REAL DEATH by Terry Hayman
Terry Hayman’s “Real Death” is a story of an unwanted legacy that poses questions about the value of immortality and the cost of affluence.
Real Death
by Terry Hayman
My mother’s funeral and her bequest to me were as embarrassing as the woman herself. A kind of final test.
The funeral…
The fact there was a funeral at all says it, doesn’t it? A major stakeholder in Genrev dying from old age? I’m sure the Genrev board would have simply “disappeared” my mother were it not for her uncontestable, world-posted will. It turned her fifty-one percent share over to an unsympathetic charity if her burial wishes weren’t carried out exactly.
So there we all were in her chosen barrio cemetery, eyes shifting about anxiously as the priest finished up, expecting some kind of swarming from the onlookers pressing their noses to the high black bars twenty meters to our left. Not that they’d try anything. Uncle Castor had hired a small army to keep us safe.
Now I and Mother’s four brothers — George, Bradley, William, and Castor — stepped forward, untied the ropes suspending my mother’s casket in a double trapeze, and lowered the casket into the dank earth. The ropes slipped roughly through our gloved fingers. The bugler played “Taps.” Continue reading “REAL DEATH by Terry Hayman”
