The president of Proper Play Things Incorporated wailed. He stood over his father’s body literally wailing.

People downstairs were growing impatient. They wanted to go home. Their Sunday didn’t have to be a complete waste, spent at this old man’s funeral, someone who they only knew as the old man, the boss’s father, who had lived above the two-storey offices with his common-law wife for as long as they could remember.

PASSING FROM COMMON LAW INTO FOREVER BY KAREN BREMER MASUDA 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 42

The president of Proper Play Things Incorporated wailed. He stood over his father’s body literally wailing. It baffled bystanders, it proved to some of them the rumor was true of him being third generation Korean-Japanese. Japanese don’t wail. It made other people tired, those who the president had told over and over how they did not understand what it was like to lose a father. The president’s wife stood unimpressed off to the side, the wailing climbed a decibel as if to make up for her indifference.

The wailing eventually abated. Then as everyone in the funeral procession waited in the …