The Battered Suitcase July 2008

  And listen to the weather, beating down from above

  well I can hear your eyes roll, and I could be anyone

  In those transit lit tunnels, with friends you used to know

  I wanted to keep you from the world

  smile at me and hold out your hand and I'll kiss it gently

  Is it this that you see, or d'you see through it all?

  you.

  But What About The Future

  by Moist Bamboo

  You've got an IQ that's so bloody high

  and I watch Rugrats and it makes me cry

  If I drink so much that I miss my flight

  would you drive to the airport in the middle of the night?

  There's a thousand things that I'd do for you

  but I'll never miss an episode of Doctor Who

  These days won't last forever

  Could you make them last forever?

  Well I'm just a geek, and you're no fool

  you'll have to tell me what to wear so that I can look cool

  Say I take a test online one day

  and the results say I might be 42% gay?

  Well if this makes you laugh and you still want me

  you'd better wait until you've met my family

  These days won't last forever

  Could you make them last forever?

  But we will both like Stephen Fry

  He's such a clever fucking guy

  Oh my

  And if we've got no money just a clapped-out van

  we'll 'ave an ironic trip to a caravan

  We'll sit in the van in the seaside town

  feeding chips to the seagulls as it chucks it down

  And then one evening for a special treat

  we'll have a nice curry while the kids are asleep

  But if we do quite well then I'll make you ski

  we'll go twice a year and you'll be cross with me

  But we'll live in a house with a swimming pool

  you'll have ducks and chickens and an aga too

  In the summer you can go for a daily swim

  and I'll buy a TARDIS and stick it in the gym

  These days won't last forever

  Could you make them last forever?

  But we will both like Stephen Fry

  He's such a clever fucking guy

  Oh my

  And then one day when we're really old

  and we're all cwtched up so we don't get cold

  You'll be dressed in purple and I'll be fat

  So what d'you think of that?

  These days won't last forever

  Could you make them last forever?

  These days won't last

  Could you make them last?

  Would you make them last forever

  The Lost Art of Funerals

  Lynne Hinkey

  I spend a lot of time thinking about funerals. Not about death, just funerals. And not an inordinate, obsessive amount of time - just more than the average forty-something. This could be a result of growing up in a household where, "The green dress - that's the one I want to be buried in. Not the pink one," was considered part of a normal conversation. Photos arriving from 'the old country' - Czechoslovakia - often showed dead relatives in coffins and live relatives gathered around tombstones, smiling brightly for the camera.

  Maybe it's a Czech thing? All I know is that my friends give me strange and horrified looks when I tell them stories from my childhood that begin: "This one time, at the funeral home... " and "There's this one cemetery that we go to... "

  Today, I'm on my way from my home in South Carolina to what was home twenty-five years ago, upstate New York, for Grandpa's funeral. I can't wait to get there. Not really an odd reaction to a death in my family, where funerals are one part mourning, two parts social event. It's not that we're callous about death, but that we consider funerals just one more celebration of life, like births, weddings and holidays.

  Like so many families today, though, we've spread out. My generation left home for college, career and family. Every return for a funeral makes me wonder, what will happen when we - those of us who've moved away - die?

  When I arrive home, my family - mother, stepfather, brother, in-laws, nieces, nephews, aunts, uncles and cousins - greet me at the airport. This is a family event, after all. We spend a late night laughing over memories of Grandpa "and his little dog, Toto, too," and in the morning, go together to the funeral home to make arrangements.

  My brother's three children; eleven, eight and five, have already been to their fair share of funerals. Their 'other' Grandfather, Richard, died only a month earlier. The funeral director, Mr. Sedlock, greets my nieces and nephew by name and they help themselves to the candy dish on his desk.

  I'm pleased to see them so at-home in a funeral parlor. Sadly, funerals are a fine art that is rapidly being lost in today's world of geographically separated families and feel-good-all-the-time culture. I'm shocked to learn how many of my friends have never attended a funeral and how many won't allow their children to attend them, to "protect them".

  Avoiding funerals doesn't make a death easier to bear. Funerals are a necessary process that helps us deal with the loss and celebrate the life of a loved one. Done right, they combine joy and mourning, tears and laughter, and through it all, they affirm that the life of the departed continues through family and friends.

  Some of my earliest and fondest memories are of playing with my cousins at funeral homes. Organ music whispering in the background, a tropical fish tank bubbling in the corner, and old ladies smelling of mothballs and perfume ferociously patting my back. "Ti si velika girl-yeh," Czech-lish for 'what a big girl'.

  Our favorite funeral home was Pecko-Oswalds, an old Victorian house complete with hidden passages. It was the perfect setting for funerals. My cousins, brother and I would sit on the landing of the stairway and dare each other to look behind the dark door at the top, certain there'd be dead bodies on the other side. We shrieked with delighted horror when we discovered that's where the Pecko family lived.

  Cemeteries were another place we loved to visit. As soon as spring arrived, we would climb into Grandma's car to 'make the rounds.' First to Calvary to plant geraniums in the marble planters on either side of Grandpa Borush's headstone, then to Aunt Anne's grave. She was my grandmother's sister who'd died as an infant. As Grandma scrubbed the small, white marker, I would talk to my baby aunt while petting the stone lamb, its features blurred by sixty winters. After that, we'd go to Riverhurst to pull out the plastic flowers that adorned Great-Grandpa's grave during the winter and put in colorful new pansies and marigolds.

  Sundays, dressed up in our church-clothes, we'd return to the cemeteries to visit dead relatives. Grandma took pictures of us standing next to their gravestones. Great-Grandma especially loved having her picture taken there. Side by side in one album are two pictures of my brother Matt and I next to our Great-Grandparents' headstone. In the earlier photo, Great-Grandma stands between us. Ten years later, in a photo taken at her funeral, a white human-shaped blur fills the space between us. It could be the sun reflecting off the lens, but we prefer to think Great-Grandma wouldn't let something as minor as death stand between her and a photo op.

  At the funeral home, Mr. Sedlock leads us into a room full of caskets and we examine them, looking for the one best suited to Grandpa. Five-year old Robert takes my hand. "Watch this, Aunt Lynne." He reaches under the pink silk lining of a casket and pulls out a wrench. Lifting the pillow, he inserts the end and turns. The lining lowers. "That's so they don't pinch Grandpa's nose when they close it." I'm impressed. Matt and I hadn't discovered that until we were much older.

  We select a metal, matte gray finish casket with an American flag sewn on the white silk lining and American eagles at the four corners. We all knew immediately that this was Grandpa's. He served four tours in WWII-two in the navy, one in the army and one in the marines-then spent the next thirty years in uniform w
orking for the US Postal Service.

  Two days later we return to Sedlock's, this time dressed in somber black. Matt nods his head and whispers, "He looks good for a dead guy." It's a long-standing joke we'd share with Grandpa at funerals when people complimented 'how good' someone looked in a casket.

  The family surrounds Grandpa, patting his hands, straightening his tie, and smiling at his ever-present grin, as if there was some big joke that only he's in on.

  My mother frets. "I should've put him in his funeral suit." Matt and I barely suppress our giggles.

  Grandpa was a frugal child of the depression, never buying a new shirt when the old one still had life in it. He had a new suit that he'd only worn once, to my brother's wedding. Whenever our mother prodded him to wear it he'd say, "It's not comfortable. I'll wear it for my funeral." When it came time to select clothes to take to the funeral home, Mom didn't want Grandpa to be uncomfortable for eternity, so she took his old Sunday suit.

  "He's going to haunt you for this," Matt teases.

  Throughout the next two days, family and friends stream into the funeral home. Quiet tears give way to laughter as tales are told of a long and full life. We hear of a Grandpa we'd never known.

  "He was the State singles tennis champion when we were in high school," his old doubles partner told us. "He came to every ship reunion we had until the last few years, after your grandmother died," we hear from a navy-buddy. "He was quite the prankster at the post office," my mother's mailman tells us, "always slipping something into our bags when we weren't looking." "When we had to start driving the jeeps on our rounds, he'd drive around the corner from the post office, park the thing, and walk the three miles to his route," another former co-worker told us.

  These stories about the man who was John Pranaitis, not just Grandpa, make him even larger to us in death than he had been in life.

  ~

  After two days of viewings, it's time for the family to say our final, private good-byes before the lid comes down. We examine the mementos visitors have slipped into the casket. There's the blue corduroy driving cap he always wore, a rubber chicken key-ring, photos and notes, and a pocketful of drink chips from his favorite haunts: Red's Kettle Inn, the VFW, and Sharkey's. I put the cap on his head.

  "Now he looks like Grandpa," says my niece, Kimberly.

  My mother surreptitiously slides a box beneath the covered half of the coffin. "Toto's ashes," she whispers. They'd been inseparable. Grandpa kept the dog's ashes on the mantle after Toto died.

  "Don't cry, Aunt Lynne," Robert comforts me as I laugh through my tears. "He's not really in there." He thumps hard on Grandpa's chest and we hear a dull, wooden thud. "See? Empty. And, look at this," he scrapes a small finger down Grandpa's cheek. "Make-up," he says, certain this proves it's not really Grandpa.

  "You're right, Robert. Grandpa's in heaven, and in here." His mother taps Robert's chest.

  On the way to the cemetery, Mom and I realize we forgot our cameras. We emerge from the limo giggling over the lapse and try to compose ourselves for the graveside prayers. When the VFW honor guard raises their guns for a final salute, a volley of flashes split the air. My cousins haven't forgotten their cameras. The roar of the guns drowns our sobbing laughter and we cling to one another, comforted in our shared sorrow.

  As the crowd walks away from the mausoleum I notice Kimberly is missing. Matt and I find her on a ladder, the upper half of her body swallowed by the black hole in the mausoleum's marble fa?ade. "I hope you don't mind," the young man holding the ladder says. "She asked to see inside."

  "I saw Grandpa Bob!" she tells us. My father died before she was born but she grew up with stories and photos of Grandpa Bob all around her. "He's next to Great Grandma," another dead relative she'd never met. "It's really cool how they fit them in. They're perpendicular to each other, like this." She shows us with her hands.

  My brother and I exchange a look - we want to go back and see.

  Before leaving the cemetery, we visit all of our dead relatives, stopping to touch a marker, pluck out a weed, and chat. We take a picture by Great-Grandma and Grandpa, hoping for another visit from Grandma's ghost, but the picture is blur-free. I say good-bye to Aunt Jerry and Uncle Frank. I was living out of the country when they'd died and had missed their funerals. Touching the cool, marble stone, and whispering an apology and a farewell, gives me some consolation.

  We head to church for the traditional post-funeral luncheon. Quiet conversations over fruit salads and sandwich meats are broken by hearty guffaws as people recount stories about Grandpa. I can't see him, but I know he's in his usual seat in the corner, by the coffee maker, taking it all in.

  Afterwards, we make our way across the street. Every family wedding, funeral, baptism, and confirmation ends at Sharkey's. The nieces, nephews and cousins play the electronic bowling game with the metal puck and hanging plastic pins-the same one we'd played as kids.

  Watching them, I am hopeful. The art of funerals, their importance in marking the continuity of life and family, isn't lost. Our family - those who've come before and those yet to come-will continue to live through their generation's celebrations of life and death.

  "A toast," Cousin Jean raises her glass, "to Uncle John." We lift our glasses and echo, "To John."

  "You all throw a helluva funeral," Grandpa's neighbor nods solemnly. "John would've had fun."

  Grandpa would agree.

  Lynne Hinkey is an adjunct assistant professor of biology for the University of Maryland University College-Europe. She has published research and marine science educational materials in academic journals and through Sea Grant. Her fiction, creative nonfiction, and travel writing have appeared in the Stars and Stripes, and literary journals such as Skyline Review and The Painted Door. She is currently working on a novel based on her experiences living in the Caribbean for thirteen years. Lynne lives in Charleston, South Carolina with her husband Matt and their dog and cat. https://lynneandmatt.spaces.live.com/

  Poetry by Joseph Goosey

  Cigarette Mouth, Rainy Tile Floors

  Will you play scrabble with this

  addled brain of mine?

  She asked,

  Would I care to go to dinner?

  Listen,

  I said,

  I've had this social commentary

  piece about

  the futility of the sexual

  act

  that I've been trying to write

  since last Thursday

  afternoon

  Oh,

  She said,

  Goodnight.

  Joseph Goosey is on his 4th Pabst Blue Ribbon. He does most of his writing when he reaches his 6th or 7th. Barring disaster or breakdown, his first chapbook will be available from Poptritus in the Fall.

  Triptych

  Michael Mirolla

  "Gaps, know what I mean? Missing pieces. Of time and space - and other things. Other important things. How do I know they're important? Well, they have to be, don't they? It just wouldn't be right otherwise. Just wouldn't make any sense otherwise. Take yourself, for instance. What are you? Flesh and blood, right? Isn't that what everybody says? Bone and cartilage. Brain and brawn. Mind and matter. Body and spirit. Aren't those the expressions everyone uses? And it's all so simple, isn't it? All so obvious. All so crystal clear. So, tell me, what happens when you're here one moment - and there the next? And you don't know how you got from here to there. Haven't got a clue. Or you're neither here nor there - and that's even worse, if you can imagine such a thing.

  "Neither here nor not here, to put it in its lowest common denominator form, the mathematical logic of the permanently lost. At sea and not at sea. At least, that's the way you feel sometimes. Kind of unsettled, to put it mildly. Queasy and full of wormy, knotted-bark feelings in your stomach. Like something's rotting beneath it all but you're afraid to look because it might make you sick. Might make the rest of you rot as well. Head in the clouds; boots in the
muck. And nothing in-between. You stare down from on high and there's nothing there until you get to those muck-encrusted boots. You try to put your hands on your hips - akimbo, I think they call it - and neither hands nor hips make any effort to accommodate you. In fact, they make no effort to even appear for you.

  "Gaps, like I said before. And then, you know, in an effort at stabilization, you nail your feet to the floor. The tips of your boots, that is. You nail them solidly with railroad spikes so that they won't jump without you realizing it's happening - and what happens? You guessed it. It gets even worse. You're nailed to the floor alright - with 20-centimetre spikes - and that's a good feeling. A warm, wonderful feeling. Like suddenly being surrounded by family. By four generations of family ready to celebrate genetic persistence if nothing else. But then other things start bopping around. Appearing and disappearing when they feel like it and for as long as they feel like it. The harder you're nailed down, the more they won't hold still. Things, I mean. Know what I'm saying?

  "They won't come together long enough for you to pin them down. For you to nail them to the spot. Hold still, you want to say. Hold still and be numbered, damn you! Useless. More than useless. You can shout and swear and pull your hair all you want. In fact, after a while, you don't even know if you're still shouting and swearing at the same object you were shouting and swearing at a moment before. Or something else that just happens to look like it. That just happens to be passing by - in its devil-may-care way - when you happen to look up.

  "It's like... like trying to count butterflies in a wildflower field. Ever try that, huh? Used to do it all the time as a kid. I guess I did anyway from the vivid memories I have. The vivid, slow-motion memories I have. Anyway, they're fluttering all over the place. The butterflies, I mean. Up and down and all around. Just hopping and bopping to their hearts' delight. From milkweed pod to dandelion. From apple tree to bramble bush. From sweet clover to prickly pear. And you, curly-haired and sun-burnt, Greek-god-boy-like, chase after them, trying to keep count in your head. One... two... three ... and then one of them, one you've already counted naturally, decides to fly by you again. Right by your left ear. Or you think you've already counted it but aren't sure. They all look pretty much alike, don't they? One doing it is okay. You can keep track of that, no problem. A couple won't cause too many problems either. Even three or four or five aren't much to handle for the mathematically sophisticated ten-year-old able to put numbers to objects, albeit in a rudimentary way. It's when they all get to doing it, leap-frogging each other just for the fun of it, hitching rides on one another's backs, doing the butterfly version of car-pooling.