The Hearse…

There should have been sunshine. Three hard days of rain, sleet, and snow blacked out the candles that  led the hearse. The snow piled between the ruts crusted and stained deep from horse piss and coal dust beat down by the chimneys in the narrow streets. Rain keeps everything down.  The horses lifted their knees in a slow high step to keep their feet out of the black sludge water, the horses didn’t like the ice around their hooves and legs. A hoof crushed a ball of horse manure deep into the frozen mire here and there. The stinking mud did its best to suck and stick each horse foot to the bricks beneath it. The hearse was harder and heavier to pull than it should have been. The brasses and chains hung from the horses in customary funeral attire and tolled with the clips, clops, and whinnies between thunder claps and moments of silence. The storm, the snow in winter wasn’t going to stop soon. Yellow-grey flickering shop windows were the only mourners for the casket carrying the hearse with the black horses. The undertaker hated this part of his job. 

A man behind a dripping window watched a tiny woman dressed in sopping wool cross the street behind the dreadful cart heading toward the small graveyard behind the church on the other side of the street. Water beaded, dripped, and froze from the edges of the blanket wrapped around her shoulders and head. Her heavy wet skirt stuck to her legs, and made that moment in the trudge impossible. She lost her feet in the wake and fell face first into the knee deep muck. It  covered her.

From behind the wet window, the man still watched her. Flapping like a raven with woolen wet wings, she rose, rolled over and over in the street’s riptide until her black wings caught the air in the cobbled street and she rose like a raven from a moat. With her head down, the blanket became the hide of an ancient beast. The creature she became lumbered to the stoop of the church, hauling herself with grief, shame, and cold. Five long minutes passed before she pulled herself up to open the door handle and used the weight of the wool and her soul to open the door.

The man in the dripping window across the street, warm and comfortable, threw his head back and howled with laughter.