My latest novel 'The Long Runners' is a complex blend of crime, thriller, and dystopian themes.
The undertaker, a thin tall man with dark deep-set eyes and a receding hairline, aptly resembles a corpse, he harbours a ghastly but appealing thought that the frail ones teetering on the edge of the grave, overwhelmed by guilt and assorted emotions, guarantee him another payday.
A hellish rain turns the graveyard into a quagmire.
From a distance, a latecomer, an unremarkable old man, studies a line of mourners with unfailing attention. Near cadavers keen with expectation jostling for a front-row view, trying to outdo one another to pay their respects.
Pay their respects, a queer saying.
He watches mouths collapse in on themselves and tears dissolve like snow.
A hellish rain drowned in silence.
He doesn’t much like small talk and that was all ill-fitting men in ill-fitting suits, full of drink and platitudes offered.
He sucks freezing air through clenched teeth, adjusts the topcoat covering the slick professional armour of death, and in a doomed attempt to defeat the icy wind, moves his weight from one shiny black brogue to the other, recalling the weather woman, who, not unlike a bad teenage poet had earlier described the inclement conditions as “the beast from the east.”
A blood-pressured man who from a side elevation, resembled an Easter egg on legs, wipes a tear from his cheek. “It seems we only see each other nowadays at weddings or funerals.”
The reluctant mourner has little in common with those present, tedious, inveterate mumblers with whom he had, part by an accident of birth and other peripheral circumstances, spent the best and worst part of his formative years. He shuddered at their abundance of facial tattoos and their shuttered ignorance.
A hellish rain carving rivulets.
It is easy to confuse burials and cremations, confusion symptomatic of creeping decrepitude.
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