The Dear Departed

Snub, a harried everyman whose pockets jingle only with IOUs, awakens to a dawn of knuckles at his door—bailiffs, landlords, grocers, all brandishing paper like scalpels. In the mirror he sees a ghost already; the only solvent asset left is his own corpse. He rehearses suicide with the fastidiousness of a maestro: a noose in the parlour, gas in the kitchen, a pistol in the vestibule, each attempt foiled by slapstick providence—an exploding stove, a mis-roped chandelier, a dog that absconds with the bullet. Meanwhile his wife, a moon-faced optimist who believes widows’ weeds are merely haute couture, sashays to the insurance office clutching a policy fat as a wedding cake. Word of Snub’s “death” ricochets through the tenement, summoning a parade of voracious relatives who mourn with one eye on the furniture. The corpse-that-isn’t becomes the life of the party: propped in a rocking chair, it receives condolences, cigars, even a surreptitious pinch from the spinster aunt. When Snub finally storms in—bedraggled, alive, and incandescent with rage—the inheritance orgy collapses into a Keystone waltz of slammed doors, torn wills, and confetti of repossessed IOUs. In the final iris-out the couple, stripped bare of both kin and debt, waltz down an empty boulevard toward an uncertain sunrise, their laughter echoing like loose coins in a tin cup.