The Dead Romantics

by Ashley Poston

I wondered if the wind was Dad. I wondered if he was in this gust, or the next one. I wondered if I would ever recognize the sounds through the floorboards, the wind swirling between old oak wood, making sounds that, perhaps, could have been voices. It all finally became real. This week. This funeral. This world—spinning, spinning, spinning without my father in it. And the wind rattled on.

I breathed out a long breath, steeling my shoulders. One step at a time. Carver and Alice were waiting inside the red parlor room—Dad’s favorite room—and outstretched their hands to me. I took them, and squeezed them tightly, and together we walked up to the dark mahogany casket decorated in wildflowers of blues and reds and yellows and pinks, to begin to figure out how to say goodbye.

“I’m dead so why does it matter?” he said, and his voice was gruff and thick. “I’m dead and every time I disappear I come back a little less. I’m dead and I can still hear my heart beating in my ears, fainter and fainter. I’m dead and gone and I’m here and it’s not the book—it can’t be the book, Florence.”

“Tell me to stay again.”

Dad was in the wind because he breathed the same air that I breathed. Dad was a mark in history because he existed. He was part of my future because I still carried on.

“Who told you that lie? It’s never easy. It’s also never really goodbye—and trust me, we’re in the business of goodbyes. The people who pass through here live on in you and me and everyone they touched. There is no happy ending, there’s just . . . happily living. As best you can. Or whatever. Metaphor-metaphor-simile shit.”