Dead Men's s Boots

As casually as I could I lurched to my feet and stepped out into the aisle. I was heading for the door but suddenly I wasn’t even sure which way the door was. Instinctively, I walked away from the force that was pulling on me so hard: away from the coffin, half-convinced that I must be dragging it along behind me like a sheet anchor because the sensation of weight, of resistance, was so palpable.

The doors loomed into my field of vision and I took another step towards them. Carla was on her feet at my side, and Todd too.

Hot air which must have been entirely imaginary billowed across my back. The hook bit deeper and I couldn’t move, couldn’t move at all now; couldn’t make myself walk forward, because a force as unanswerable as gravity was pulling me back towards that hot mouth behind me – pulling me back and down into the dark.

Someone shouted a name – a single syllable. My name? Possibly. I wouldn’t have wanted to be categorical on that subject right then, because I didn’t seem to have a name of my own: only a vague sense of a space that was me and a space that was everything else.

And the oven’s searing heat was making the space that was me shrink away like the film of breath you leave on a window-pane.

Then suddenly the doors ahead of me were thrown open, and something miraculously beautiful filled my sight. It was Juliet. Vivid, ineffable, irreducible Juliet, a bookmark in the stodgy, samey script of the world that always lets you find your place. I fell into her arms like a drowning man, aware even through the sweltering ruck inside my head of her strength, the incredible ease with which she took my weight.

The last thing I saw as the red of the furnace rose before my eyes was her face staring down into mine, a little surprised.

She said something too long and complicated for me to catch, but I was pretty sure that my name was in there somewhere.

Castor. Yeah, of course: I knew that.

Voices came towards me across a fractal landscape of synaesthetically throbbing shadow.

They were raised in argument.

Todd telling Juliet that this was a private ceremony and she couldn’t just walk in off the street and interrupt it.

Juliet telling Todd in a calm and neutral tone that if he didn’t step way back out of her face he was likely to lose some internal organ that he couldn’t do without. No more from Todd after that.

The foxy priest asking if everyone would please, please sit down again so that the cremation could continue.