I think a lot about the best way to have a funeral. I’m not into the funeral parlor ones, no-oh, I won’t have any Stanley Stegles & sons hand my kids tissue boxes, hunching in suits of condolences, in their cheap shiny leather shoes, standing on their crappy lino, exuding their wafts of grey grey grey.

I like the stranger ones, the self-made rituals, like everybody I know, on a hill, piling small coloured stones atop of my body, until it can’t be seen anymore; it becomes just a mound of little rocks, all different colours. Then everyone just walks away. Letting the sands of my bones mingle with stone. I’d like that. I also like the idea of it being everyone I know, not just my children and my partner, but also the Indian student who works late nights at the service station on the corner of my street and always asks me “how’s your wife?” (she’s not my wife), or my accountant, who will never accept my offer of some sort of refreshment when he’s in my home, as if by refusing it he is politely letting me know, he can’t stand to relax in my presence, because he can’t possibly consider me to be someone who knows him or has a cordial relationship to him. And so, every time, I offer, he refuses, I feel rejected, he looks smug and awkward, and then we continue to plunder the taxation system for all its worth.

Did you have to buy a new pair of work shoes this year? No. Yes, you did.

I like the idea of him pressing his rock down into my hardened flesh a little deeper, than how my children did, pressing down, softly and unconsciously clenching his jaw, and in that brief moment, he is absolved of all his awkward, envious, falsely passive aggression which cages him in his every moment, and so in that passing few seconds, he is emboldened, he feels strength in his limbs, he feels purposeful. And then he walks away (without looking back)