Crazy With The Medicine

She sat on her mother’s coffin and looked up at the sky, a militant grey shroud now, armed tooth and nail with cloud and a drum full of cold rain that was slowly rising in cadence.  The sea was blotted with black pulsating shadows like many leviathans were waiting underneath.  Dolores Costello was beginning to take wallops as she struggled with the swells, and the bouncing and jolting that followed had Katrine thinking her mother was about to break free from the box.  She wondered what she would do if such a thing was to happen.  How would she respond if the coffin swung open and her mother’s reanimated form shot up to greet her?  Of course, it would be lovely to see her once more.  But Katrine couldn’t help herself: being that she was a champion of the sciences, she would be forced to ignore the miracle of resurrection and rather instigate a thorough cross-examination of the predominant foundations of truth in the modern world; and the revenant of her poor mother would just have to stand there while Katrine tackled all these big questions, looking on helpless and wretched in her putrefaction, with a pitifully transgressed stupor on her after-living face.  No, that wouldn’t be good.  Better to admit the closed procession of mortality.  Suffer she would the knocks, the reverberations. 

                                                                              *

Stinson entered the cabin and found Masterson's huge body spread all over the sofa with Meteorological Parables of the Sea open, unread, on his lap.  His eyes were red and gluey.  He had just paid a visit to Littlewood’s medicine drawer.

He looked up at Stinson and drawled, drugged to the nines: ‘Do you think there’s really a body in there?’

‘What?  Of course there is.’

Masterson’s eyes were crazy with the medicine.  ‘I’m beginning to doubt it.’

‘I’ve held the coffin,’ said Stinson.  ‘There’s a body in there, I guarantee it.’

‘To hell with your guarantees!  I will argue they’re carrying something considerably more heinous.’

‘Like what?’

‘Gold.  Stolen gold.  Or if it’s a body, it’s probably the Danish prime minister or something.’

Stinson paused.  Masterson’s medicated state was now quite apparent to him.  ‘What’s wrong with your eyes, Masterson?  They’re crazy.’

Stinson was right.  Masterson’s eyes sure were crazy with the medicine, they were.  They were.