A Funeral After Her Period – Mark Parsons

September 21, 2025

She conducts a funeral
after every period.
A brass band plays a dirge,
“Shut Up and Eat Your Cricket Bar.”
Everyone is there: her mother and her mother’s
biker boyfriend, and her brother, baker
of light and fluffy pastel things. On the way home
they stop off at a grocery store
and roam the aisles of packaged foods.
“Who’d have thought gluten is used in so many
different things?” her born-again sister
muses, looking at a squeeze bottle of mustard.
At moments like these the subtle distinctions—condiment
or food, stabilizer or binder—come back
with a roar, marring whatever equanimity had accrued
to blur the world like the brushed stainless steel refrigerator door,
now dented, nicked, and tweaked where someone’s spouse
emptied the pantry of canned goods at the other, who cowered behind,
the morning after the most recent row.
Back at home the family gathers around the fireplace,
seated in molded plastic patio chairs
taken from nested stacks in the corner of the living room.
In the light of a musk-scented candle
she offers up a prayer to her father’s bronzed combat boot on the mantle.
He served in the special forces. Later,
after the war,
he ran off with a red-headed Jewess
and re-invented himself as a heat-packing D.A in Las Vegas,
where to this day he strong-arms the heavies
between days-long binges playing roulette, always betting on black.