Jet

by Russell Blake

  ~ ~ ~

  Maya stood by the side of the small plot as the tiny casket sank into the ground, the wind blowing huffs of salt air from the sea, carrying with it the smell of life. She hadn’t wanted anyone around – just her and her baby, her Hannah, gone forever before getting a chance to live.

  Tears rolled down her face, shoulders shaking as she sobbed her grief into the blue absolute of the heavens, repeating the same unanswered question over and over again. Why? Why Hannah? What kind of God would do this?

  The casket came to rest, and the two men who had lowered it into the grave removed the straps, pulling them free before the taller one looked at her.

  “I’m sorry for your loss. Would you like to put in the first soil?”

  Maya moved woodenly to the banked-up pile and grasped a fistful of moist loam, vision blurred, her breath rasping in harsh bursts as she struggled to retain her composure. She stood above her hopes and dreams, now dead as her soul, and paused to offer a blessing before relaxing her fingers and letting the cool earth fall from her hand.

  She stood at the edge of the gravesite, crying, alone, as grieving mothers had cried at their children’s graves since time immemorial, her pain so visceral and intense she wanted to join her daughter in death’s indifferent embrace. But that wasn’t to be. The unlucky suffered on in a hell of their own devising while innocents paid the ultimate price in homage to a frivolous universe.