FICTION: “Rose-Colored Sunglasses” by Heath Dollar

“Since we’re already digging him up, if there’s anything you would like besides the watch, please let me know,” Matthias Schaeffer said while adjusting his rose-colored sunglasses.

Matthias, who went by Matthias, had been stuffing cotton where the sun never shines since he was in high school, and even in a town as small as Warnell, he had seen about every variety of funeral that could be seen. He had seen a coffin lowered into a hole float like a johnboat after a night of torrential rains. He had seen gravediggers dig holes in the wrong places and people being buried in the wrong plots. He had once buried a woman with two stuffed Labradors. And he had buried a rodeo cowboy upright in his saddle on the back of an aluminum horse with whiskey bottle wings, which required the purchase of two plots, and the hole had to be dug to a depth of twelve feet to ensure that the cowboy was buried far enough beneath the bluebonnets to comply with state law. Matthias had even seen coffee grounds sprinkled instead of ashes to fool relatives into believing that a man was being buried next to his estranged wife rather than the lover who was hiding his remains in her closet until she could save enough money to buy them a couple of cozy little plots in the country.

Today’s exhumation was occurring less than an hour after the graveside service. It was the usual fare, a family squabbling over worldly possessions. This time it happened to be two brothers who had gotten so busy arguing over their father’s pickup truck that they had forgotten to remove a contested Rolex from the old man’s arm before he was put into the ground. But the older brother figured that since the younger brother was already driving their father’s custom-built pickup with ventilated seats, which he had actually had the nerve to take to the funeral, the older brother had might as well claim the wristwatch for himself.

“If there is anything else you would like, please let us know,” Matthias repeated. “The grave will already be open.”

“I’d like his fez,” Jimbo, the older brother, said. “He earned that fez. He drank a lot of beer in it, raised a lot of money for sick children in it. We’ll buy a glass case and stick it on the mantel.”

The gravedigger, who appeared to be so hungover that he could have been confused with one of his clients, scooped up dirt with his backhoe. When he got close to the coffin, he jumped in the hole and started digging with his shovel. After a while, the gravedigger hit metal, the coffin lid, and left a dent that resembled those found on cut-rate refrigerators over at the damaged freight liquidator depot. Fortunately, Matthias thought, the son didn’t seem troubled enough by the indentation to start asking about a discount.

The coffin was steely blue, the color chosen by the deceased himself, a color that would have been changed to burnished copper by the younger brother’s wife at the funeral home three days prior had Jimbo, who was now standing across the grave from the funeral director, not asked Matthias to see the receipt signed in his dead father’s sure, manly hand. His father’s will would be done, Jimbo told everyone in the funeral planning office. Now Jimbo was standing beside an open grave while shovel-loads of caliche gumbo flew out of the hole, a sight that always reminded Matthias of the ant lions he liked to play with when he was a happy little tot.

The gravedigger cranked open the top part of the lid, exposing Jimbo’s father, Abner, who, with his hands at his chest, was holding a snow globe of the Alamo, the first present his dearly departed wife had ever given him, and that, combined with the fez upon his head, made him resemble a coin-operated fortuneteller in an old-time arcade.

“I reckon I’d might as well take the snow globe, too, since we’re already down here,” Jimbo said.

Matthias imagined that Jimbo would have requested that his recently deceased father’s ostrich-quill boots be yanked from his feet if he thought they would fit him. In a rare act of concord, the brothers had asked that the old man be buried in his boots like they had seen happen in one of the more obscure spaghetti westerns. Getting the boots on stiff old Abner had taken some doing, but Matthias was a professional, and he could always find a way to do what needed to be done. Still, he was glad that those ostrich-skin boots were two sizes too small for Jimbo since he expected that it would be rather difficult to get them off Abner.

Cremations were so much simpler than burials, Matthias thought, though not nearly as profitable. But then, even cremations could be problematic on occasion. Matthias thought about the time the Waylon County Fire Department had to come save the funeral home by putting out a grease fire in the crematorium. An obese professional gamer, who had not left his home in eight years, had been placed in the incinerator, and the yellow flames that consumed him had grown beyond control. Upon arrival, the volunteer fire department quickly knew how to react, for they understood the underlying cause of the conflagration, for they had had to cut away the frame of the video gamer’s door just to get him out of the house. He had been, in the words of the fire captain, like a ship in a bottle.

But Matthias understood that evangelical types like Abner insisted on being buried whole, for it had something to do with the apocalypse, the last days, Gabriel’s trumpet, or something like that. Matthias imagined the rapture, and all of those coffins rising to the surface, the whole event looking like a rather macabre rush hour traffic jam on Central Expressway up in Dallas.

The gravedigger pulled the snow globe from the dead man’s hands, leaving the old fellow lying there with his hands extended as if he were about to bite into an invisible jalapeño bacon cheeseburger.

“So do you still want this hat?” the gravedigger asked after passing the snow globe up to Jimbo.

“I sure do,” Jimbo replied. “It brings back good memories.”

The gravedigger removed the hairpins that were keeping the fez in place and gently took the hat from the man’s head and reached it out of the grave handing it to Jimbo while standing on the bottom part of the lid. Then, to show respect for the deceased, the gravedigger tried to straighten the dead man’s toupee, but it would not stay on his head, so the gravedigger superglued the rug to the dearly departed’s forehead.

“I’ll try to get the watch,” the gravedigger said in a solemn contralto.

Matthias’ mustache twitched. The gravedigger was sharper than he looked. He had taken what was easy to get first and passed it up to appease Jimbo by giving him something to hold in his hands. Then the gravedigger unlatched the Rolex and tried to tug it from the wrist. When he saw that the watch was going nowhere, he reached into his utility vest and produced an economy size container of petroleum jelly. He covered the wrist and hand of the departed and tried to fold the man’s thumb, which made it appear as if Abner were requesting a table for four at the Wailin’ Biscuit Café, one of his familiar haunts and a place whose cuisine had likely shaved a year or two off the old man’s lifespan, but, Matthias thought, quality of life was certainly better than quantity, and he reckoned eating celery sticks and broccoli to add a couple of years to one’s tenancy on Earth was hardly worth the fuss. After an odd crack that caused Jimbo to somewhat cringe and Matthias, well-hidden under his mustache, to divert his eyes, the gravedigger reached his hand out of the grave clutching a jelly-covered wristwatch.

“Thank you,” Jimbo said, tucking the goopy watch into the inside pocket of his western blazer, his father’s velvet fez now resting upon his shaggy crown.

The gravedigger closed the top lid, hopped out of the hole, and started up his backhoe.

“I reckon that’s it,” Jimbo said, a mournful look on his face. “I reckon that’s how this story ends.”

None of this was over, Matthias thought. The younger brother would probably come around in a day or two asking if the funeral home could open up the grave and get him that watch, and by that time, the methane build-up could very well blow the lid off the casket, Matthias figured, for he had seen that sort of thing happen before, exploding casket syndrome as they called it in the industry.

The gravedigger pushed the last of the dirt onto the grave with the bucket of his backhoe, and then he and Matthias gathered the bouquets and wreaths and sprays decorated with golden ribbons emblazoned with the words “Papaw” and “Biscuit-Eating Champion,” arrangements that looked a bit like morbid homecoming mums for the rural dead, and the two funerary professionals returned all of these floral tributes to the fresh mound of earth before them.

Once the last wreath was back in place, Matthias cleaned his rose-colored glasses with a small cloth and offered a slow, consoling nod to Jimbo. Then Matthias climbed into the hearse and drove the narrow road between rows of headstones, a little road called “Tranquility Lane,” shaking his head and turning a honkytonk weeper up on the limousine’s radio as Jimbo’s younger brother, driving dearly departed Abner’s fancy custom pickup, passed by him at the gate heading toward his daddy’s grave.