Page 1 of Grave Humor

One

Your funeral is at noon tomorrow.

Had I been smarter or wiser, I never would’ve accepted the job offer at the funeral home. With my prospects few and far between, I hadn’t had a choice, not really. Who else would hire an eighteen-year-old high school drop out?

I could type.

Dead bodies didn’t bother me.

When the dead started chatting up a storm, I ignored them until the priest arrived. I almost liked the days when the corpses got talkative. The boss paid me triple the normal hourly rate per incident, and if nobody screamed, a gift card would magically appear on my desk the following morning. Without fail, the gift card would be for the grocery store, and it would offer me the rare opportunity to enjoy a luxury.

Luxuries came few and far between.

Tomorrow, I would take my gift card, fondle some honey rocks until I found the perfect pair to take home with me, and I’d crack them open and go to town on their sweet, sweet insides. I sighed happily at the thought of two perfect melons all for me.

It really was the little things in life.

“It’s no fun if you don’t scream, Anwen m’dear,” Old Man McGregor groused. “Must you suck all the joy from my funeral?”

“Your funeral is at noon tomorrow,” I reminded him. That was the problem with the newly dead. They got lost on the way, refusing to leave their bodies until someone came to lay them to their final rest. Old Man McGregor could make my life a living hell if I wasn’t careful.

In life, he’d enjoyed yanking on chains for the fun of it.

In death, all he had to do was sit up to yank on the entire town’s chain.

“You’re still going to suck the joy right out of it,” the old man whined.

I checked my watch. In an hour, Old Man McGregor’s wife and grandnephew would arrive for the viewing, which was scheduled to begin in three hours. I expected half the town would show up to pay their respects while the other half showed up to partake of the drama.

The dead getting up for a final chat tended to create a lot of drama, and after the first time it’d happened, attendance at viewings and funerals had skyrocketed.

People loved a free show.

Damn it all, I couldn’t afford to wait for my boss to arrive. If I wanted to get my greedy hands on a pair of honey rocks, the old goat needed to get back into his coffin where he belonged without pranking the entire town on his way to the grave. That meant one of two things. I could cut a deal with the cantankerous coot, or I could call for the priest myself.

The priest would arrive within ten minutes, as he didn’t appreciate when the dead refused to abide by the natural order of things. Corpses belonged in coffins or caskets, and Old Man McGregor had opted for a coffin rather than a casket.

I figured he knew he was a pain in the ass and wanted us to nail the lid closed so he wouldn’t get out once we put him in the ground where he belonged. Technically, the difference between caskets and coffins was one of shape, but generally, caskets were of better construction in addition to being rectangular. Traditionalists favored the coffin, as did many a vampire, claiming they were head and shoulders over the rest.

Every time someone cracked that damned pun, I wanted to beat them to death with their burial vessel of choice.

Personally, I liked cremation. Any urn would do, and you could store the ashes in a plastic container if an urn wasn’t available, although I’d heard of a few unfortunate incidents where someone had left their loved one out where a cat might use them as a litter box.

There wasn’t a whole lot anyone could do about urine-contaminated ashes, yet somehow, once a year, someone would stroll on in asking how to get Fluffy’s excrements out of their granny.

Oy, oy, oy.

At least Old Man McGregor wouldn’t be showing up again as a victim of cat pee and poor handling.

I straightened my shoulders so I wouldn’t sigh at the unfairness of it all. Old Man McGregor would prove a challenge, but I really wanted my damned honey rocks, and the only time I got them was when the dead returned to their rest without breaking any of the funeral home’s rules.

“You’re not going to do this the easy way, are you?” I asked, careful to keep my tone pleasant and curious rather than expose my readiness to rip what remained of his internal organs out through his right nostril.

“When have I ever done anything the easy way, missy?”

With that one question, I gave up on my attempt to be the immaculate professional. I sighed. “You’re going to cost me this week’s groceries, aren’t you?” Not only would he cost me the rest of my groceries, my honey rocks would be a dream within a dream.

It’d been so damned long since a corpse had actually cooperated with me. The last time, Mrs. Theault had been the one to do the screaming, and it’d taken an entire night of talking to her to get her to return to her casket. Everyone handled death a different way, but Mrs. Theault’s problems broke my heart.