I’m Sorry for Your Loss
If I hear I’m sorry for your loss one more time, I’m going to stab someone with this goddamn decorative cheese knife. I imagine it: the smooth curve of stainless steel sinking into Aunt Carol’s unsuspecting neck, blood mixing with leftover bits of brie.
A white-haired woman fondles Marcus’ high school graduation photo, brick-red lipstick seeping into the wrinkles beneath her bottom lip. His mother insisted on shoving snapshots into every nook and cranny of this morbid mausoleum that used to be our living room. Snowboarding Marcus, cheeks flushed from a black diamond mogul, stares from the bookshelf; Family Reunion Marcus beams next to a vase of wilting orchids; Honeymoon Marcus is propped against our flat-screen, sipping from a coconut shell Mai Tai. Good luck getting rid of me now that we’re official, he’d said that night, grinning like a rum-glazed idiot while I rubbed overpriced gift shop aloe vera on his sunburn. Turns out he was right—hundreds of his smiles lurk from every vantage point like a low-budget horror film. Hellhouse: Dead Husband’s Revenge, starring yours truly.
I busy myself at the buffet table, straightening dishes of soggy pasta salad and toothpick-skewered salami cubes. Someone sniffles into a tissue near the desserts and I wonder how long you’d have to hold a person’s face in a triple-layer Black Forest cake before they suffocate. Five minutes? Ten? Talk about death by chocolate, Marcus would have said, if he weren’t a pile of ashes in the equivalent of an overpriced Café Bustelo can.
“I’m sorry for your loss.” It’s Pastor Carl, I think. My hands clamp the edge of the buffet table in a vice grip, mouth open in a scream that would rattle bones and curdle blood, if it could escape. But I’m paralyzed. A gargoyle turned stone by white-hot rage, forced to live without the only person I’ve ever loved, doomed to stand sentinel over Crock-Pots of Swedish meatballs and discount Wegman’s party trays for all eternity.
He puts a hand on my shoulder. I flinch, but the warmth in his fingers, the first physical contact I’ve had in weeks, deflates me. Energy seeps from my pores like helium—a constant, steady lessening until only a vacant sack of flesh remains. He grabs me by the elbow, holding me upright with a polite smile and a furrowed brow. “Let’s find you a seat.”
Pastor Carl deposits me on the couch with a bottle of Aquafina, unaware of what he took. That the wrath was my final tether, the only thing I had left. I take sips of water, watching co-workers and cousins and neighbors from three streets down hover like hordes of black-clad gnats; watching Marcus watch me, frozen behind a hundred mismatched Hobby Lobby frames.
“I’m sorry for my loss,” I say to no one in particular, just to see if it’s true. It’s not. I’m not sorry, or sad, or angry. I am white noise, TV static—a bottomless nothing, a lack of anything at all.
Ashleigh Adams is creative director and fiction writer. She tends to write about messy and complex female characters because she is one. Her words are featured or forthcoming in Bath Flash Fiction, Flash Fiction Magazine and After Happy Hour Review among others. Find her on Bluesky: @ashdoeswords