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Reality isn’t real.
Like always.
The music plays as they roll the casket out, down the long aisle, as if my mother is on parade, her last parade.
We stand and the funeral-goers file past us, one by one by one.
I’m sorry for your loss.
Heaven has gained another angel.
If you need anything, just call.
All trite words from people who don’t know what else to say.
And then someone new stands in front of me. His eyes are dark, his hair is dark, his body is lean. He’s wearing a black suit just like all of them, but he’s wearing a silver ring, and it gleams in the sunlight, and something something something ripples through me, but I don’t know what it is.
“I’m so sorry,” he tells me, and he’s got a British accent.
I feel the strangest feeling in the pit of my stomach as he shakes my hand, as he touches me and there’s electricity, but I brush it away because I don’t know him and he doesn’t matter. Only Finn matters. And mourning my poor mother.
The stranger passes through the line and I turn to the next visitor, and the next and the next and the next.
The day is exhausting.
The day is never-ending.
I lean my head on the family car window as we drive home from the cemetery. We’re surrounded by all things green and alive, by pine trees and bracken and lush forest greenery. The vibrant green stretches across the vast lawns, through the flowered gardens, and lasts right up until you get to the cliffs, where it finally and abruptly turns reddish and clay.
I guess that’s pretty good symbolism, actually. Green means alive and red means dangerous. Red is jagged cliffs, warning lights, splattered blood. But green… green is trees and apples and clover.
“How do you say green in Latin?” I ask Finn absently.
“Viridem,” he answers.
And then something else occurs to me, something out of the blue.
“What does Quid Pro Quo mean?”
Finn stares at me. “It means something for something. Why?”
“No reason,” I answer, but my heart is pound, pound, pounding. Over and over. Because something for something. Did I give something to get something?
ThumpThump,ThumpThump.
I trudge up to my room and drop into bed without even showering.
I feel a thousand pounds of guilt on my chest because I only have one thought, one thought that makes my chest tighten and constrict and pound.
I love my mom,
I love my mom
I love my mom.
But thank God it wasn’t Finn.
Quid pro quo.
