The Funeral of Aunti Ummid

Allah’s liquid phlegm stuck to each blade of the grass. The Earth wept worms from its loneliness. The hoofprint of rain made the brown grass curled and trampled. Autumn showers had soaked the sod. Desolation’s poison, it seemed, had reached the very dirt and caused the brown sinews to contract in revulsion. There was no moon on this gelatinous night. The clouds stood like centurions, shields lowered, surrounding the heavens. On this night not even a soul could sneak past the armored protectors of the Almighty. Everything was still.

The only thing still moving were the corpuscles of blood in the veins of the three hooded figures who were sharing in the lifting of a heavy cardboard box. The box was approximately two feet in height and three feet in width. It was a stale brown color, soaked from the rain that had fallen earlier in the evening and was coated with dirt. Rapidly wrapped, loose-ended, duct tape surrounded the box on all corners and down the center. The three of them deposited the box in the center of the large empty lot, looked about for signs of life – peering into the trees that surrounded the clearing – and slumped to the ground.

In the stasis of the night the passage of time was hard to evaluate. A period of time later, the tallest one of the group, a young man named Adam Pandor – a thin young man of twenty one with a chin-strap beard, hook nose, pouty lips, heavy eyebrows and shaggy hair – stood up, drew a swiss-army knife from his pocket and began to cut open the grey tape. “Get up!” he ordered the other two who quickly rushed to his side and began pulling the top of the box wide apart as if it was a cervix.

Inside the womb of the box, however, there was no expectant baby ready to spring into the world. The three of them peered at a dead old woman, stuffed inside the box with her feet jutting out gruesomely towards the top. The smell of her death mingled with the decay of the cardboard, giving the amniotic inside of the box a horrific pungence. Her head – which had slid down into a corner of the box – was trapped under the weight of her torso. In the darkness her face was hard to see, especially since it was buried under the weight of her body and hidden from sight due to the macabre way in which the neck was bent. Her bony hands were in the claw-like mold in which the appendages of the ancient become stuck. Her left foot still had on a white open-toed slipper made from lamb-skin which she had so delighted in wearing all of her life.

“Venus, hold the box down,” Adam ordered the younger girl. She looked perhaps sixteen, with red-hair, red-eyes that seemed unused to death. She had full red lips that looked as Allah has molded her face from a rose petal. Her innocent ebony skin contrasted the rigorous resolve on Adam’s face; it also contrasted with the painful expression lodged as a complaint on the dead woman’s face. “Imam Murda…you and me will lift the body. Hurry up now!”
The diminutive Syrian Imam, spiritual head of mosque number 19 of Strawberry Mansion Philadelphia, threw back the hood of his sweat-shirt, brushed the dirt out of his long disheveled beard, drew a deep breath, adjusted the wrapped turban on his head, said a “naoozoobillah” from Iblis, the devil, and came closer to the box. He placed the shovel into the ground and looked up at Adam. “I cannot believe this is happening. This has to be a dream…” he said to himself.

Sudden tears found themselves emerging from Venus’ brown eyes. She said nothing, although the texture of her tears seemed to still be twinkling from her usual laughter. Imam Murda turned his head away from the body, buried his mouth in his sleeve and allowed his hands to aid Adam in the lifting of the body of Aunt Ummid. Muffled moans of displeasure escaped from the Imam’s mouth. Adam grunted and groaned under the weight of the dead woman. With a squishy thud the body fell to the ground, spread out spread-eagled on its back, except for the feet which had turned inside out and the head which was almost buried face down in the mud.

“You two take a break,” Adam motioned to the two and began digging a hole for the dead old woman. Venus walked away from the scene, daubing her face with her wrists. Imam Murda, meanwhile, squatted down next to the body and began rocking back and forth as he often did when reciting the Quran. Adam’s sharp inhaling of breath was the only sound aside from Murda’s muffled moans. Almost an hour later, when Adam’s consistent digging had produced a decent sized hole, he whistled Imam over to him, handed over the shovel to the small man’s trembling hands. “Put in a good half hour or so and we can be done with this…”

“I-I…can you move the body over just a bit?…I don’t want to be so close to the body…”

“Shut up and dig,” the young man said and walked away. Adam approached Venus who carried a small water bottle and handed it to him. He turned to Venus, “go and calm him down a little, will you? His whining is flipping me out…I’m gonna take a walk and chill out…”

“Definitely,” she said and smiled. Adam was more than a little shocked to see the ever-present smile on her face at this current time. Venus moved closer to the Imam whose digging seemed not at all to be expanding the hole that Adam had made.
“Murda!” Venus came close to the short man and put her hand on his shoulder. Imam jumped up, dropped the shovel and recited an entire verse of the Quran. “Imam…why don’t you relax? Good god, its only me…yeah?” she touched his face with her hands. “Just little ol’ Venus…don’t worry about a thing…” – Imam Murda’s trembling slowed a little. He reached out and held her hand. “You are alright, ok? Everything’s gonna be aite! You get me?” He nodded weakly, gulped and took a deep breath looking up into the sky.
“Just having a hard time believing she’s gone…This has to be a dream. I swear to Allah, in a few hours I’ll wake up and everything…yeah, it’ll just be over,” he said rapidly while bending to pick up the shovel.
“Come here,” she said to the small man, pulled him by the wrist, looked into his soft Arab eyes and smiled her rosy smile. She knew he despised being touched by any one. The only woman he had vowed to touch was the woman that would be his wife. Imam Murda was a stubborn and unadulterated performer of the requirements of his religion. Venus knew all this, but having grown up with the young man under the foster care of Aunti Ummid, she excelled at challenging Murda’s beliefs and Adam’s quiet virtues. She felt not even a twinge of guilt taking advantage of Murda at the current time. Her soft, rose-dipped arms encircled Murda’s shoulders and she drew the short man to her bosom, stroking him lovingly, carressing him enticingly. “Don’t you worry cutie,” she said. “Mama Venus is gonna take care of you…right my Imam? Aint I gonna take care of you?” – but instead of waiting for Imam’s response she pinched his buttocks, which caused him to jump up in fright, afflicted with the guilt of transgression.
“Oh Allah! What have I done?…” he backed away, picked the shovel back up and began digging hastily. “Get away from me, just get away…she-devil.” Venus swayed and walked away, looking back towards Adam who sat on a fallen tree, head-in-hands, contemplating the events of the prior day.
The preeminent thought in his head was why he felt no guilt or remorse from the actions of the day. Though Aunti Ummid had taken the three children under her foster care when they had been thrown out of their respective lives; given them the only sort of maternal love she could offer; and raised them into “well-adjusted young people” Adam had concluded her life with an embrace that suffocated her. Venus and the imam did not have knowledge of the crime. He had made the decision on his own and carried it out himself. Convincing the other two that burying her without telling anyone else was all for the best had not been too difficult. His twenty years of life before yesterday had been full of so much virtue and heartache that one would have never dared object to anything he asked or demanded. Even Aunti Ummid had never looked disapprovingly in his direction. She had yelled at Venus often, accusing her of trying to do too much too soon; she had even yelled at Murda who was, despite all the yelling, her absolute favorite. She had never yelled at Adam. He had concluded long ago that her lack of yelling towards him was indication that she did not care for him; and if she did not care for him, he had no need for her. The past few years of his life had felt like a jail which he continued to try to escape. But his fidelity to his foster brother and sister prevented him from ever getting away and staking out a life of his own. He often prayed for Aunti Ummid to die so that the three of them could be free from the weight of her insidious words. She had nothing good to offer us except the empty promise that one day things would improve. And it was the falseness of that promise that angered Adam; it angered him so much that he felt compelled to murder her. Only without her constant rejoinders to a better future was it possible for Adam and the others to actually acquire peace with today. Those whose eyes are glued too tightly to the arrival of the future easily miss the benefactions of the present. If Aunti Ummid was guilty of anything, it was the way she led one to believe that one’s miseries would subside if one ‘just made it to tomorrow.’ What about today Aunti? Are we supposed to stay miserable today? In his misery he had become afflicted with diseases; with unending mono; with colds and flus; with a nausea that seemed to rest just at the tip of his bowels; his stomach was always infected; and his tongue could never taste food. The longer he remained in Aunti Ummid’s presence, the stronger the cadaverous stench of her existence seemed to drown him – and allnthis was while she was alive!

When Venus the red approached him she saw the look of apprehension on his face. Always willing to dole out love from the reservoirs of her compassion she came closer to him and put her arm around him. She asked him if he was alright. He nodded affirmatively. “If you want to cry havoc, If you want to let loose the dogs of war, just know that I understand what you are feeling. I will take care of you.” As the words came from her mouth, Adam pushed her away, looked at her with trembling lip and walked away angry.
He didn’t want to be taken care of! He wanted to be afflicted, to suffer from everything that he was meant to suffer from. He contemplated killing Venus for the same reason he had killed Aunti Ummid – they both made promises of betterment instead of allowing a man to come to terms with his travails. Whereas Aunti Ummid guaranteed betterment in tomorrow; Venus guaranteed peace in herself -- And in believing that one couldn’t have peace without Venus, one would, like a coward, be led to believe that one couldn’t live without Venus. Why had he murdered the woman that controlled them if the next step would mean to have to bow to someone else? These thoughts revolved around in the orbits of his mind, but had to be pushed aside. Murda was calling, the hole was adequately dug. Adam vowed to deal with Venus later. And indeed he would: because there was no chance that his freedom to tackle (and become tackled by) everything in this world would ever come to be limited by anyone ever again.

The three of them stared at each other in the bleak night, each of them wearing the emotions on their faces instead of their hearts. Adam was a stoic, tight-lipped paragon of silence; he resembled a convict who has managed to escape from prison; there was an urgent desperation in his eyes. He wanted to throw the hag in the hole and run. Imam Murda, a year younger, but light-years ahead in love for Aunti Ummid looked like a sick dog, with drooping eyes; he even seemed to be limping from the cold wind that tore at his weak knees. Venus was ecstatic; her energy resembled the sun; little drops of electron happiness jumped off her body and into the atmosphere around her, threatening to subsume just about everything around her.

The body was thrown into the dirt. The brown muscles of the earth, torn by the shovels, were heaped atop the decayed body of the old woman. That’s that, said Venus, dusted her hands and began walking towards the the young men. She stood between the two of them, her arms reaching out to either side. She was the link that joined Murda and Adam. A sort of standing crucifix, thought Adam. He shrugged her arm off and began to walk away. Venus rushed to catch up with him. Murda stayed behind for a prayer.
A sudden scream pierced the stillness. Adam rushed back to the grave, Venus trailing after him. Imam Murda stood rooted to the ground, his weak knees bobbling. The little rumbling moan in his throat mimicked the deep, grating groan of the ground. Aunti Ummid’s body had been rejected, thrown-back, returned to sender. The Earth had spat her out. She lay bare, coated in shiny dirt and weeds, back on top of the ground. Imam Murda recited the ninety-names of Allah. Adam was entirely transfixed upon the scene. He didn’t believe in the super-natural; he looked to Imam Murda for an explanation -- who was reciting the Verse of the Throne under his breath, clasping his hands. Venus had an apprehensive expression on her face.
“The Prophet Muhammad said,” Imam Murda began as he did when narrating a hadith of the Prophet, “that those who have not been forgiven by those that they have been unjust towards are refused even by their grave.”
“Look, I don’t really give a …” Adam began. As he spoke he noticed the bursting of the dawn; the red-flecked bombs of the morning shot across the sky. “We can’t stay here anymore. Someone will see.” He ordered the three of them to pick up the body, and deposit it back into the cardboard box. They placed the box in the trunk of the car and drove home.

At home, all three of them did not move from the spot to which they became glued in the morning. By the time evening descended its curtain upon the world no words had been exchanged. Adam Pandor had vowed to return to the spot of the grave this night and be done with the hag once and for all.
The process from the previous night was repeated. Interrupted this night by Murda’s increasing hesitation towards burying her. First, he refused to dig; second, he sat eerily close to the body of Aunti Ummid and ran his hands lovingly over her arms and her face. “She can’t be dead,” he explained. “The ground would not have refused her if she was really dead.”
“She’s not breathing, you moron,” Adam growled. His foot fell upon the shovel and the steel bit into the ground, causing trails of the dirt’s blood to shoot out. “She’s dead, deal with it!”
Venus sat on the fallen tree. She came to sit beside Murda and looked at him with compassion. “Murda, my love…she’s gone. She’s gone. Don’t you get it? She’s gone?”
“She can’t be gone…” Murda said. “She was all we ever had. Adam, you bastard, you cold-hearted bastard…how can you be so stoic about this…”
“Shhh,” Venus said and put her finger on Murda’s lips. “Just quiet up. Look, we can’t do anything about the fact she’s gone. If you are worried about tomorrow, don’t! I told you, I’ll be there for you, for all time. I’ll love you like a mother, more than she…”
“Will both you just shut up?” Adam barked. “Murda, stop crying like a child…deal! Venus, just leave him alone. Let him grieve. Don’t try to be what you aren’t. I won’t allow it. I rather bury him with the old hag than let him be your little toy.”

The grave, again fully opened, was the maw into which Aunti Ummid was hurled. Allah was the ventriloquist of the breeze which seemed to be resounding cryptic messages by rushing against the trees. On this dark night, Adam pulled Venus alongside – away from Murda. The imam knelt next to the grave yet again, his head in his hands. As Venus opened the door to the beat up Buick, she and Adam once again heard the piercing scream of the small dwarfish man and rushed back to his side.

Aunti Ummid once again sat beside him; her hands were in his lap. He rocked back and forth, muttering inaudible insanities, unwilling to let Adam wrench the old woman away from him. Venus came up behind him and wrapped her arms underneath his shoulders and began to lovingly pry him away. Adam held onto the cold dead skin of the woman and wrenched her away.
“She’s still alive!” Murda said. “She keeps coming back because the earth can see what we can’t! She’s still alive! Don’t let her die!” – Adam came closer to Murda, stared at his face and then landed a resounding backhand slap.
“Reason! Employ it!” Adam said.

Murda straightened up. Defiance was in his eyes. He looked at his assailant who had so far been his older brother. He came up close to Adam’s chest and pounded his fist into the solar plexus. “I hate youyou! And I swear to Allah, you watch…see if I let you try and bury her again. It’s not her time. She’s meant to stay here with us…she cannot yet go. She is not yet dead!”
Adam clenched and unclenched his fists. “What do you propose? Shall we keep her at home? Let her sit on the couch?”
“She’s not dead,” Murda said. “She can’t be. And even if she’s dead we can’t bury her. The Prophet Muhammad would want that her sins be forgiven! Look, don’t you get it? The soul won’t rest in peace unless the requirements are met!”
“Her sins cannot be forgiven!” Adam growled and turned away. “Do something for this necrophiliac. It was bad enough we had to pay homage to her year after year when she did nothing for us. Now she’s dead, she’s gone, she’s khattam-shud and we are still doing her whims, living by her standards! Hell, she’s more alive now than she was before she died.”
As the argument dispersed and the cold seeped into their bones, dawn exploded yet again; once again Aunti Ummid was thrown back into the cardboard box. This time, however, the imam insisted that the top of the box not be closed “to give her proper respect.” The three of them returned home, Adam vowed to return once again to bury her. “And if this one pulls her out again, I swear I’ll have to do something drastic!”
“But I have not pulled her out you disbeliever! I only perceive the signs that Allah provides us with! Is it my fault the earth refuses to devour her?”
Adam’s day was spent in quiet contemplation; the make-up of his mind was afflicted with more clarity than the day after his murder of Aunti Ummid. He had not perceived having so much difficulty in disposing of her. He had not thought that Murda would be such a nuisance or that Venus would cause his ire to grow limitless. It was a strange situation. He could not be rid of the cause of his misery; the one that kept him from moving onwards in life. Aunti Ummid’s tyranny had been the reason Adam still woke up day after day in this horrendous city. She had prevented him from moving all of them to some place cleaner, or healthier. And when Adam had explained that only sickness reigned in Philadelphia, she had countered him with her “promises of how things just improve! They get better, just wait and see.”
Murda, meanwhile, had gone mad. Adam’s foster-brother could not live without the carcass; he could not conceive life without the crutch that was Aunti Ummid. Venus, meanwhile, was probably pleased in seeing the old hag go. But, instead of staking out her own life, she was ready to take Ummid’s place at the house – to subsume him in her embrace. In short, to become another Aunti Ummid who would, undoubtedly, sweep some other unsuspecting souls into her own home and grow them into perfect, obedient little children. No was the resounding declaration in Adam’s mind for the entire day. He smoldered in silence.
The madness of the enterprise had reached such a fevered pitch that Murda sat with the dead woman in his lap. His lips grazed her dead cheeks, his hands ran over her body lovingly. “I love you so much Auntie…I’ll never let you go.”
Venus sat in the passenger seat, sneering at the scene behind her, trying desperately to talk Murda out of his insanity. “Come on sweets, don’t you think that’s a little excessive.” In short, she seemed to be burning in her jealousy. A dead-woman kept her from her throne. The ride to the empty lot was filled with shame for her. Tonight she would make certain that this entire operation came to a close.

Adam, meanwhile, drove with one hand and with the other fingered the 6” inch blade in his jacket. His mind had probed all the scientific and geological reasons for which the body was having a hard time staying down – if what Murda was saying was correct. He concluded that if it was true that Murda was not pulling her body out of the grave, then the only likely explanation had to be that the weight of the old woman’s body was not enough to push the dirt down. And for some reason the dirt was contracting from the cold that her body emanated and simply pushing her out. For this purpose he had brought, without telling Murda or Venus, a tin round box into which he intended on placing Aunti Ummid.

He instructed Venus to guide the maddened imam to the center of the lot. She coaxed him along with little nudges and warm words of fake compassion. Adam, meanwhile, rolled the box out of the trunk and brought it to the site of the grave. He reached over and tried to pry the old woman away from Murda who was now carrying her like a baby.
“No! What are you doing? She’s mine!” Murda said.
“Let her go you idiot!” Adam cried and pulled the already broken legs away. The sound of breaking cartilage was very audible. Venus jumped into the fray; she placed her hands on Murda’s face and began carressing him to be quiet as he had started to blubber and cry.

“Just let her go jaan…come on…just let her go, come to me…” – But the imam’s grip was like a vise upon the dead body of Aunti Ummid. Adam, longing to be free from all of the restrictions that came with obedience to this old hag, finally gave into the premeditated ratiocination.

He drew the blade from his jacket and with one casual stroke sliced a clean line onto Murda’s neck. The imam, so in love with Aunti Ummid, didn’t as much as move to clutch his own throat. Instead, the blood leaked out of him in hot eruptions, dribbling down upon the cold body of Aunti Ummid. Venus didn’t scream. Her lips remained pressed close together, red like the blood that mingled with the earth. Adam stood over the two dead bodies, panting like an overworked horse, his veins bulging, a strange masculine pungence emanating from his skin. Venus hadn’t moved from her spot; she stood rooted to the floor. Finally she did move, not closer to the dead body. Instead, she came to Adam. “Are you alright?” she asked. She put her hand on his shoulder for support. “It’s ok…don’t worry…”

Just as suddenly as before, Adam turned upon her in promordial rage. His knife, this time, plunged into her over and over; as one murders someone who has betrayed. Her death was slow, deliberate. He wanted her to feel the pain she would’ve made him feel if she had succeeded in making herself the repository of all his emotions. He needed independence from that as surely as he had needed freedom from the promises of Aunti Ummid.

The young man placed all three of them inside the tin-box; he stuffed the three of them with souls-that-were-alike; dug an oblong hole for the next hour, whistling a soft tune to himself. His breath had returned to normal. His face was once again stoic and silent. The sweat of his body smelled sweet to him on this damp night. He felt free, limitless, uncontrolled, like a spirited horse ready to break out from the starting gate. The grip of his hands was certain, his mouth didn’t open to wheeze; the sicknesses that afflicted him when in Aunti Ummid’s presence seemed to have ran off him like flowing blood. His bowels stopped churning, his mouth didn’t taste poisonous. He reached out to pluck a clover from the ground and put it in his mouth. When he smoothed the dirt over the box, dawn exploded in its myriad colors; the strength of the gold hued embers of the morning was so tremendous that it blew away the reticent grey clouds of the past few weeks. The sky was as calm as his eyes.

Adam Pandor spat the green clover upon the spot where he buried the box.