Helena thought how clinical the whole process was. Crematorium staff, in soft voices, present the grieving with a receptacle of ashes to be sprinkled at the site of the loved one’s choosing. So neat, so easy, so modern.
But Howard was none of those. So, towards sunset, she donned a white shroud, draped his casket win white fabric and garlands of flowers and hired the ferry man for the Isle of the Dead.
In the Amphitheater of the Spirits, on the stone pyre, she set alight his mortal body as the sparks of his soul spiraled with the smoke skyward. She keened, wailed, and rent her clothes in the passion play of death.
As the fire died, the zephyrs swirled the ashes up into the starblanket sky. The Spirits faded back into the Isles’ labyrinths and caverns. Helena stepped out of her shroud, worn over an old t-shirt of Howard’s and a pair of jeans, to wait for the dawn, and the ferryman whom she had yet to pay.
Written for Jane Dougherty’s Microfiction Challenge # 30: Isle of the Dead. As always, critique and criticism welcome.
© my frilly freudian slip
Lorraine's frilly freudian slip 
October 28, 2016 at 10:05 am
I like the idea of enforcing an ancient ritual – keening and clothes’ ripping and all – into a modern era. We in the UK play down funerals so much – we have to be quiet and respectful and try not to make too much of a fuss. I’ve done it myself, trying not to cry … at a funeral, of all the places it’s okay to cry.
I like the mix of old and new, of robes over jeans and cremations and ferrymen. Great stuff
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October 28, 2016 at 10:47 am
In N.A. too. I think funerals should be about grief and if that’s wailing and public display, so be it. Funerals are far too quiet and almost mundane.
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October 28, 2016 at 11:02 am
It’s the idea of showing ‘respect’ isn’t it? This entrenched, Victorian legacy of wearing black and restrained sorrow and remaining dignified against it all. Ridiculous really.
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October 28, 2016 at 12:11 pm
Stiff upper lip and drape the mirrors in black. Once thought of doing my thesis on rituals around death in the Victorian period. Morbid side raised on Charles Addams cartoons, lol
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October 29, 2016 at 5:21 am
Ooh, that would be fascinating though – the strict shift from black, through the grey and lilac for women in mourning, photos taken of the dead as if sleeping or alive, as you say, draping mirrors in black crepe. It was a complicated business, Victorian death – for the better off any way :)
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October 29, 2016 at 11:13 am
The emergent middle class and Victoria made death rituals oh so interesting.
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October 29, 2016 at 12:13 pm
It must have been a social minefield, so easy to make a mistake and bring censure on yourself by wearing the wrong colour gloves at the wrong time!
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October 29, 2016 at 1:27 pm
Of course, it fell to women to keep it right. No wonder they suffered from neurasthenia!
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October 30, 2016 at 3:17 am
The corsetry probably didn’t help either :)
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October 30, 2016 at 3:21 am
Poor waists, poor whales.
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October 30, 2016 at 3:39 am
Haha! Love that :)
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October 30, 2016 at 3:23 am
PS: Love the line from Gone with the Wind when Scarlett, after having a child, is petulant because she’ll never be able to corset her waist to 18 inches again!
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October 30, 2016 at 3:40 am
Good lord! I don’t think my waist was ever 18 inches. Not even when I was a kid :)
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October 30, 2016 at 4:26 am
I’m not sure how true that was — always meant to look that up — how thin did women get their waists with corsets. I’m off on a research trip.
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October 30, 2016 at 4:28 am
Let me know your findings, meanwhile I’m off to find me some baleen, whittle me a croset :)
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October 30, 2016 at 4:45 am
I’ll let you know. On glance, looks like they started with a 19 inch corset, when you fit that one, laced you into a smaller one, then smaller, til you laced into a 14 incher. And, you slept in them! That was news to me. Apparently you might wear slightly larger ones at night, but it was less painful to be strapped in the next day if you didn’t expand all the way. Egad.
Don’t whittle one too small! And some were made out of STEEL! I see another thesis topic missed, but I think I’d get kinda sick after awhile. No wonder ladies were pale complexed, it wasn’t just from keeping out of the sun.
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October 30, 2016 at 9:13 am
I remember hearing of sleeping in corsets now you’ve said. How lucky are we that we only need to read about that life and not live it?
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October 30, 2016 at 11:28 am
Yes, except, devices to make the waist impossibly small are back in again — made of different material, but the end goal is the same. 16 inches here we come (not me, the general we)
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October 30, 2016 at 11:41 am
Ridiculous idea, isn’t it? I know a girl who wears one of the devices you describe – swears it ‘trains’ her waist to be smaller. I said – ‘Yes but only if you keep wearing it. The minute you stop you’ll go back to your previous size.’ Fortunately the fabric gave her a rash, so I think she’s laying off it for now :)
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October 28, 2016 at 9:11 am
I love the atmosphere of this story. It’s mysterious and full of a ghostly presence, and you leave the reader hoping the trick of not paying the ferryman will work. One niggle for my sense of logic, is how she muscled Howard’s casket onto the stone table all by herself, and how she got the necessary combustion to turn bone to ash. I’d add a touch of the old, this is a place out of time, line and have his casket being light as a feather and the fire falling from the sky to zap him, something like that. That’s just me though. Most people have a greater capacity for suspending disbelief than I have :)
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October 28, 2016 at 9:45 am
I wondered the same, and I like your suggestion. I will go back and tweak. I’m no fun at movies because I get caught up in details like that, lol.
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October 28, 2016 at 10:38 am
Me too! One reason I can never follow the plot because I’m still wondering about where that door led in he first scene, and was the woman we glimpse through the window the same as the one….
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October 28, 2016 at 10:45 am
And how did he know she liked gardenias and when did they fire Jim . . .
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October 28, 2016 at 11:05 am
And when the horse jumped out of the window was it okay, because they just carried on as if nothing had happened, when really somebody should have called a vet, or the fire brigade…
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October 28, 2016 at 12:13 pm
It’s endless isn’t it. And then there is the historical accuracy. I’m always rolling my eyes and saying, back then, they didn’t . . . .
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October 28, 2016 at 3:14 pm
I saw a book cover once that styled itself Regency Romance. The woman was wearing a seventeenth century dress with a lacy bodice, and the man was wearing…modern chinos and an open necked shirt.
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October 29, 2016 at 1:11 am
Yikes — Ralph Lauren’s Regency Line
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October 31, 2016 at 1:46 pm
Something like that :)
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