Their Haunting - flash fiction

Their Haunting

My grandmother’s bones always crackle-pop when she reaches out to touch me.

            Even now, as I stare at her, still within her casket, I can hear them. It’s as though the air collected up her life as debt, her body eternally singing crackle-pop.

            I imagine her reaching out and wanting to run the coarse thin-skinned features of her index finger along my cheek. From cheek she’d move to chin, try to press up. But she’d been dispossessed of her strength for ages. I’d oblige her, tilt up my face, flash her a smile, and then find a corner to skulk.

            Seeing her there, it reminds me that I still don’t know somethings. Somethings that her preacher tried to sell in Sunday sermons. He’s only a huckster, only a chiropractor, a used car salesman, a bad joke.

            Grandma believed though. Too bad, I hear crackle-pop.

            I’m scared, scared because what if what I’m hearing is just the skulking hopes of a kid who was forced to believe, or else.

            As a man who loved men, what can you do for the specter begging you to smile, hellfire glistening in her eye.

            I don’t think it’s tragedy to crackle-pop around the corners of this room, to find a door ajar, and float to the inches of everything.

            My mother meets me at the casket, offers me a tissue. I’ve been crying, hard, so hard that snot bubbles have formed and were eviscerated against my face. I’m scared that I’m wrong. Suppose the crackle-pop is just for me, just for me for eternity.

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