The only air felt in the church came from the cracked window Marianne was peering through. There wasn’t much of a view at all. A dead tree could be seen outside with the motorcycles of the townspeople piled up near it. Beyond that was the ocean, which she thought could be beautiful if it wasn’t everywhere around her. She averted her eyes and took in her closer surroundings. The building itself was small with only twelve pews on each side. The walls were covered in chipped green paint and Marianne wondered why Methodists would choose to represent themselves with such an ugly color. The only noteworthy sight was the old stained glass windows that let in hues of violet, blue, green, and red. She observed the way the light hit the people around her and came to the realization that not a single person was dressed in black. It was the morning of Allan Medina-Motino’s funeral and nobody seemed to care about making it beautiful.
The members of the church were clamoring around Pastor James, a missionary who came all the way from some state called Georgia— one Marianne had never heard of. He seemed to be loving the attention, flashing his obnoxiously white teeth at any woman who thanked him for “doing the Lord’s work.”
Marianne nudged her sister Arlene and asked, “Do you seriously think his teeth are real? I mean they’re so square and straight, and pure white too. He looks kinda old… Do you think they could be dentures? Or do you think it’s some weird American plastic surgery kind of thing?”
“Marianne, please shut up. It’s rude to talk at funerals. They’re starting the service anyway,” her older sister replied, rolling her eyes and refocusing her attention back on the stage.
Arlene had always been the more stern one out of the two, being five years older than Marianne and, at eighteen, one of the oldest women in the house. With an absent-minded mother and a father who spent most of his time staring at a flashing TV screen with an empty beer bottle in hand, Arlene took on more responsibilities than any other girl her age. When the news of Mr. Allan’s death reached her ears, she barged into their shared bedroom and told Marianne they had no choice but to go, knowing that their parents wouldn’t bother at all.
Marianne sank back into the pew, crossing her arms as the faint sounds of a piano began playing and echoed throughout the still walls. A group of men carried the large black coffin and placed it at the altar. All Marianne could do was stare.
She never knew her neighbor Mr. Allan well, since he was rarely in his old white house with the overgrown plants and cracked windows. She mostly saw him walking from the corner store with lotto tickets and vanilla wafers in each hand. He was a mean old thing, a short little man with an even shorter temperament. His two strands of gray hair stuck out from each side of his head, coiling up into little twists. His tan skin was covered in large brown splotches that came from working long hours in the sun when he was younger. He was always wearing a cheap pair of black sunglasses, claiming he’d got them from a popular American singer he ran into at a bar back in his twenties. Despite knowing very little about this man and having no attachment to him whatsoever, Marianne felt a lump rise in her throat at the realization that all his life— at least all she knew of it— amounted to being shoved in that little black box.
Pastor James stood on stage, greeting everyone present in the church as the loud booming of the microphone echoed in Marianne’s ear and left her a bit lightheaded. He thanked everyone for being here as if it was some strenuous task for people to leave their houses and pay their respects to a dead man. Before he could even mention who this funeral was for, he endlessly rambled about himself and where he came from, how it was his mission to travel all over the world to spread the Lord’s gospel. He said that he loved it in Honduras— pronouncing the “o” as an “a” and neglecting to roll his r’s— and was confident the congregation was worshiping to the highest degree.
Finally, Ms. Esther took over and began to sing a simple hymn— one that, according to Arlene, was sung every time somebody on this little island died.
Everybody else stood up to sing along, while Marianne, who did not know the words, remained seated and flipped through the pages of the pamphlet.
To her surprise, a large number of people were listed as his family. He’d been married once, to a woman named Maria Diamond, but they had no children together. He had, in total, five sons and seven daughters, with only a few of them having the same mothers. They all had strange names—Lucky, Blue, and Kitty. She wondered where they’d come from, and where they’d ended up. Had they really loved their father, or resented him for leaving to start new families that would eventually be left behind? She wondered if any of them looked or talked like him, if there was any way for just a little bit of him to go on living.
It was then time for his eulogy. Since none of his family were present, the members of the church decided to write their own little pieces to recite and invited the attendants to share a few words as well. Ms. Naiomi, who had frequently rescued Mr. Allan from drunkenly collapsing on the side of the road, went up first.
She cleared her throat, gripped the mic tightly with her wrinkled hands, and spoke: “Mr. Allan was a friend to many. Many of us have known him since our childhood days spent walking home together from school, celebrating whenever he’d get a goal during soccer, always listening to him interrupt the teacher to talk about his crazy conspiracies. He was a wild, garrulous, and lively man. We’d all call him crazy, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t kind.” She paused to glance over at the piece of paper in her hand. “We all hope and pray that his spirit is in God’s good hands.”
Marianne rolled her eyes and shifted to face her sister, before turning back upon realizing that tears were flowing from her face. She pursed her lips and chose to remain silent instead.
Pastor James took over and said to the audience, “We’d like to turn the mic over to any of you sitting in the pews.”
Nobody walked up to the stage. A loud stream of silence enveloped the room. Marianne scanned the room and noticed that everybody else had seemed frozen in place. There wasn’t a singular limb moving, and not one mouth opening until Pastor James said, “Well then, we’ll be closing the casket soon, so if anyone is hoping to have some private words with Mr. Allan, now is the time.”
The people near Marianne dispersed and separated into their own little groups. The majority of the women returned to clustering around Pastor James, their husbands uncomfortably dawdling around in the corner and saying very little to one another. Anybody who went up to the stage didn’t stay very long and didn’t seem to say much. Majority simply placed a hand upon his cheek and whispered a small prayer.
Once it was Marianne’s turn, she held her hands behind her back and took slow strides up to the casket. At first, she looked up, gazing at the ceiling, and then turned her neck to the side to look back out the window. She looked behind her and saw that nobody else was in line after her. Taking a deep breath, she kneeled over his casket and looked straight at him.
His wrinkled, sun-spotted hands were folded neatly together, his fingernails carefully trimmed without any dirt caked under them for once. He was dressed in a typical tuxedo, the nicest outfit he’d ever been seen in. His loose strands of hair were somehow slicked back, the sunlight illuminating the shininess of the gel.
Finally, she looked straight into his eyes for the very first time. They were closed, of course, his jet-black lashes flowing down like waterfalls and serving as a marker for his eternal slumber. Upon the realization that Mr. Allan Medina-Motino was no longer wearing his cheap, finicky sunglasses—and that the only view he’d be able to see from now on was pure, infinite black—Marianne began to weep.
