The Communion Dress

By P.A. Farrell [Winner: 3rd Place]

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The rain pounded on the roof while the sickening smell of the flowers in his nostrils added to the lump in his throat. Knowing what he was about to do gnawed at him as a tearful haze clouded his eyes. All so vivid, it could have been yesterday.

The hammer's weight in his hand, a smooth handle with a heavy head, would do it. He brought it down smartly to drive the merciless nails into the coffin's wooden lid.

In his mind, he knew she was being tossed with each strike, and his muscles rebelled, but he persisted. The hammer slipped in his calloused hand, almost falling to the floor. He renewed his resolve. 

His grip now whitened his knuckles; he was the father, and it was his duty to ensure her safe journey to the grave. Afterward, he would go home to his bed, bereft of energy and sick to his soul with the loss. 

Today, a flush of heat sends beads of sweat across his furrowed brow, creating a crown-like glow. The bedcovers intensify his internal heat, and he pushes them off. 

      Then he noticed her in this room decorated with fading rose wallpaper, old bits of furniture, worn shoes thrown under a bureau, and a seaman’s cap on the bedpost.

“Mary, Mary dear, what are you doing here?” A wizened man in his rumpled sheets is looking at his small daughter standing at the foot of his bed. In her pale hand, she is holding something, but in the flashes of light and darkness from the streetlight, it’s unclear.

The streetlight flickers outside, creating patterns of light and shadow in the room. He doesn’t want to complain to the electric company about the loose corrugated metal plate protecting the fragile bulb. 

He doesn’t want to make trouble. In this stage of life, he knows making trouble can be a problem. When he was younger, he’d speak up, shout, and even threaten to get his way, but not now. The fight had gone out of him after the car accident. Who listens to a man with one leg?

He is as tired as anyone can be after losing a child, and here it is decades later, the anniversary. The thought of the ground that day, so cold and wet, sends shivers down his spine. All of them looked away when he approached the ugly hole. What were they thinking? He knew. He caused her death.

He keeps the shoes he wore that day with the flaking mud on them in his mind, where they have settled into a kind of permanence, like a scar. 

The shoes, the shoes! They said he’d brought mud into the house. Fever followed as quickly as a hot storm that swallowed her, and she was gone.

Through his brain fog, he remembers the white roses and the glistening drops of rain, like tiny diamonds, lying on the casket as it was lowered into the black hole. Now, he’s taken to his bed many years later, but the thoughts torment him as he lies there.

The man's granddaughter in the next room is on the phone. Her feelings of loyalty to family cause her hesitancy, even as she saw his rapid decline in the last few years. If only she had someone to help, she’d get the advice to make it all right and ease the guilt. But there is no one. Her own husband, who had died of an unknown illness only months before, left her to care for her ailing grandfather.

Slowly, her finger pokes out the phone number. Each digit pressed makes it worse. She wants to cry but mustn’t alert him to what she’s thinking. Finally, someone answers the phone, and her voice falters.

“Doctor, I think he's getting worse. We may have to consider putting him somewhere safer than our home.”

“What's happened that made you change your mind?” 

Again, she hesitates, but she knows he’s her only help.

“We both know how he started acting since my young aunt died from that fever decades ago. I even hid his straight razor. I never knew he could be so gruff, so unhappy, and so tearful. He’s never been a man who cried. Now, if he can’t find his slippers, he cries. Imagine that? 

“Today, he claims he saw his little dead daughter standing at the foot of his bed. He even described the dress she was wearing, which was her First Holy Communion dress. It was the one for her funeral. I saw it because someone took a photo of her in the casket.”

The answer comes back in an assuring tone. “Well, if he's beginning to see things, that may mean more brain damage from that fall on the tile floor. I know he’s been unsteady on his leg. We’ll begin the process of placement. I do have somewhere in mind. I’ll ask to have a bed reserved for him. Do you think he’ll agree?”  

The decision causes her head to throb. “I don’t know. He’s always been so independent, and now I’m beginning to worry. We’re alone in the house most of the time, and when he’s not crying, he’s so angry.”

The woman puts down the phone, dejected, and begins walking quietly toward the bedroom. The old man has pulled up his bed’s sheets. Lying motionless under the heavy blankets, pushing against the thick, white stubble on his chin, his mouth droops to one side. His fixed gray eyes stare at the foot of the bed. 

The woman looks down, and there, lying on the bed is a rain-bejeweled fresh white rose.