Re: Acta est fabula, plaudite!
He understood, both from the crows piled into the pews to croak along to hymns they'd been singing for years at deaths marked just like this one, and from the black she wore from heel to head that small towns didn't much like color. Color was suspicious and black and white were the easiest of rules, but it was the girl who glittered in the wake of the procession and who demanded yellow, like color was a right.
She wound it around her wrist, yellow sunshine twined around fish-belly white, funerary lilies and ice and it was contrast in a town that preferred grey all day long. Fear danced a tarantella in his belly and bit his throat. The teeth, they looked as real as the box up in front and real as the pews and the people.
Run, she said, as if all the processing had been a game, and the apple thief saw black and white that ran together like rain. Dead was supposed to stay in its box, and the tears would run like salt until the earth covered over the wood. But he believed the teeth.
His feet tangled, and he stumbled sideways in a scatter of hymnal and prayer-book, and a bony man with a tuft of white hair turned and shushed him like he was a nuisance instead of a meal. Run, she said. And he was hands and knees and he left the hymnal and the prayer-book with their pages fluttering in time to the singing, and he ran. Just as she said.