Flushing Human Remains Down The Shitter: Fiction About Henrik

 

My father’s funeral was fun.

We ate and drank ourselves to near death and laughed our guts out at how he died.

Then Ra’Nelle flushed his ashes down the church toilet.

The ashes went everywhere, and stopped up the toilet, and it was on the next morning’s news and in the paper, and people were leaving disgusted comments on the internet about it and about our disgusting family.

Which was disgusting. Because… well, if they’d only known our disgusting father.

After we abandoned the disgusting church toilet after trying to plunge it, the disgusted minister walked in on us as we were sweeping up the rest of the cremains off the floor with the broom that’s been everywhere, and dumping them unceremoniously into the trash.

He just about had a shit. I bet it was him that called the press himself.

Meanwhile, we were back in the car laughing our vocal cords off. I drove; I was the only sober one of us.

We went back to the house and rummaged through his stuff until we found everything good, then we sold everything else on the front lawn and Derek and his wife and kids moved their stuff into his house. Bye-bye apartment; bye-bye paying someone else’s mortgage.

I moved into the apartment in the basement. The room over the garage was taken by Edrick.

I returned home to get the rest of my stuff and found my trees toilet-papered, my windows egged and my door spray-painted with, for some reason, a swastika. I sighed, grabbed my stuff, and left the mess to the landlord of the rental house.

I got tired of my family soon after I moved in. Some communal house this was turning out to be. I had to do the same chores, and most of the chores, every day because nobody was stepping up to do anything.

I got depressed, from both my past and my present, and had to go on antidepressants.

Then I went on a mental health Facebook group to vent.

And there, right in that Facebook group, where I vented about my life, I got invited to a real commune.