My best friend clutched my fingers like an oyster on its pink, luscious flesh, and kissed me once on each cheek, in the manner of a ship forcing the sea apart when against the wind, then shoved me excitedly to her father’s coffin, and begun crooning to him how I’ve been a good girl, and how my college grades were very exceptional, with an air of a flighty tea-party mutual introduction before giggling with the lost, hollow smile of a drunkard. In the kitchen, her youngest brother absently-mindedly whipped up a feast of grainy meatballs, their father’s favourite dish, he carefully explains, with murky crow-claws etched beneath his peach-pink eyes and a tipsy smile that reminded me of barbed wires, before placing a bowl on the coffin as if forcing his father to eat, while the preacher majestically proclaimed outside, with the red, jagged glare of the funeral lights, about how it is God’s will to bring him, to a better place.