They Dig Up Oliver Cromwell’s Body to Publicly Hang It, 1661

Callie Collins
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Jeter’s World History report has taken a turn. Marty is gone again, so it’s my job to sit in the kitchen and make dinner and talk to Jeter about England. I have the brief but insistent feeling that I’m failing miserably. “Jeter” I say, “what?” And he says, “Imagine just being dead for like three years, and then they fucking dig you up and hang you for treason.” “Jeter,” I say, and he says, “What?”
Jeter’s playing second base on varsity this year even though he’s just a freshman, so he doesn’t have much time for World History, but I get the sense that this fact has beaten up his brain a little.
Treason, I think. A little thing. Rectifiable. And anyway, it was a damn long time ago. Jeter smiles a lot, which makes me smile a lot.
I’m in the stands for the game on Friday afternoon, and he’s crushing it. Some girl named Liz has his batting song cued up on a boom box. It’s Guns N’ Roses. I howl from the base of my chest.
Earlier I read about Oliver Cromwell. He was buried with great ceremony. He was washed and laid out, and then embalmed. The room was curtained in black velvet, as was the burial bed, and beneath his head gold tissue. But the body swelled. The room was quiet. I imagine a gaggle of Jeters, a chorus of Jeters—two Jeters at the head, two in the middle, two at the feet—and all the Jeters lifting Oliver Cromwell’s lead coffin and laying him in the hole. I imagine their upturned mouths. I imagine a job well done. Jeter’s little hands choke up on the aluminum. He knocks one to left center. He bursts out of the box. He runs hard.

Callie Collins is the co-director of A Strange Object and the fiction editor of Covered with Fur. Her stories and essays have appeared in places like The Rumpus, The Toast, The Collagist, PANK, and NANO Fiction. She lives in Austin, TX, where she also cohosts Five Things, a bi-monthly reading series.