June, Reimagined
Rebekah Crane
ONE
June Merriweather sat in Concourse B at Cincinnati International Airport with a backpack at her feet and an urn in her hands. Her foot tapped rhythmically on the metal chair, while her hands played an accompanying pattern on the urn.
June’s flight was due to board in fifteen minutes. Outwardly, she appeared only slightly tense, while, internally, she felt like a criminal running from the police. In fact, June was trying to outrun something much more cunning and well ordered than law enforcement.
Her life.
Any passerby would be surprised to know that June was holding a cremated body. To an onlooker, it appeared she was cradling an obnoxious football trophy. And while it was most definitely odd for a traveler to be holding a sports trophy, it was exponentially odder because her brother was inside. Some might call it depressing, even morbid or gross or horrifying. Some might go so far as to say June had a problem.
Some would be right.
“I know what you’re thinking.” As if carrying a football-shaped urn wasn’t odd enough, June now began to talk to herself. Or maybe she was talking more to her dead brother. Neither boded well for her sanity, but after a month of cloudiness, June was finally thinking clearly.
“It’s better this way. You’ll see.” Cigarette smoke clung to her hair from last night’s party. Maybe she should have showered before leaving for the airport at four in the morning, but all she had considered was not waking her parents. Luckily, they had attended the Hartfields’ notorious New Year’s Eve bash, known for copious amounts of champagne and decadent food. The first-ever invitation for the Merriweathers had come just weeks ago, and while June’s father, Phil, had immediately declined the offer, June’s mother, Nancy, had felt it would be insulting not to attend.
“I think we have a pretty good excuse not to go,” Phil had said. “Just say thank you, but we’re staying in that night.”
“Maybe it will be good for us,” Nancy had offered. She showed Phil the invitation. “It says here it’s catered, with live music.”
“I don’t want to eat oysters Rockefeller and talk business with the likes of Bob Hartfield when I could spend the evening in my own home.”
“I bet it’s a jazz band. You love jazz.”
“Unless they’re resurrecting Miles Davis, I don’t care what band it is. The only reason we’re invited is Josh.”
“That might be true, but it’s a nice gesture, and I don’t want to upset them by declining. It’s one night, honey.”
“You’re telling me we have to worry about the Hartfields’ feelings when it’s our son who’s dead? Who’s being cared for in this equation? The last thing I want to do is attend a party right now.”
Nancy burst into tears, a volcano of grief. For the past month, this had been her reality—one instant she was calm and collected in the meat section of the grocery store, and the next she was cradling ground chuck wrapped in plastic and Styrofoam like a precious baby, her face smeared with makeup, mascara-blackened bags under her already tired and saggy eyes, as she thought of how Josh loved peanut butter and bacon on his burgers, whereas most people loved American cheese and pickles. How he was always on the brink of being truly revolutionary.
And now he was dust.
Nancy didn’t cry in drops. She cried in streams. “Well, the last thing I want to be is a grieving mother of a dead son, but here I am,” Nancy had countered to Phil. “We’re going to the Hartfields’ New Year’s Eve party, and that’s the end of it.”
June now checked the time in the airport. It was eight thirty. Her parents were most likely awake, with three Advil tablets and two cups of coffee in their systems to counter their hangovers. June imagined her mom at the kitchen counter, hugging her mug to her chest, and her dad seated at the breakfast nook, cradling his head in his hands, the red Christmas poinsettia in front of him too large for the small table, in the center of which sat the letter June had left them.
She pushed the thought from her mind. She couldn’t concern herself with her parents. Now all that mattered was getting on the plane.
“Be happy I brought you with me,” she said to the obnoxious-looking urn. “You could be sitting on the mantel right now.”
The silence that followed seemed to indicate that a girl with an urn on her lap, holding a one-way ticket out of Cincinnati and talking to a dead person, was indeed a little bonkers.
But June had her reasons.
June felt the sudden urge to weep large, ugly tears and hugged the football to her chest until the tightness clawing at her throat subsided.
The perky gate attendant, smothered with foundation and red lipstick and dressed in starched blue slacks and a white button-down with a crisscrossed red necktie, announced that flight 823 was almost ready to board. June stood, feeling the sharp contrast between the attendant and herself: worn-out flared jeans with growing holes at the back pockets, Phi Gamma Delta winter formal T-shirt stained with late-night pizza, newly procured pointed black boots bought just a few days ago with her Christmas money, and an oversize green-and-blue windbreaker grabbed from the front closet as June rushed out the door to catch her cab. Fashion and cleanliness had not been on her mind, but with no idea when her next shower and change of clothes would be, June realized that maybe she should have given her outfit at least a passing glance.