Man Mountain

Although his tall frame had withered quietly with the passing of the years Rose had always thought of Mr Mountain as a big person. Maybe it was just the memory of their first meeting when she had crawled from under the hedge and found him on the other side. The box that emerged from the back of the hearse looked as if it could not possibly contain him.

The gathering was small, just a nephew and his wife who had driven up from Stroud and a handful of stalwarts from the village, and herself. The memorial on the neighbouring plot somehow made her feel unreasonably irritated. Why did people think so much of themselves that they felt the need for such ostentatious megaliths, since it was never really there for the dead person but for the visitors who came to mourn. She tried to bring her attention back to the muted murmuring of the vicar but it all seemed so irrelevant. She thought fondly of the time he had rowed them out to the duck island on the boating lake and the duck call he had bought specially for her to try and lure them out. She suddenly had an almost irrepresable desire to sing 'Toot Sweets.'

(An out-take from my NaNoWriMo novel, but I like it so much I might put it in.

Linking back to Magpie Tales 90)