Thanks to BeKindRewrite for the inspiration again this week. I’m so pleased to be forced to write this morning, although now I’ve got the bug and really want to spend the rest of the day at the keyboard fictioning, rather than racing around the house doing all the stuff I should be doing! Curse you, inspiration!!!
Nobody Films a Funeral
“Nobody films a funeral,” Aunt Alice said. “It’s indecent.”
“That’s what he wanted though.” Hugo slid the handwritten pages across the table, his finger picking out the paragraph entitled Funeral Arrangements.
Aunt Alice poked at her glasses, knocking them further down her nose, so that her menacing appearance was only enhanced by the move she had once thought coquettish. “I should like to be buried at St Mark’s, having a full Catholic Mass funeral, which will be video-taped and then archived with Fish Brothers in Bath. They have my instructions as to what to do with the recording,” she read, somehow managing to sound all too much like her dead brother. “Well, it is simply ludicrous.”
She pushed the Will back towards her nephew, tutting under her breath.
“Maybe I could contact this Fish Brothers company? See if they can give us any more information?” Hugo suggested. “They might have an explanation. Or, at least, knowing what they are going to do might help us to understand.”
“Young man,” Aunt Alice began, pausing only to poke at her glasses again, “My brother, the only relative I have left in this world, has just died. I can be expected to be devastated. I am grieving. I do not have time for chasing across the country, following strange puzzles which he left in a Will which, frankly, is so recent it was probably written in a less-than compos mentis state. And I do not want the paparazzi attending upon my grief. We will have the Catholic Mass, although God knows he never attended one when he was alive, but I will not have video cameras at my brother’s funeral. Is that understood?”
Hugh rose to his feet. He had never stood up to his Aunt before, and to do it now, he felt he needed the advantage of height. “My father’s wishes are very clear. I should like to follow them if it’s at all possible.”
Aunt Alice pushed back her chair and got to her feet, giving her several inches’ advantage over Hugo. For a moment, her hand hovered inches above the table as if to slap him, then she turned and stalked out of the kitchen. Hugo let out the breath he’d been holding, and walked over to the phone.
elmowrites 