Community

In my community there were two theories on death. Both were based on Gompertz. Neither proved adequate in assuaging the large-scale existential concerns that were addressed in our monthly town hall meetings.
My family fell squarely in the camp that was not concerned with choosing one side or another. Ours was not a popular position.
My father had been a logician; we found his body in the study. He had heaped the bulk of his unpublished papers, stood atop the stack, then kicked away at its height. As my mother went for a chair to cut him down, his body swung like a pendulum tracing soft eights in the air over the paper-scattered floor.
We lived in a small cottage on the outskirts of town, on a road that was nameless except we called it Country Road. On days that it stormed we huddled in the portico of an old pizza cafe. The owner wanted it to be an Italian steakhouse, but ours was not that kind of community.
It would thrive, he said. It would really turn this place around.
On the day of my father’s funeral, we took turns tilling the field. Each of us waved from the far end of the dirt plot. When my brother was at a distance, his hand raised and I could feel the earth rotate faster below my feet and he disappeared beneath the strangely curved horizon.
We found his bones the next morning, thin inside the clothes of an old scarecrow, its ivory arms wide and Christlike. Eyes like excavated earth, all hollow and rut.
Well, my mother said, looking skyward. I suppose we should check the forecast.