Tim Oslington

The Death of the Bird

It was an open casket funeral, and frankly the idea revolted her. The girl had drowned in a lake and it had taken them nearly forty-eight hours to fish her out. True, those two days had been from the middle of the very coldest month of the year, and everyone who was returning from their trip to the casket was saying things like “she could almost be asleep” and “she really was such a beautiful child.” But to Naomi the idea of actually going up to the front of the room and seeing the thing that had once been her cousin filled her with dread. As the cross-country train had carried her here, she could not shake the image from her mind: Madeline’s little body at the bottom of the lake, her hair drifting in the gloom, her blank eyes gazing upwards as those two days passed. Though, it had been so long since she’d visited that Naomi could not even picture her face.