The playgroup met on Tuesday mornings in the basement of the funeral home, a dozen small children sitting cross-legged on a rug patterned with clouds while their parents finished paperwork upstairs or caught a rare hour of sleep in the break room. It had started as a joke, a way to keep the kids occupied between viewings, but the joke had calcified into tradition the way jokes do in families that spend too much time around the same strange work, and now there was an actual song, passed down and refined over several years, sung to the tune everyone already knew from somewhere else.
The wheels on the hearse go round and round, the children sang, hands circling in front of them the way they’d been taught, round and round, all through the town. The next verse involved the doors going open and shut, palms clapping together on shut with real enthusiasm. There was a verse about the flowers going droop, droop, droop, which always got a laugh because of how seriously the smallest kids took the wilting motion, folding themselves slowly toward the rug like something deflating.
The parents upstairs had mixed feelings about it, mostly resolved into a shrug, because you couldn’t really raise children in this trade and expect them to flinch at the shape of the family business, and better they learn early to find it ordinary than grow up flinching at every hearse that passed on the street. The song had a final verse nobody had officially added but that had shown up anyway, sung a little quieter than the rest: the people in the ground go still, still, still, all through the town. The children sang it the same way they sang everything, with the same open, unbothered faces, hands folding into their laps at still, and the parents who overheard it from the stairwell never quite decided whether that verse was the darkest part of the tradition or the most honest one.
©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys
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