Kathy Hoyle
Humbug Shark
On the funeral director’s desk there’s a jar of black and white humbugs. An old-fashioned glass jar with a shiny silver lid, like the ones you see in sweet shops of yore. And don’t ask me why I use the word yore when I would never ever use that word usually, it just seeped into the room of its own accord, alongside a thin woman in laced boots and a white cap and apron, stark against her high-necked black dress.
The woman has veined hands, which she uses to take those glass jars down from heavy oak shelves. She unscrews the silver lids and fills a bronze scoop with humbugs from the jars. She pours the humbugs onto an iron weighing scale. They clink-clink and the dish tilts. The woman tips the humbugs into striped paper bags, carefully folds the top of the bags and hands them to children in bright bonnets, while indulgent mothers look on. The woman has a kindly smile and a gleam in her eye. A gleam that says, you chose well, your decision will bring you happiness, well done you.
I wonder if her name is an old-fashioned one, a name of yore (what even is yore?) And I’m thinking maybe it’s Marjory or Ethel or Mrs Ada Quinn. I wonder if Mrs Ada Quinn was taken to her final resting place from right here, in this very funeral home - established in 1913 by Messrs Banbridge, Bolton and Sons - and I wonder if the money from her family paid for those swirling gold letters etched onto the shop front window and I wonder if the humbugs on the desk were her humbugs, and are still.
I wonder why humbugs. Because humbugs are sharp, not soothing at all, they’re sombre sweets that nip at the tongue. They taste like shit. I wonder if the slick funeral director is even aware that they’re there.
The funeral director is talking, flashing small shark teeth, talking, endlessly, talking about colours, Dove White, Genteel Cream, Break of Dawn Blue, and now he’s telling me about fabrics, silk, velvet, satin or calico and he leads seamlessly into caskets, oak, wicker, steel and cherry, and he’s talking, still fucking talking, about flowers, lilies, orchids, roses or irises.
I wonder if Ada would sigh, like he does, if I took my time choosing things from her shelves. Or would she kindly make suggestions? Maybe not humbugs at all. Maybe she would carefully bring down each jar for me to peer into and inhale the sugared smells? Give me all the time in the world to consider the overwhelming myriad of coloured candies, my tastebuds tingling. Maybe she would smile and say, ‘it’s okay, it’s important to take your time,’ until finally, I could breathe and make my decision.
The funeral director is smiling now, actually smiling, and it makes his face look even younger, and I realize that he’s probably not even the funeral director at all, just the funeral director’s son. My father did not warrant the funeral director… just the funeral director’s son.
The smiling funeral director’s son pauses. His words float just above his head, like little drops of candy, like little humbugs. He pushes his pale hands through his slick dark hair. He is waiting for me to answer. I think his hands must feel slippy now, and slick, and if he were to try and open a jar of humbugs, say, his hands would be too slippy, he would have difficulty, for sure. So, because I’m feeling ornery and feisty and a more than a little pissed off at his stupid shark teeth and his smiling and his talking and his slicker-than-slick business-like manner, I lean forward and nod into the hanging silence. I nod toward the glass jar on his desk.
Confusion creases his brow.
‘Oh, please do,’ he says, with his leering shark-smile. He holds his hand out for me to help myself. But because I’m apparently in the anger stage of grief, I lean back in my seat and wait. I wait and wait, until finally he stands up and walks around his stupid way-too-big oak desk and smooths his stupid pale hands through his slick dark hair and runs them down the legs of his expensive trousers - paid for with the bones of people like Mrs Ada Quinn since 1913 - and I watch him pick up the humbug jar and struggle with the lid, hands slipping, shark teeth clenched, a snarl of slipping, clenching ick, until finally the lid pops and he thrusts the jar toward me with a sigh of relief.
I peer inside the jar and say, ‘Oh, humbugs, no, thank you. Do you have anything else?’
I watch him turn toward his desk and then back to me and slowly shake his head. He holds the jar steady. Ada stands in the corner of the room, eyes downcast with pity because she cannot help me and she knows, she knows, that all I need is a little more time, and for him to stop yapping, even just for a minute, for a second, and let me breathe before I have to make a decision, but now I’m forced to put my hand in the jar and pick out one of those fucking humbugs and seethe at the funeral director’s son with his stupid shark smile.
I shove the humbug in my mouth and suck hard, the sharpness nipping my tongue, almost bringing tears to my eyes. Almost. And when the funeral director’s son starts talking again, talking, talking, about colours and caskets and flowers, I keep sucking, harder. I let him talk and talk, trying to force me to make a decision, any decision, anything at all. I sit there sucking on that sombre, shit-tasting humbug, refusing to say a word or, even for a second, let that shark-faced fucker see me cry.
Ada looks on. She gives me the gentlest nod and whispers, ‘you just take your time.’
Kathy Hoyle’s work is published in literary magazines such as The Forge, Lunate, Emerge literary journal, New Flash Fiction Review, South Florida Poetry Journal and Fictive Dream. She has won a variety of competitions including The Bath Flash Fiction Award, The Hammond House Origins Competition and The Retreat West Flash Fiction Competition. She was recently longlisted for the Wigleaf Top 50 and her work has been nominated for Best Small Fictions, Best Microfictions and The Pushcart Prize. She lives in a sleepy Warwickshire village and when she’s not writing, she spends her time singing Dolly Parton songs to her long-suffering labradoodle, Eddie.
