You can hear a sound like distant, splattering hoof-beats as your eyes close to the dark.
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You can see yourself, maybe, wearing black Sunday-school shoes, the grass clinging to them wetly. Maybe you can imagine the tenor voice of the minister, his leather-bound book, and the hands that fold and unfold around that book as he speaks. Perhaps the casket is dark, luxuriously polished cedar, or perhaps you don’t look. Your grandmother is next to you, impossibly, clutching your small fingers, but it’s hard to tell if she’s crying through the saltwater in your own eyes. Are you going to remember this?
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On the other side of the night, your ears awake first, tremulously listening in a forest of sound. Outside, the rain falls, the skies cry.
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Can you remember, when you were little, how he used to play Chinese checkers with you? He was always red and you were always blue, except for every other time, when you begged to be red. And how you almost, almost, almost were gonna win, but then he skipped one marble halfway across the board and spoiled all your next moves? (And how one day, years later, his slightly shaking fingers knocked into some of the coloured orbs and sent them ricocheting across the board with sharp, metallic clamor.) And of course you must remember how, when your parents took you to visit at Christmas, Grandma always hated that singing, dancing toy Santa that he always got such a kick out of, and how she would unplug it, with a roll of her eyes, once he had turned his hearing aids down.
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Have you ever tried standing out in the rain without a raincoat, without boots, without a hat, just you—your bare toes, bare arms, bare face—and the rain? At first, it’s dreadfully cold and startling. Shivering drops hit your shoulder blades and roll down your spine, and you feel a peculiar sensation, almost as if your skin is trying to crawl inside itself, into the sheltered sub-epidermic warmth. Sooner or later you shiver once, your shoulders spasmodically shaking, as your feet turn warmly numb. You can only feel the cushioned fall of raindrops on your head, now, and all but the sound of silent crying is lost in the downpour. You close your eyes for a moment, and live inside the red dark.
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I do remember staring out the window, nine stories above the puddles, waiting for the nurses to leave. When I saw him he wore a brown hospital shirt that merely floated around his thin frame, his arms oddly protruding from the wide sleeves. In the visiting room he sat against the windowed wall with shades drawn as my father talked with him. His long, bony fingers curled around nothing; I remember the faded, translucent skin that stretched smooth over his knuckles, his thin, almost delicate hands draped over the arm of the chair, blue-green blood slowly draining through the pronounced veins and back to the heart.
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Soon the rain will end.

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