Half a Glass

by Jo Gatford

Sardar Faizan

This is not the type of wake where someone gives a speech, even once everyone has a drink in their hand. There will be no polite tapping of a spoon against glass. There are no good stories besides the ones that end with yelling or a hangover or both, and so the same low conversations shuffle around the room instead. Empty stuff about stardust; about us all returning to the sky when we’re gone; about matter. As if it matters—ba-doom-tsch. As if the universe coded something into our particles. As if there’s a reason why we behave the way we do.

When some woman asks if serving alcohol is, y’know, appropriate? I tell her it’s okay, we’re professionals, but my jokes have always landed with a twisted ankle and she does that “oh hun” smile at me.

‘High functioning’ mostly means that someone’s getting away with their own carefully-managed self-destruction. Which is fine, until it’s not.

I said something like that to the high school grief counsellor. I thought I was pretty smart back then. A high functioning idiot. She asked me where I’d heard it from. What TV show?

“Books,” I told her. “I read books.”

“About psychology?”

“About stuff.”

“Ah, stuff.”

A teenage shrug. Stuff. Things. Matter.

“We’re all made up of the same matter,” I said next, and she tilted her head and gave that same bullshit smile.

“Now you’re talking like a philosopher.”

But I didn’t know any philosophy then, only that ridiculous Python song, so I started singing my party piece:

Immanuel Kant was a real pissant…

And look, I didn’t mean to make it about him—that old Kant, boom boom—but it all comes around because I’m knee-deep into a second bottle of red and eating tortilla chips a few feet away from a literal dead body when the summer haze threads a tenor voice through the trees from streets away and I can’t tell if I’m slipping or anyone else can hear it.

“Is that opera?”

Hands caught lifting glasses are cast adrift as everyone stills to listen. The song fades in and out like a sheet waving on a line; like a spider’s thread you can only see when the sunlight glances off it.

Someone opens the shutters. The air outside is even hotter than the squat, carbon-laced oxygen in here and I worry about decomposition and the draining of fluid and our one good table being used as a slab. But then the music flutters through the window and everyone inhales together. Spines straighten. Tongues lie at rest against teeth. The singer practises a motif front to back, over and under, wrapping the notes around the breeze.

“Puccini,” someone says, and I am astounded that anyone in this company would know that, but I am glad the song has a father.

Someone pulls the shutters closed again and we exhale back down into the rounded postures of dutiful mourners. Someone uncrosses their legs. Crosses them again. Bashes a foot against the filing cabinet that supports one end of the one good table. The body doesn’t move. Of course it doesn’t. Though I imagine its inner softness sinking into the grain with every passing second it lies without the movement of blood. Oh, how still. Have you seen the rabbits sleeping ’til it’s nearly noon? Flickering heartbeats so fast it’s a marvel they don’t explode in your hands. Life is not relaxing, but whiskey helps—that at least I know.

I hoist my glass to half-mast—red, not golden, but all is one in the belly, in the liver—and recite the only words that make sense.

There’s nothing Neitzsche couldn’t teach ya ‘bout the raising of the wrist…

Someone nods. Someone sniffs out a laugh. Everyone drinks. All except my husband. He’s drunk enough for a lifetime. Drunk himself into a sleep he won’t wake from. I was confused about that, as a child—why they called it a wake, as though we were waiting in case they opened their coin-covered eyes before the burial. But the slipstream of a boat’s behind is just about right, leaving a trail that hardly shows if you’re wily enough, slender enough—carving through the world sending out ripples with no care where they might land; the tsunamis they might build into. This one, the one on the table, his path was clear enough. I didn’t even try to jump the wave. I saw that familiar deep water and let myself sink right in. It was easier to live with someone who couldn’t function on the bottle—made him human in a way my dad never had been. But people can’t pickle themselves forever. Even if my old-old man outlived my new-old man.

“It’s meant to be a duet,” someone says, as the song returns, another round at the same lines even though it has been perfect every time to our starved ears. And I hear it then, the missing part—a little above, a little below, sometimes chasing, sometimes leading, goading, pushing, sliding into warm embraces and lingering just long enough to leave a mark.

I put down my glass and I lift myself up and open every shutter even though we will choke on the tightness of the midday air. Never mind about the rot. About the ooze. I pat his suited thigh and what was once tender and responsive is loose and empty. No more a man. Just matter. He’ll be in the ground tomorrow, where it’s quiet and cool and the sun won’t redden his eye if he wakes from his malted sleep, where he can de-particalize himself in peace. And he can last out one more summer afternoon, one more drink, for the sake of finding the other half of a song.

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Jo Gatford is a writer who procrastinates about writing by writing about writing. Her work has been published by SmokeLong Quarterly, Litro, , Aesthetica, and elsewhere, as well as winning the Flash500 Prize, the Bath Flash Fiction Prize, and The Fiction Desk Flash Fiction Contest. Her first novel, White Lies, was published by Legend Press in 2014. She is one half of Writers’ HQ and tweets about weird 17th century mermaid tiles at @jmgatford. She feels very strongly about puns and Shakespeare.