by Linda Talbot
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Zizi's Last Wish
"It's not worth sending less than sixty," said Sam, contemplating the gold-plated urns in the window of the funeral parlour.
"I reckon they'll wait until they can fill the hold," replied Sydney.
"It isn't that big," pointed out Sam, stroking the sleek cylinder-shaped urn. "I think the whole idea's spooky anyway. Who'd want their ashes whirling round in space forever? Rather be in a cosy crem myself."
"As if it makes any difference once you're dead," said Sydney. The funeral director had joined the scheme developed with a space engineer to launch the ashes of those with unbounded aspirations, into the outer reaches of space.
"I don't hold with these gimmicks," added Sam.
"I hold with them if we get a share of the profits, although with what they're charging there's not many I should think who can afford it," said Sydney.
The insides of the empty urns glinted in the pale sun as though anticipating their auspicious mission.
"Are you sure it's what you want?" asked Rudy, watching the parchment skin of his mother acquire a translucent palor.
"Yes my boy. I know the answer's up there in the stars."
Zizi, his mother, had asked to be launched in one of the urns, to hurtle for ever through the constellations on which she has constructed a personal system of fate.
Rudy thinks of her years ago, seated with her cards, her blue black hair swept like the wing of a raven around her head, her strange eyes penetrating the gullible client, prepared to abide by any claims she might concoct.
Her hands, the dark painted nails filed to a focusing point, moved as though with mystical means over the surface of the cards, laid flat in fateful rows. She made a passable living from flattering and foretelling destinies. Clients were addicted to her revelations, coming to her from a combination of egotism and a macabre desire to be doomed.
She was simply an astute psychologist, able to swiftly sum up character, make calculated guesses and deduce expectations.
Listening to her, Rudy had, at times, been almost convinced, but he could foresee his own future; his dull post at the shipping office, providing a modest pension, the inheritance of his mother's weatherboard house and her tarot cards, but not her alacrity in discerning the lot of others.
Zizi glowed when she heard of the ashes being sent in urns to space. To cover the expense she would sell the mahogany commode that had come from France and been unaccountably acquired by a footloose forbear. Then perhaps she could plot in the afterlife the cosmic movements in which she had come to eventually believe; the Sun, source of strength, the Moon causing flux and the other planets - each controlling two constellations, from belligerent Mars and Saturn, to the optimism of Jupiter and equitable Venus.
"Open the curtains," she murmured, as Rudy brought in her soft boiled egg. She turned weak eyes to infinity.
The following night glowered with cloud and at ten to four in the morning, Zizi, her dim eyes fixed on the misty window, drew her last breath.
Her clients, looking lost on the departure of their prophet, drooped around her coffin and twitched with trepidation as it slid from sight. They eyed Rudy hopefully, as though searching him for some inherited inspiration. But he turned from them, dismayed and bereft, contemplating the pressing repairs he would have to carry out on the weatherboard house.
Gloomily, he watched the gold-plated urns assembled in the funeral parlour and packed tightly into pigeon holes to be transported to the launch pad.
The house brooded, as though mulling over Zizi's departure. Rudy was alarmed to see the chair where she sat after supper, suddenly indent as though her invisible body had just sat down.
"Only an after effect," he thought. The tarot cards lay motionless on the walnut table. Yet Rudy felt apprehensive, as though at any moment they might deal themselves in predictive rows.
Now and then he thought he heard Zizi's step on the stair but he was more perturbed by a compulsion to open the curtains and gaze at the stars, clear tonight, as though poised to receive Zizi's ashes. The rocket was hurtling through them now, rattling its sealed urns; a robotic lozenge slanting through eternity.
Rudy slept fitfully, waking with the impression that Zizi was standing in the room, silently watching and waiting. In the morning he trod wearily downstairs and picked up the tarot cards to place them in the dresser. As he moved over the carpet one dropped from the pack; a card of ill omen. Alarmed, he retrieved it and, trying to shrug off a sense of trepidation, replaced it in the centre of the pack and lay the cards hastily at the back of the dresser.
There the matter might have rested but misfortune moved like a malevolent companion with Rudy around the house. He slipped in the kitchen and sprained his ankle, which prevented him working for a week.
When he returned, he had his pocket picked on pay day and that evening, as he sat miserably by the gas fire, a slate slid from the roof shattering the glass of the conservatory.
Still his mother's footsteps echoed now and then around the house and he turned sharply as though expecting to see her. One night he did; framed in the doorway, her white hair glinting as though she had just dropped from the galaxies. Then she vanished. But her presence persisted. A table lifted a leg and tapped lightly as though memorising the morse code, a bathroom tap turned itself on and ran away Rudy's supply of hot water. Inexplicable bumps punctuated his restless nights and in the morning he found objects mysteriously misplaced.
"Have a seance. Call her back and ask her to give it a rest. After all she's supposed to be light years away," said Astrid, one of Zizi's former friends.
Still Rudy was reluctant to accept the principle of the paranormal but after three weeks was too exhausted to resist pressure from Astrid and her cohorts; Solly, Margo and Fleur.
A night for the seance was arranged and the five gathered round the walnut table in the dining room. Hands were laid flat, the lights dimmed. Silence settled.
Astrid, past her prime, dreary of dress and grey of face, was suitably spectral. She induced an air aimed to trap unwary spirits and fell into a trance.
"Is there anybody there?" she queried, leaning back, her eyes closed. She heard only the faint breathing of the other four.
Then the glass began to move and Rudy, still sceptical, tried to deduce who was moving it. Solly and Fleur seemed innocent, even apprehensive. Margo had closed her eyes.
Slowly the glass spelled out ZIZI and Rudy thought he caught a whiff of his mother's eau de cologne.
"Where are you?" asked Astrid.
"Haven't a clue," spelt out the glass, "Been hit for days by asteroids. Can't communicate with so much as a falling star. This was a mistake. I should have been buried in the garden," came the reply.
Rudy shivered. "This is ghoulish," he thought and was about to halt the seance when Astrid jerked out of her trance, looked baffled and sighed.
"She's gone," she stated, "Out of reach."
Rudy considered the space craft's speed and was not surprised. Silence fell. Rudy turned on the light. It had surely all been an illusion.
But left alone that night, the house was uncannily quiet. There were no footsteps on the stair, no clink of crockery in the dresser, no impression of Zizi motionless in the doorway.
Timber and plaster crashed to the floor and a cloud of dust obliterated the bedroom. Rudy was blown out of bed through the open door and down the stairs, as the roof rocked over his head. He reeled into the garden, to see his bed hooked, as though for a midnight airing, from the upstairs window. In the withered winter border beneath, lay a large piece of metal, gleaming eerily in the moonlight.
Huddled by a neighbour's fire the next morning, Rudy learned from the televised news that the space craft carrying the urns had inexplicably exploded. Analysis revealed the shrapnel in Rudy's garden to be part of it. The metal glinted defiantly in the faint February sun, its surface layered with a film of ash that quivered as though tentatively breathing in the crisp winter air.
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The expert allocated to examine the metal, ran his finger through the ash. It shivered as though in indignation. He said, "Must be from the explosion. We haven't located the urns yet but they're probably still safely sealed."
Rudy was not so sure.
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