On Monday mornings, I send out a story via email: ultra-brief tales of 1,000 words or more, usually in genres including horror, science fiction, and the supernatural. Those stories collectively are called Once Upon A Time. I’ve also published several ebooks and compendium volumes of those stories so far.

I’d love to have you as a subscriber to the weekly free story. You can subscribe via email here. Unsubscribe any time, from the link in every issue.

Here's story 193, of 240 so far.

Brush Your Teeth

“Did you know her well?” the old lady asked, and I turned to look at her and assess whether she was joking.

She wasn’t, though, and had a kindly smile, so I lifted one shoulder in a non-committal gesture, then she nodded as if she’d been expecting such an answer.

“You?” I asked, and she nodded once more, a bit more definitively this time, and I searched my memory to see if I recognised her, but I was still drawing a blank. Then again, it had been a long time since I was last in this neck of the woods. Or she could just be a hanger-on. Funerals were probably full of them.

“Are you going to the reception after the service?” she asked, and I shook my head, making up something about an appointment I had to get to later on, and a long drive. There might have been a momentary look of mild reproach on her face, but it passed, and so I didn’t obey my instinct to walk off and stand somewhere else.

Instead, there was a minute or so of silence, as we continued to watch the closest family members of the deceased at the gravesite, the men sombre and the women weeping, holding their flowers and dabbing their eyes and all the rest of it. I had a flash of insight into the life of the reverend who stood at the head of the coffin, clutching his little black-bound book of spiritual nonsense to read from.

Perhaps he did the morning funerals, then went off to have lunch before the afternoon batch, eating his meal while scrolling his phone and exchanging text messages with his own family. Maybe they asked how his day was going, and he told them it was going well, and then he asked if there was anything he could pick up for dinner on the way home.

I shook my head at my own cynicism, even though I knew it was probably fairly accurate. Life went on, after all. I was proof of that.

“It’s nice there was such a good turnout,” the old woman said, and I was almost startled, because I’d forgotten that she was there at all.

I nodded, only partly in her direction, in an attempt to subtly discourage further conversation, but old people had usually either forgotten those social cues or just wilfully ignored them, because their own need for human interaction had long since taken precedence.

“She had a son too,” the old woman said, peering around at the crowd of mourners. “I haven’t seen him yet though. I wonder if he lives far away.”

“Not far enough,” I replied, and she looked at me strangely for a moment before the lightbulb went on behind her eyes.

“Why aren’t you up there with your family?” she asked, thus heralding the conversation I’d been anticipating for at least a week. I realised that I’d created the opening myself, and I wondered what that said about me, but it was a matter for another day.

My sister, my aunt and her whole family, and any number of my mother’s friends and acquaintances had spotted me earlier, none of them doing more than nodding in my direction. Some of them knew, but all of them seemed at least to understand, and decorum was probably the biggest reason that it hadn’t gone further. More pointed approaches would no doubt have come at the reception afterwards, especially once the alcohol began to flow, but I had already decided not to turn up for that.

“It’s complicated,” I said at last, answering the question without answering it, and then I suddenly felt as angry with myself as I did at the lifeless remains in the big, polished wooden box a few metres in front of me. “Actually, it’s not that complicated at all,” I added, contradicting myself.

I expected the old woman to be confused, but she didn’t seem to be. If anything, there was now a distinct note of understanding in her tone. “Ah, I see,” she replied. “Well, that’s not too much of a surprise to those of us who knew her.”

“You might still be surprised by some of it, for what it’s worth,” I said, not really sure why I was continuing the thread of conversation. “There was a time when she left my cousin — the tall one on the right there — out in the rain for two hours, in November, for talking back to her when she was babysitting him. And that doesn’t approach the stuff at home for yours truly.”

The old woman’s face had tightened now, and she looked pale under her powder. She was like anyone’s grandmother, smelling of perfume that probably wasn’t made anymore, and textiles, and years gone by. “I’d wondered if maybe she was like that,” she said at last, more quietly. “But she put a good face on it.”

I nodded now. “She did. That was her great gift. But behind it she was cruel. Or maybe she just cared a lot more about herself than anyone else.”

A memory surfaced suddenly, and I frowned, examining it. I hadn’t thought about the incident for years, but it made sense that it would come back to me now, here in the same town. I was talking before I realised that I was going to.

“I had a tough time at school sometimes,” I said. “I came home once after some kid had hit me, right in the teeth. Burst my lip, bit my tongue.”

The old woman looked at me with sympathy, and for an instant, I could see my own long-gone grandmother in her. But then the similarity passed. “What did she do about it?” she asked, and I fixed my gaze on the coffin, slowly lowering into the ground.

“She said that I was probably asking for it,” I replied. “Then when she saw I had a mouthful of blood, she looked disgusted. I was sensitive about my smile at the best of times anyway, and she knew that. I never opened my mouth for photos. She said go and brush your teeth before somebody looks at you.”

Silence again, and a bony, fragile, bird-like hand on my elbow. I appreciated the gesture, even from a stranger and decades late. Eventually, she asked the real question of the day.

“Why did you come, then?”

“Because it’s the right thing to do,” I replied immediately. “And because she’d have seen it as vindication if I didn’t.”

The old lady considered that, then finally nodded again, and neither of us had anything more to say. We stood together, as the coffin disappeared from view, and anyone watching might have thought that we were family.

JINX

KESTREL face a new and terrifying enemy: an all-seeing mastermind who already knows exactly who they are, and many of their deepest secrets. Nothing stays hidden forever, and the line between privacy and liberty is razor-thin…

Book 3 in the KESTREL action-thriller series.

Find Out More

I'd love to hear any feedback or other thoughts; you can find my contact info here.

I encourage you to share this story with anyone you think would enjoy it. If you’d like to receive a tale like this via email every week, you can sign up to receive them here.

Thanks for reading.