The winter Chet turned 83, his family threw him a death shower and invited all his friends. The ladies made a coffin out of yellow cake. The men measured the inseam for his last suit with the ribbons from the gifts he had opened on his lap: a pair of wingtips, a travel-size Aqua Velva, a scrap-fabric hanky sewn into a pocket, and a gold watch with a missing hour hand from Death himself, who had arrived late and, in those days, wore the flip flops and seedy pencil mustache of a cruise director.<\/p>\n
\u201cLet\u2019s take guesses on how it will happen,\u201d Chet\u2019s daughter said, passing a yellow legal pad around the room. \u201cClosest wins a booby prize.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cHow droll,\u201d Death said to Chet, rolling his eyes.<\/p>\n
But the daughter collected the strips of paper anyway and put them in the hanky pocket, stirring her fingers in the papers before pulling them out to read. \u201cExposure. For fear of crossing a bean field. Wasps. Impaled by steering wheel.\u201d Each seemed more reasonable than the last, they all agreed, and even Chet cracked a smile.<\/p>\n
Toward the end of the evening, Death spun records and wah-toosied time to a freeze, though Chet checked his watch to measure the lapse.<\/p>\n
\u201cDon\u2019t be such a stiff,\u201d Chet\u2019s daughter said. She pulled him onto the kitchen floor and he broke in his new shoes dancing the collegiate shag as the music roared. But then Death, always the klutz, spilled the last ladle of punch on Chet\u2019s white cabana shirt.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ll get the club soda,\u201d Chet offered, but Death put up his finger.<\/p>\n
\u201cThink nothing of it,\u201d he said. He took off his own shirt and put it over Chet\u2019s shoulders, buttoning it neatly over his bony chest. The spill flared out beyond the line of holes in a gash of color, like the wing of some bird of paradise Chet no longer knew the name of.<\/p>\n
Patrick Crerand<\/strong> currently lives and writes in Florida where he teaches at Saint Leo University. Recent work of his has appeared in Conjunctions, New Orleans Review, Sentence<\/em>, and other magazines. He is currently at work on a novel about Bingo (the game) and Jesus (the Christ).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The winter Chet turned 83, his family threw him a death shower and invited all his friends. The ladies made a coffin out of yellow cake. The men measured the inseam for his last suit with the ribbons from the<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":384,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[21956],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/libblogs.luc.edu\/requited\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/libblogs.luc.edu\/requited\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/libblogs.luc.edu\/requited\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libblogs.luc.edu\/requited\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/384"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libblogs.luc.edu\/requited\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=264"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/libblogs.luc.edu\/requited\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1411,"href":"https:\/\/libblogs.luc.edu\/requited\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264\/revisions\/1411"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/libblogs.luc.edu\/requited\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=264"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libblogs.luc.edu\/requited\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=264"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libblogs.luc.edu\/requited\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=264"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}