MONO ISSUE 2 - Flipbook - Page 89
with fear. I motioned to him to keep calm.
“Well, Loretta, you asked me to bury Fluffy. You were in the bath, and you wanted me
to bury Fluffy right then.” She looked right at me, leaning forward so that her peaches
were there for the taking. I didn’t want them. “Look. Out in the yard, just like you asked,”
I said. I pointed to the mounded and packed dirt. Slowly, Loretta got up and walked out
to the place.
“Ohhhhhhh,” she began, “you buried Fluffy without me. You did it without me, Eric,
and you, Mike Stokely. Ahhhhhhhhh,” she lamented, “we’ve got to dig her up, dig her up
and have a real funeral. I didn’t get to have a real funeral,” she wailed. Eric and I were
crushed and terrified. I was hoping that Loretta wouldn’t dive onto the ground and begin
digging with her hands. A minute later, Eric got up and hit a home run. He walked over to
Loretta and took her hand. She cried into his shoulder. Eric motioned me to join them.
“Loretta, we’ve buried Fluffy. We can’t dig her up now because that would be an evil
thing, a desecration of her body. When we buried her, we said prayers over her. And you
can say a prayer now.”
It was his tone of voice and his command of the situation that won out. I was getting
tired of carrying the thing off, and Eric stepped in and made it work. Loretta made us join
hands as we formed a little triangle over the grave. She said a prayer for Fluffy. Then she
gave both Eric and I a hug and went inside.
Eric and I looked at each other and shook hands. “Good job,” we both said at the same
time.
“Man, we were lucky,” Eric said.
“Well, we had a rabbit’s foot,” I said.
Not long after that, Eric moved out, and he and I became friends. I never saw Loretta
again. Eric told me she got married to some guy she’d met at Gentleman Jim’s.
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