The teen stood at the back of the church watching as old women, old men, and their various descendants and blood relatives began to filter out of the funeral home. Arthur sniffled, wiping his face with a tissue he'd had on hand, one of perhaps twenty he'd gone through. To keep himself occupied, he'd counted them, wondering where all the tears were coming from. By now, he thought he'd have run out.
His mother was shaking hands, doing her best to look regal despite the tragedy. He wondered if he would be this composed when his mother would eventually die, and the thought sent him into another bout of tears. He looked over at the coffin that sat in the middle of the stage, the foppery of funeral home decorations seeming to cast it in an odd sort of sanitized mourning. He blew his nose and stuffed the tissue in his suit pocket, ruffling sandy blond hair.
He looked around again, wondering how much longer the line would be, To his surprise, someone - a lady he didn't recognize - wearing an elegant, but massive, red hat had sat in the back row right in front of him without him knowing.
"Your grandmother was a lady of so much light. She would have wanted you to have that light. Follow me," the woman said, her voice mellifluous and sweet as honey.
Arthur frowned at her and said, "Beg your pardon?"
The lady didn't answer, merely standing up and walking away from him towards another exit. Arthur glanced back at his mother before turning forward and doing as the woman stated. Around the corner he went, and out the door, and to his amazement he saw the woman walking off -- into the woods behind the home. He jogged to keep up, thoroughly confused by now.
The further into the woods he walked, the more the woman transformed. Her skin began to transform and lengthen into feathers around her body, the bright red of her hat becoming a coiffed sweep of crimson feathers as well. Her feet, which were bare, changed as well into a pair of scaled feet, becoming digitigrade as they walked.
"Wh-what--"
She looked back at him and said, "Only a little farther. You are safe here. I give my word."
Arthur glanced behind him. The forest line was in running distance. Against his better judgment, he turned forward and followed the cardinal-woman behind a huge, fallen tree, the roots spreading out into a canopy on its own. There, he was astounded to find even more of her kind, as well as several others - from a man with deer antlers and mottled fur, to a moss creature that endlessly rolled around in the state of a human body, to titmice in woman form, chirping softly.
"This is Arthur Drake. A secondhand son of heavenward Agatha," the cardinal said. She turned to him and said, blinking, "Your second-up mother - mother of your mother - was a friend to what cannot be seen or touched. And she told us you were pained."
Arthur thought back to his grandmother's last days, pushed out onto the patio to talk to her birds. He had often sat and wished that she remembered who he was. Now he wondered if she had known - someway.
"We took some of her - we don't know what you say it is - a piece of the thing on the very inside, a little bit of it, and we made it for you to keep."
Arthur felt momentary disgust, wondering what that could mean, until she pulled out what he could only describe as a flower made of light. It was glass, that much he could tell, but it had a sort of luminescence of its own. It was curled in the shape of a Cala lily - Granny Aggie's favorite flower, the one she defended the most from chipmunks and husbands and grandsons with zeal. He took it gingerly, surprised at how light it seemed, and he looked up at the cardinal woman and the other strange creatures that surrounded her.
"This will be her, for you. Always," the cardinal-woman said with a soft chirrup. "Plant it and watch it become. Or keep it and let her feed you. Your choice. She would love it either way."
Arthur held the flower tight to his chest and pressed his lips firmly together.
"Thank you," he said, a smile finally coming to his face. "Thank you."
