**I apologize for the long wait, but I hope you will find it worthwhile. This is the second-last part.... Enjoy.**

**Part five! All comments welcome... Enjoy.**

**Happy New Year, everybody! Here is part two. I would love to hear your thoughts on this second installment. Hope you enjoy! :) **

**This is inspired by a dream I had about a year ago-- I just found the paper on which I wrote about it, and it inspired this story. It will be a short one (read: not a novel), but I wanted to split it into more than one part so that it can have more time to fully flesh out. At the end, I will also try to get a better title, since this one doesn't quite fit. Let me know what you think, and as always, Enjoy. :) **

Chapter the Twenty-ninth

There is blood on her fur-coat,
from when his nose started to bleed,
when she embraced him,
at the funeral.
There is a tear on his shoe,
from when she cried,
as he held her,
at the funeral.
There is lipstick on his cheek,
from her parted, seventy-year-old lips,
from when she kissed his cheek,
at the funeral.
And there is Julie, who is three,
doing silly magic tricks,
in the parlor,
at the funeral.
And the dead one is watching Julie,
laughing and smiling,
at the funeral.

here, all pretense is
gone, the situation is
plain and simple: we
are a small group of
people, we are alive
standing beside a hole
human hands dug with
shovels, dirt piled into
a mound, square sides
of the hole scraped clean

in that hole, in that
plain wooden box
is a body, formerly
a person. in that hole
the world as we know
it has ended forever.
the sun shines, it
is warm. the rabbi
says that death is not
our normal way.