She imagined throwing mud and rocks onto the casket lid. Or, better yet, onto her father with the lid open.

Hey, boy, I hit it! Go get my washer out of the can. Yay, Granddaddy! I’ll get it!

BURYING GRANDDADDY BY JOHN ALLISON 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 65

The come-to-Jesus service in the little sanctuary had been first, the preacher reading a passage about the truth and the light and another about a camel’s eye and a needle.

Cleo came close to applauding the sheer effort of the skinny woman vocalist and the corpulent, red-faced man making Cheerios with his lips as he exerted himself in accompaniment on a scarred spinet, until she remembered that it was a funeral she was attending. Her father’s funeral at that.

Sitting beside Cleo in the pew, six-year-old Kevin squirmed, Cleo knowing that the boy was even more bored and ready to get this over with than she was.

Then Cleo, her two sons Kevin and his older brother Claude, and her husband, Ed, whom the boys called Pop, drove a short distance in their 1950 Chevy coupe to the small community cemetery where a second service was held beneath a forest…