• Outside, the ashy-gray color of the sky had seeped into the landscape, turning everything in sight bleak and lifeless. The fog combined with the drizzle of rain that fell from the clouds whited out parts of the outside surroundings, like a drawing only half-completed. As much of a cliché as it was, the gloomy weather was a direct reflection of the mood that surrounded me now. How could the atmosphere be any different during a funeral? The weather only proved to add to the depression of death.

    So there I stood, watching, as the priest stood on a pedestal and chanted in a droning monotone. His words were muted, much like the landscape, and it seemed like I was watching an old black and white movie with bad sound. All around me people were crying, daubing at their puffy eyes with handkerchiefs and sniffling at every other word. I wondered if they even knew what the priest was saying through their tears, even though I couldn’t. I wasn’t even crying.

    Oddly enough, I didn’t even know whose funeral I was attending. When I awoke this morning, I found my parents still downstairs in the kitchen instead of at work like they should have been. The air was thick with a feeling that I could not describe; neither of them spoke, as if by doing so they would break an unnamed taboo. They didn’t even look up as I entered the room, noisy as I was as I thudded down the stairs one by one; Mum sat at the table, staring into her coffee in a stupor, while Dad paced around the room, impatient and restless. They both wore black.

    “Ana…”

    I had opened my mouth to ask what was going on, but was silenced by the utterance of my name. I couldn’t tell who had said it, and I was about to ask when Mum stood up suddenly and announced that we should be off.

    All through the car ride we were silent. I didn’t hear my name again.

    I glanced at them now with shifty eyes; Mum stood beside me, with Dad on her other side. A river of silent tears streamed down my mother’s face, and her face was scrunched up in pain and sorrow. My father’s expression was harder to read. It was blank, as though all forms of emotion had been smoothed away to a mask, leaving a thoughtless, impassive robot behind. His eyes were hollow; deep, black tunnels that extended into eternity.

    An involuntary shudder crawled up my spine, and I looked away. There was something missing, something I had forgotten. I racked my brains looking for an answer. Mother and Father… my parents? They looked different from the people I remembered. I looked at Dad’s face again, inspecting it closely. It was faint, but above his eye there was a soft pink scar that was never there before. How had he gotten that scar? It couldn’t have been long ago… I pressed my fingers against my temples in an effort to remember, but nothing came up. Why couldn’t I remember?

    I chuckled softly under my breath. I shouldn’t be worrying about something as trivial as a small scar. Dad had probably just cut himself yesterday and never told me about it. But his eye? I shook my head, chasing away the foreboding feeling with a nervous chuckle.

    Somebody on my right coughed, and I peeked around my Mum’s figure in curiosity. An old gray-haired woman I did not know was watching me with a peculiar look on her face. I realized she must have heard me laughing and I looked down at my hands as my cheeks burned in shame. I peered at her through my eyelashes once more, but she no longer looked at me.

    As I looked in her direction, something caught my attention in the corner of my eye. An electric billboard stood outside the funeral building, neon-red words glowing brightly into the mist. My eyes were drawn to the bottom of the board, which read in blood-red letters:

    May 21, 2008.

    I didn’t know why something like the date on a neon billboard would upset me so much, but it did. Like my father’s scar, it seemed out of place to me.

    All around me, people had begun to line up in front of the coffin, paying their last respects to the deceased person inside. My mother and father stood at the front beside a vase of red roses, and I began to realize that many of the people at the funeral were my own relatives. Something clicked in my brain; someone in my family must have died. Otherwise, why would most of my relatives be at a funeral?

    Still, I wondered who it could be who had died. I had no cousins, and my grandparents on both sides were both alive and well.

    “…Such a sad way to die…”

    “…She was so young…”

    “…Her father was in the car with her… He has the scar to prove it…”

    Whispers were erupting all around me, but nobody had spoken. The voices echoed in my head, like thoughts entering my brain unbidden. More voices merged with them, disjointed thoughts invading my mind, confusing me. I clutched my head in my hands, willing the voices away, but they continued crescendo until I thought my head would explode from all the noise. I heard every thought, felt every feeling.

    “…Was only… young girl…”

    “…The truck… passenger side was crushed…”

    “…Six days ago… May fifteenth…

    “…Why not me…?”

    “…Ana…”

    A hand grabbed my wrist, and the voices all dissipated at once. My head jerked up, and my wide eyes met the silky white ones of the blind woman who had stared at me earlier.

    “You should move on.”

    Before I could respond, or even comprehend, she had released me and moved away.

    My head was spinning. Things weren’t making sense at all; a blind woman, the only one to look at me in the eyes all day. All my relatives gathered at this person’s funeral, while I still had no clue who I should be mourning for. People’s thoughts were seeping through the cracks of my subconscious, invading my mind. Thoughts that I shouldn’t be able to hear…

    I glanced down at my wrist where the old woman had grabbed it. My old watch, which had been given to me for my tenth birthday some five-odd years ago, was still there. The time was shown, as was the date, in fluorescent digital numbers.

    May 15, 2008.

    May 15th….

    The date on my watch was six days ago. The billboard outside had read May 21st.

    Six days ago…

    In the car with her father…

    The passenger side was crushed by the truck…

    He has the scar to prove it…

    “You should move on.”

    I suddenly couldn’t breathe. Ever so slowly, things were beginning to fall into place.

    Six days ago, I had been wearing my watch. May 15th, 2008. I had been in the car with Dad; we were coming back from going shopping. We stopped at a four-way intersection, waiting for the light to change from red to green.

    The cars on either side of the intersection slowed to a stop. We moved forward.

    There was a rushing noise as something large came at me from the side. Then a loud screech, and the smell of burning rubber.

    Then pain.

    Then black.

    Nobody had spoken to me since then; nobody except an old blind woman who shouldn’t have been able to see anything, much less me.

    It was May 21st. And on May 15th was the day that I…

    The area around the coffin was beginning to clear up; people who had paid their respects were moving away, leaving only a few stragglers behind.

    In a trance, I began to move forward, taking one slow step at a time. I passed my mother, who now wept openly as my father held her in his arms. Her howls of pain reverberated in my heart as I stopped in front of the coffin. On the top was a picture of a young teenage girl, about fifteen years old, with long black hair and a smile that reached her bright green eyes.

    Below the picture sat a golden plaque with words engraved on the surface.

    Rest in Peace
    Anabelle Tristan Fashant
    October 9, 1992 – May 15, 2008