I knew today was the right day to put on actual clothes and so I am buttoned up to the chin in my most plainest black dress with ten thousand tiny black buttons, black tights giving me spider-legs and a black ribbon around my ponytail but the bow fell out and I can feel the tails hanging down over my shoulder. My black boots are by the door, with a hundred more buttons between them and the hook sitting on the floor but I probably won't be going anywhere because this week I am quarantined, pinned and otherwise unavailable.
But both my favorite boys are home. Sam and Daniel! Wait, I mean Ben and Loch.
*(Damn it. The other ones bring me the aforementioned pastries I love so much.)
I have a vintage lace handkerchief in hand for full effect. Lochlan rolled his eyes when he saw me dab at my nose through breakfast and he asked if I was just about done mourning my own health and should he go build a coffin?
(Because Lochlan has no patience for this. He must be feeling better, he's so fucking cranky. He also doesn't like my usual day wardrobe all that much, honestly.)
Yes, please, build it for two, so I can kill you first and then we can be buried together. I snap at him because he knows I have issues with things like coffins and death and still he needles me.
No one gets a coffin. They get a box and get burned to ash and then I can eat the ashes. No burial. No cemeteries. No headstones. No engraving. No plots. No sticking someone you love so badly into the ground like they're a fucking tree that's going to grown and flower and thrive because that won't happen. They're not coming back. At least you can go to bed at night with your arms wrapped tightly around a little sealed (HA) box and that's better than nothing at all, or at least better than lying in the cold, six feet down, all alone.
They've tried to talk me out of things like cremation. Ah well. Everyone has their own opinions. Mine are just so loud. They're so loud I can't get past them and I get up and start to leave but he grabs my wrist.
Sorry, Peanut. I get ornery when I start feeling well enough to feel but not well enough to do anything.
I know, Locket.
I let him off the hook as he lets go because he's right and I'm impossible and then Ben says Basically if she doesn't get outside soon 'nice' won't be a choice, it will be some long-forgotten memory of how Bridget used to be before she became the Fever Beaver from cabin three at Lake Echo Campground.
It sent both of us into sprawling laughter punctuated with harsh coughing.
From where? Loch recovers first but barely.
I don't know. I just made up a campground.
Fever Beaver?
If the shoe fits, Bridge, I mean water-logged microbeast.
So sweet, with such a fantastic bedside manner, Benny.
What would you do without me?
Be classified as a different species, at least.
Ha, you got a ways to go yet, Peanut. (Loch joins him because what is teasing someone if you can't get a whole tableful of meanies ganging up on you at once?)
Sam (whom I love unconditionally, take note everyone) brought me a beavertail an hour later. It made everything better. Especially the part where they all asked for a bite and I said no.
:) (<---still so sick it took me a good ten minutes to figure out why my smiley face was so lopsided. Italics for the win, because I refused to listen to my editor, who said to put conversations in quotes. No way.)
