Winner

This story won me some money recently, and there is some talk of it being published too, as part of an anthology. Anyway, neither of those will concern you as much as the morbidity in the story. So grab something to to munch on and enjoy The Perfect Closure :D

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As the sky grew dark outside, Sheetal sat by her window, sipping her coffee that had long gone cold. She shivered a little, the coffee providing no warmth, and hugged herself tightly. She took one long last look at the growing darkness and stood up, closed the window and faced the unlit room. Meandering around objects that she couldn’t possibly see in the dark, she made her way to kitchen, rinsed the cup and placed it in the sink.

Back in the room, she switched on the little night lamp, and by its feeble light, saw the body that lay next to the couch. These last few years, she had loved him with all her heart. And now, he was dead. All those years of loving and caring came to nothing, it seemed. All she was left with was a hole in her heart and dead body to deal with. Thankless bastard, she thought to herself, leaving her all alone to deal with the mess he left behind.

She sat down on the floor next to the body, and held the lifeless head in her lap. It wasn’t her fault that he was dead. She knew he had a weak heart, and she alone knew how much of her meagre salary she had already spent on his health. She knew, somewhere in the back of her mind, that it was only a matter of time, but she had constantly put the thought away in some recesses of her brain that she never accessed. So, expected as it was, the death came as quite a blow.

Such a transient thing, life, she thought. We are born, we live, we eat, we love, we hurt, we die. And if we are reborn, we do it all over again. What is the point anyway?

As she sat in the feeble light of the night lamp in the grip of existentialist thoughts and feeling a sense of great loss, she heard a rumbling sound. She looked up with surprise, and then realised that it was her stomach signalling hunger. Drawn back to the reality of everyday bodily matters, she once again wondered what she should do with the body of her dog. She considered burying it, but couldn’t bear the thought of maggots eating away at her dear Monty. She couldn’t just dump it some place remote, for that would be too cruel to the one being she had loved selflessly. She definitely couldn’t afford a cremation. And she sure as hell couldn’t just leave it lying next to the couch.

Picking it up, Sheetal took it to the kitchen and put it down on the table. Rummaging through her refrigerator, trying to decide what to cook for dinner, she realised that she was all out of groceries, except a carrot which was hardly sufficient dinner. She took it out anyway, washed it clean, sat down on a chair facing the body, and began munching on it, while trying to decide what to do about dinner and the body on the table.

And then, it struck her. Sheer genius, she thought, and whimsical as it may seem, it was surely a great idea to eternalise her love for Monty while solving two of her more immediate concerns.

When the meal was over, and she had put away a substantial amount of leftovers, she made herself some more coffee and went back to her window to stare at the darkness outside. In the clear night sky, she traced Orion and Taurus, and thought of Monty’s soul up there in the sky. She tried to conjure up another constellation in his memory, and when she failed at that, she tried to pick a star that would always remind her of him.

Satisfied with a bright star a bit off Orion, she felt a double sense of contentment. No matter where she was, she only had to look up at the sky to see Monty in the unnamed star she had picked for him. And no matter where she was, she had to only rub her stomach to remember that Monty would forever and always be a part of her.

Sheetal couldn’t have asked for a better closure.