Redsand Canyon One more drink, one less I’ll lose

People fall into line behind him: Auriel, Derg, Finley, Renard, but he can't bear to look over his shoulder. There is no altar, and no one has written a eulogy.

Donovan grabs her again; she ragdolls to and fro and the sound of bones breaking reminds him of boots crunching through snow in wintertime,

back at the church and the graveyard that had always felt like a cruel joke to him because there'd been a clerical error, and instead of his son getting buried next to his grandfather he had been buried a few feet away next to a girl, a beautiful girl who had come in sick with a mole on her cheek and died a week later—

can I have her skull once it's picked clean? 

He wants to say, she isn't even cold yet. 

He doesn't say anything at all.

Donovan buttons his suit up again and rolls the sleeves down, meeting dismissed, and Colin watches his face turn then disappear, thinking of Sasha, and then Ruth, and finally, Theo, his coffin surrounded by those of strangers.

Exit Colin.