prompt: shade, title: the mystery of faith in misc. flash fiction

I was sitting at the High-Catholic funeral for the grandfather of two of my oldest dearest friends, thinking how much he would’ve appreciated the rituals. The singing, the incense, all the military rites after the religious stuff. He was devout and proud of his service, it was perfect for him. Still I couldn’t help but also think how glad I am we didn’t do something like that for our father, who was basically Atheist-Buddhist by the end of life. How much he would’a hated it. He never liked a fuss, would’ve barely tolerated the tiny catered get-together where we told stories about him as we did. The High-Catholic mass where they talk two-hundred-percent more about some guy who bit it millennia ago on the other side of the world than the gentleman who actually just died, you would’ve heard Dad’s eyes rolling from beyond That Beyond, had he not already been cremated. I wouldn’t put it past him to figure out how to rattle an urn, though, he was wily in matters of the nigh-impossible.

I ramble on about being Lapsed-Catholic, having checked out when a parish priest was terrible to me after my cousin was killed but honestly I was barely Catholic from the start. Easter-Christmas Catholic is what they call it, for me it was almost literally true. Disillusion from Easter-Christmas Catholicism leaves such tiny trace, only a bare shade remains. Just one-part-per-million Catholic. Homeopathically Catholic. Somehow its damage still persists, the guilt and all the awkwardness.

Maybe that’s the real mystery of faith.

Dad joked his funeral should involve his ashes being put into a KFC bucket and floated down the Mohawk while a Dixieland band played When The Saints Go Marching In. As he neared the end, however, he made it clear he wanted to be cremated, then held onto until our mom passes, upon which time they should both be scattered wherever my brother and myself will deem appropriate. Had he been single, it wouldn’t have been jest.

I personally demand whenever the time-travelers assassinate me, you steal a cop-car, load it with TNT, put my body in the driver’s seat and point that vehicle toward An Evil Place when no one’s inside. Drop a rock on the gas, let me go out destroying something awful. Maybe The Remington Arms, a factory that manufactures death and caused my dad’s heart condition through on-the-job chemical exposure. Before I’m dead, God willing, we will start fighting back against the murder industry and it won’t be necessary but that’s to your discretion. I won’t argue. I’ll be super dead.

Maybe by then I will have a lover worth waiting to join, instead, as my father found. Who knows anything? All I can tell you is, these are the thoughts of a homeopathic Catholic trying his best to honour his best friends’ grandfather, even though being in a Catholic church these days no longer makes any sense for a dude rendered emotionally-interesting by life, like my melodramatic ass.