![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Dec. 6th, 2020
Short Story: "The Eulogist"
Dec. 6th, 2020 11:55 am(Originally written June 21, 2018)
When Charlotte Bixby was twenty-three years old, her grandfather passed away. Finding no solace in the company of her family and friends, she took pen to paper and composed a touching eulogy to the family patriarch.
She again dipped into the inkwell for her mother and her father, who passed only months apart, one to illness, the other to an unfortunate accident. And both times, as had happened after her grandfather’s funeral, townspeople would approach her and tell her how moved they were by her eulogy, what a talent she had in that mind of hers, and how proud the town was to count someone like her among their own. They told her many pleasant things, but never did a note of sympathy or a simple condolence pass their lips, never did a pair of arms collect her in a tender embrace.
But they sought her out, time and again, to lay their loved ones to rest with beautiful words, no matter how true those words were. And while she genuinely wept for children gone too soon, and spoke with admiration for devout and hardworking men and women, she also spoke well of Sadie Rockford’s cheating husband—who had died under most unusual circumstances—and helped Sadie to bury a saint.
When death came for her, hovering in the corners of her room, the ladies of the town requested she eulogize herself. "No one knows you better,“ they said. They were so insistent that Charlotte, drawing ragged breaths, grasped a pen in her quaking hands and scrawled out a short note. She folded the paper and sealed it with a dab of wax, instructing those present not to open it, but to deliver it to Reverend Adler, so that he may read it at her funeral.
( Continued below the cut )
When Charlotte Bixby was twenty-three years old, her grandfather passed away. Finding no solace in the company of her family and friends, she took pen to paper and composed a touching eulogy to the family patriarch.
She again dipped into the inkwell for her mother and her father, who passed only months apart, one to illness, the other to an unfortunate accident. And both times, as had happened after her grandfather’s funeral, townspeople would approach her and tell her how moved they were by her eulogy, what a talent she had in that mind of hers, and how proud the town was to count someone like her among their own. They told her many pleasant things, but never did a note of sympathy or a simple condolence pass their lips, never did a pair of arms collect her in a tender embrace.
But they sought her out, time and again, to lay their loved ones to rest with beautiful words, no matter how true those words were. And while she genuinely wept for children gone too soon, and spoke with admiration for devout and hardworking men and women, she also spoke well of Sadie Rockford’s cheating husband—who had died under most unusual circumstances—and helped Sadie to bury a saint.
When death came for her, hovering in the corners of her room, the ladies of the town requested she eulogize herself. "No one knows you better,“ they said. They were so insistent that Charlotte, drawing ragged breaths, grasped a pen in her quaking hands and scrawled out a short note. She folded the paper and sealed it with a dab of wax, instructing those present not to open it, but to deliver it to Reverend Adler, so that he may read it at her funeral.
( Continued below the cut )