Introduction:

As we get older the world seems to get just a bit weirder everyday. Recently I saw an item in the news where a man had requested in his will that after his death it would be arranged that he could be present, in a standing position, at his own wake. This got me to thinking about what might happen to an unsuspecting caller who may not be aware of this odd request but had showed up to pay his respects. Oh yes, and unknown to this person, he suffers from a severe case of Necrophobia, or fear of the dead. With that in mind I give you this little story of what may have happened.

The Wake:

Imagine... if you will... that you are back in your hometown for a few days on vacation after a long absence. You hear about the death of a son in a family from your old neighborhood. Even though you have not seen this family for many years, but at the repeated requests of your parents who now live way down in Arizona, you have reluctantly gone to your ex-neighbor's home to pay your respects for the loss of their son, Ricky. It is a modest neighborhood that has seen better days but it is still made up of simple working class people. Never one to come empty handed you have brought with you a twelve pack of cold Michelob and some store-bought frosted brownies to humbly add to the wake's feast. You want to pay your respects to the family, hang around for at least a polite amount of time before you beg your departure and then leave as soon as possible. Funerals have never been your forte; in fact the few that you have attended have always made you feel uncomfortable to the point of becoming ill. You have dallied all day trying to postpone this visit until now at 3:35 PM you find yourself standing on their front porch knocking at the dead man's door. Yet despite all of your hesitations, selfishly you silently hope that you may get to enjoy the grieving mother's famous potato salad that you so fondly remember from your childhood.

Members of the grieving family welcome you at the door and thank you for coming as they lead you into the parlor. Once inside you remember this old style of architecture with its wide opened archways leading from one room to another making the entire floor seem almost to be one large room. Passing through the parlor you notice the thirty-something-year old man with a dark complexion standing silently in the corner. He is wearing Ray Ban Aviators and an Oakland Raiders' baseball cap tilted awkwardly off to the left side of his head. An odd, cold shiver runs down your back but you can't make any sense of it except that you are just a little uncomfortable since he seems to be staring directly at you. As you pass you smile at him and give a slight nod in greeting but he does not return your acknowledgment so you move on. Next to him standing upright against the wall, of all things, rests a coffin. Now you begin to feel a bit queasy as you pass the coffin but you convince yourself that this is just from not eating all day. You think to yourself, "How odd to have a coffin here now." But just as quickly you dismiss this thought knowing that this family has always been more than a little peculiar.

Moving through this room you pass the friends and members of this family who are clustered about chatting quietly in small groups but no one seems to remember who you are. Passing through another wide archway into the dining room you place the frosted brownies and the twelve pack on the buffet table. You then take one of the beers and twist off the cap. As you sip at the beer you look around the room and see that the grieving mother and brother are talking to a priest so you decide to wait before offering them your condolences. Most of the people gathered here have either a plate of food or a drink in one hand as they move about so you decide to go ahead and eat.

Facing back to the buffet you take a plate and start to fill it with fried chicken, a little baked ham and a heaping helping of that delicious potato salad. With your feast and the beer in hand you move back into the parlor to take a seat on the edge of the sofa across from that strange young man in the corner still silently standing by the coffin. Shooting him a quick glance it is obvious to you that he is not having a good day and that he seems rather put out about something. But, you figure that as long as he stays over there and doesn't want to come over to tell you his life story everything will be just fine.

Setting the beer and your plate on the coffee table before you, your mouth begins to water with the memory and anticipation of once again indulging yourself with this heavenly, thick, creamy potato salad. Scooping up a large portion of this treat onto your fork you lean far forward, your jaws open wide as you move both the fork and your head towards each other to take that first delicious bite. Just as the potato salad reaches your lips your eyes move upward and fall once again upon that weird guy still glaring at you from the corner, you hesitate thinking, "Just what is his problem?"

Then you freeze.

For more than a minute you sit there slumped forward on the sofa, a fork full of lumpy potato salad poised at your gapping mouth with your wide eyes fixed upon that freak lurking behind those dark glasses and under that damn Oakland Raiders' baseball cap. You think to yourself, "Why hasn't this goofball moved since I got here? And why is he still staring at me? I hate the Raiders. There is something vaguely familiar about this clown… he's starting to creep me out… hey… is that… oh hell nooo… it can't be..."

Suddenly, involuntarily, you throw the fork with the potato salad into the air as you bolt upright yelling, "SWEET JESUS!" Frantically kicking your legs you back-peddle up onto the back of the sofa trying to get as far away as possible, as quickly as possible from that dead thing staring at you from the corner. Only the wall behind the sofa stops your hysterical backward flight as you slam noisily into it and you now find yourself perched atop the sofa! Drawing your knees up into your chin, you shiver, stammering to no one in particular, "That's… that's… that's him! That's the dead guy! That's… that's Ricky!"

From your new vantage point you nervously scan the adjoining rooms to see that no one else present seems to be the least bit disturbed by the presence of dead guy standing in the corner wearing sunglasses and a hat! Amazingly you also find that even after you have caused a disturbance that no one is even looking at you. No one has even noticed that you are now sitting high on the back of the sofa pressed against the wall with a crazed look of horror and your knees tucked up into your face. "What are these people, deaf, blind or nuts?" you mumble to yourself.

But then you see her. She is a young girl of about fifteen years of age with long raven black hair that in knowing the situation may or may not have exaggerated the paleness of her face. Almost out of view from the parlor she is at the far corner of the kitchen, standing rigidly straight with her back braced against the wall. Her big brown horrified eyes are as wide as yours. She looks straight at you, slightly nods her head and then incredulously mouths the words, "I know…"

"Finally," you think to yourself, "Someone who is normal!" But just as you think you may have found an ally in this house of horrors she makes a quick dash out the back door and is gone. More than anything you want to follow her as you think, "Oh no! Please don't leave me here!"

Slowly you slide back down from your high perch and stand up. Nervously you take a quick glance at Ricky to make sure he is still there. Without taking your eyes off of him you reach down and pick up your beer. You desperately need a drink so you swallow what is left of this one in one gulp. Momentarily taking your eyes off Ricky you look at the now empty bottle and say, "Well, that didn't help," as you absentmindedly drop the bottle on the floor. You back quickly out of the room towards the buffet table, your sight never leaving the dead guy in the corner by of all things, a coffin! Clumsily you bang your left leg on the sharp corner of an end table knocking over a lamp while almost falling on your ass! Pain shoots up your left leg as you struggle to keep your balance while violently twisting your left knee. The knee makes a resounding, sickening "POP" and immediately starts to swell up to the size of a beach ball. But you never loose sight of 'Ricky, The Dead Guy' and incredibly again no one in the house even glances in your direction.

At the end of the buffet table stand two men and a woman engrossed in small talk. Upon reaching this group, turning your head to keep your eyes on the corpse, you reach up with your left hand and not to gently clutch the arm of the man closest to you. He nonchalantly turns his head towards you as you point across your body with your right arm and try to tell him that there is a dead guy standing in the corner by a coffin! "In… in there… that guy is… that guy's dea…" Cutting you off the man smiles at you and casually answers, "Oh yeah, that's Ricky, he looks great doesn't he?" He then turns back to his group as they move away.

"Looks great?" You mumble after them. "He looks dead!" But again no one pays you any mind.

Feeling that you need another drink you grab a beer out of your twelve pack on the table and finish it off in one long gulp. Then you finish another, and another, and another. As the alcoholic buzz hits your frantic brain you now stand unsteadily at the end of the buffet table looking around a spinning room suspiciously eyeing this collection of ghouls who just moments ago were the family and friends of the dearly almost departed. Unfortunately, everything you once were just thinking you are now saying out loud.

"These people are nuts! There's a corpse standing in the corner next to his own coffin wearing sunglasses and a baseball hat and everybody here acts like this is just another day at the beach!" You then start to take another drink of the empty beer in your hand that you had already finished only to realize that the bottle is empty. "Hey! Who's been drinking my beer?" Quickly you shoot a suspicious look at Ricky to make sure it wasn't him!

You realize that condolences or not it is well past time for you to get out of Dodge, but now the room is spinning so fast you don't think that you can walk. To steady yourself you turn to face the buffet table confidently taking your eyes off of Ricky by bravely reasoning through your alcoholic haze, "I'll stay over here and he better stay over there cause if he comes over here I'll kick his skinny dead ass!" With both arms you brace yourself against the table and close your eyes. Slowing the spinning starts to ebb as you take a few deep breaths. You open your eyes only to find yourself staring straight into a half empty bowl of potato salad. "Oh sh…! What happened to that fork?"

Turning around you peer through blurry eyes searching the floor for the missing fork and potato salad. You take a giant step forward then immediately realize that this would only take you closer to the dead guy! Swiftly you take two large steps backward bumping your butt so hard on the buffet table that it leaves a nice large bruise, which will cause you much pain for the next two weeks whenever you try to sit down. You wince, moan, and start to sweat. But you still need to find that fork and the potato salad.

Grimacing with pain from your twisted, swollen left knee and the bruise on your buttocks, with clinched teeth and through watery eyes, you again search the floor of the other room but see no hint of the missing utensil or its creamy, lumpy cargo. Your eyes quickly shift back to Ricky just to make sure he hasn't moved. You're not completely sure but you convince yourself that as for now Ricky hasn't moved any closer you. It is then that you catch the slight hint of something moving above the dead man's head. Squinting into the parlor with your eyes fixed just above Ricky's deadhead you feel a rush of renewed horror as you can only mutter, "Oh my God…"

Approximately eighteen inches above him is a cabinet attached to the wall with an ornamental trim on the top face. There, directly above Ricky's Oakland Raiders' baseball cap, balancing on the ornamental trim teetered the shiny misplaced fork loaded down with a heaping mouthful of potato salad! The forked end with what now looked to be a full half-pound of that malicious salad protruded into the room with the handle of the fork hanging in over the cabinet. Delicately balanced there upon this ledge the fork sways up and down taunting you with the promise that, yes it will fall down on the dead guy, The Guest of Honor, just as soon as it feels like it. It could only be a matter of time before the fork swayed just a little too much one way or the other to send the potato salad raining down on the unknowing and deceased Ricky, which would of course finally freak out this up to now un-freak-able gathering.

Mortified by this turn of bad luck you try to quickly size up this new dilemma. You determine that one way to retrieve the fork would be to place a chair in front of Ricky so that you could reach the fork. Momentarily fighting your fear about even going anywhere near this dead guy, and trying to become more positive about your situation you think; "Well that should be easy enough."

But then just as quickly you come up with two very good reasons why this wouldn't work. The first is that when you climb up on the chair and reach up to get that taunting utensil you would be placing your crotch directly in Ricky's face thus probably knocking the guy's hat and glasses off his dead head! You surmise correctly that this would definitely finally get everyone's attention in a hurry! The results of which would most probably either get you beaten severely by his relatives for being a pervert or maybe even get you arrested. The second, and most disturbing to you, is that in retrieving the fork in this manner you would have to get close to this 'thing' and may even touch a dead guy! A strange, soulful utterance of "Woo who who ooo…" escapes your lips as your whole body shudders uncontrollably at this grotesque thought.

Desperately you search the adjoining rooms looking for something… well, actually in your frantic, intoxicated daze you figure that if this whacked-out group of weirdoes has a coffin standing in the room then perhaps it is not all that unreasonable that there might be a ten foot pole lying around too. Suddenly you spot a basket of hard rolls on the buffet table and a new plan quickly develops. Smiling now you congratulate yourself for being so clever. Drunkenly you reason, "Just how hard could it be to knock that fork off its pedestal with one of those rolls? Its only about twelve feet away… yeah I could hit that easy. Shoot, I was a hell of a third baseman in high school. This will be easy! Besides nobody in this madhouse will even notice if I'm throwing things around. Heck, I can even make a game of it! How many throws… with the rolls… will it take… to knock the fork away from the flake?" Laughing at your drunken wit you reach for the rolls as you boldly surmise, "I bet I can do it in three!"

Fortunately you quickly forget this plan as your swollen left knee begins to throb with pain so you decide to take some weight off of it by sitting down. Grabbing a wooden chair by the buffet table, and forgetting the bruise on your posterior, you fall into it.

Now, if you had thought of doing so you probably could have counted to ten before the agonizing pain shot up from your butt cheeks and hit your brainpan. Regardless, when it did, you jump up out of that chair like a fighter pilot being catapulted in his ejection seat from a crashing jet while forcing an audible, growling, inhumane "Yeeeelp!" from deep in your throat sounding much like a large mad dog that just had its tail caught under a rocker.

Standing there in this insufferable pain you look around at the still unconcerned gathering that has once again failed to observe your misfortune. Even though you are no longer worried about being embarrassed you are becoming more than a tad bit paranoid that these clowns may all just be a bunch of zoned out zombies. But again the only person in that whole crazy house who is looking at you is the dead guy, Ricky; only now he seems to be smiling.

Once again you start to sweat. But this time it is not just a slight perspiration but rather much like someone has placed a shower faucet over your head and turned it on full blast. Sweat pours down off your forehead into your eyes, across your cheeks and drips off of your nose and chin. You can feel your shirt start to cling to your back so you reach up to loosen your tie and unbutton your shirt collar. To make things worse your eyes start flowing with tears from the pain in your knee and buttocks. Reaching across the table you pick up half a dozen white, paper napkins and hastily mop your forehead, wipe your eyes and rub the sweat off of your face. Unknown to you, the whiskers from your five-o'clock shadow have pulled about fifty tiny, white paper fabrics off of the napkins leaving them scattered across your face and chin like some kind of mutant, mega acne.

Keeping a watchful eye on Ricky across the parlor you figure that maybe another beer will help ease the pain so once again you gulp down a bottle of Michelob. The beer buzz starts to hit you again making your head swim as two middle-aged women come over to stand by the buffet, picking at this and that on the table, ignoring you as they talk.

"Doesn't Ricky look nice?" asks the first.

The second woman answers, "Yes he does. He looks like he could almost sit down and eat some of his mother's delicious potato salad. Remember how much he used to love it when he was little?"

"Oh yes, it was so cute, he enjoyed it so much that he would get it all over himself when he ate." Replied the first woman as they walked away.

"Oh God please… give me a break." You mumble as you look once again at the balancing fork. "That's it I'm out of here… where are my brownies?"

You spot the brownies in the middle of the table and start to head for them, then its out the back door, when out of nowhere a small, wrinkled old woman with a yellowy complexion, a craggily, crooked nose and long gray, frazzled hair suddenly appears next to you. She has but one continuous hairy eyebrow across the top of her face and a mole the size and texture of a Bic Banana above her right eye. Upon seeing this mole your right eye immediately starts to involuntarily twitch.

"Hello." She says.

"HAH!" Is all that you can muster.

"My you look a fright. You must be one of Ricky's friends. You look like you are taking this pretty hard. My name is Aunt Hilda."

You think to yourself, "Well sure it is! How appropriate. Where's your broom? Don't you gals conjure up in threes? So where are Hazel and the Wicked One From The West?" But all you really do is smile weakly and nod your head as you cover your right eye with your hand in a vain attempt to control the twitching. In the meantime your left eyeball is wildly bouncing back and forth trying to keep at least one wary eye on the lifeless guest of honor over there and on Broom Hilda over here.

"You weren't leaving were you? I do hope you'll stay. We have a few surprises planned for later on." She said.

"Oh my God, what's that? I know! You and your sisters are gonna make Ricky dance!" Again thinking to yourself, only now you take a quick glance towards the back door. Nervously you reach for another beer and drink it down.

"Listen," she went on, "why don't you go down the hall to the bathroom and freshen up? Splash some water on your face, relax a little and I'll talk to you later."

With that she takes your arm and starts to lead you to the hallway. Reaching back you quickly grab one more beer, for the road and take another long look at Ricky to make sure he isn't following you. In the hallway she points to a door halfway down the hall as she takes the beer out of your hand. "Just go in there and freshen up, your not going to want to miss what we have planned."

"Wanna bet?" You mumble as you start down the hall figuring that once she turns away you will rescue your brownies and head straight for the back door. Reaching the bathroom door you hesitate, then turn back thinking she will be gone so you can make your escape, but there she stands smiling at the end of the hall like a withered gnome guarding the Gates Of Hades.

"That's it, go on in," she cackles.

Reluctantly you enter the bathroom locking the door behind you.

To Be Continued: 

The Wake: Part Two

The Wake: Part Three


"Copyright 2008.  Michael E. Tank   All rights reserved. No part of this document may be copied, faxed, electronically transmitted, or in any other manner duplicated without express written permission of the author.”