Per 
SQUARES TO TRIANGLES
Planning a funeral is no easy business.
James gestures at the urn sitting on top of a wooden desk. It was slightly small, with a few designs etched onto its surface. The employees offer sympathetic smiles and sympathetic words, and as they turn away James wonders if they would remember him, or leave him as another face in the masses.
As he leaves, he wonders why urns are so damn expensive.
The cleaning had begun on the Sunday after the death; it was five in the morning when James unlocked the door leading to the office, carrying a stack of foldable boxes. The office was small and neat, with only a battered mahogany desk and a metal filing cabinet.
As the hours pass, more people join him to clean. After some time, the Site-Director himself came to pick up a stack of papers that read: LEVEL 5 CLEARANCE ONLY. As he digs through the desk drawers, he finds something.
It's a photograph, a Polaroid, of him and Carter, standing in the rain with red raincoats and bright wide smiles etched onto their faces. The street was dark behind them and the streetlights glowed a soft yellow in the mist.
In the middle of the crowded room, with those who are his friends and offer condolences and help him, he has never felt so alone.
He slips the photograph into his pocket and moves on.
The coffee shop hadn’t changed. It was a modest brick building, with little designs and it had an odd ability to blend in with the other clump of buildings.
His coffee hadn’t changed either. As he handed over his credit card he eyed the plastic cup. White, with brown lettering on the surface. Resting on a granite counter-top. It hadn’t changed.
As the barista turns away, James wonders if he knows that James’ life was upended, thrown away as though a child was throwing a game board away after a loss.
The coffee is bitter and sharp; it scalds his tongue.
James walks on.
They never tell you about the silence.
It threatens to consume James, so it’s only natural that he has some kind of resentment towards Carter for dying, for being honorable, for sacrificing himself.
He’s sitting in his apartment, lying on his bed, looking at the ceiling. It’s a soft beige color. He looks at the tiny bumps on it, tries to discern a pattern, tries to distract himself from mourning.
It doesn’t work.
He’s crawling out of bed now, putting on headphones and pressing the play button on his iPod, hoping that the silence would drown it out. James repeatedly presses the button to increase the volume, continuing to do it until it reaches one-hundred, and he sits there for a few minutes.
When he takes them off, the silence is louder than ever.
His daily routine hadn’t changed, though. Get up. Dress in a suit and tie. Get a coffee. Get on the train to the Site- or more accurately, the train to the outer edges of the city, then ride a bus for ten miles to the Site. Work for eight hours as someone who types up reports.
It's halfway through a post-death report from a lab incident two days prior when he feels the bile rising up in his throat, and he stumbles to the bathroom.
It burns his throat as he heaves, and he doubles up, his throat and stomach screaming in agony. But there is no sound except for the soft, ragged breaths coming from himself and the loud droning noise of the bathroom fan.
He gets up, flushes the toilet, washes his hands, and walks out as though nothing happened.
When he leaves at six o' clock and gets aboard the bus, and then the train, all he could think about was how the swirling patterns of his vomit matched the ones in his coffee.
It's disgusting, sure, but it's better than the silence.
(Picture this:
Three relatives sitting side by side in a hospital corridor that reeks of antiseptic. (The silence had begun, but no one knew that, yet.)
One stands and talks to the doctor.
The other two sit, one dejected and staring at the floor as though he knows what has happened.
The other looks at the doctor, waiting for good news, hoping against all the odds that he might've survived, that there's a chance that he did.
The doctor extends condolences but none are listening; they know that he's said it a thousand times before.
The eldest goes in to see the body.
The other two don't follow.
Picture this: A link from a chain has been broken.)
"So- uh, hey, James."
The voice comes from the tiny speaker in the phone, and it takes a few seconds for him to open his mouth, and another second for him to speak.
"Hi, Mary. How was- was camp?"
"Boring, I guess. How was work?"
"Boring as well."
"You have any friends?"
"Sure, loads."
"Will you tell me about them one day?"
James sighs into the receiver. "Y-Yeah, later."
They leave some words unsaid, burying them inside themselves to say at a later date, maybe when things weren't so morose and depressing and confusing.
The rest of the conversation consists of them sitting in silence, and when she says she has to go to bed he doesn't say anything and merely hangs up the phone.
The conversation with his father goes no better. Neither of them had talked, and they had sat there for twenty minutes before his phone had died.
As he walks to get a phone charger, he wonders when it got so hard to talk to people.
He's digging through his pants while he's walking to the train station. He swore that he put the watch there a minute ago.
It wasn't very special; just an ordinary watch face with an ordinary hour hand and ordinary minute hand, but for some odd reason James can't bring himself to go without it. Perhaps because this was the watch his brother was wearing before he died.
He digs past various bits of trash, like a coffee straw rapper and some candy wrappers before finding a coin. It was a Pokemon one that came with card decks. He could remember fighting over it when they were ten and twelve, respectively.
James takes out the phone and snaps a photo of it, and he's typing a message to Carter saying, Remember this?, and for a infinitesimal second, less than a heartbeat, before the error message pops up, the silence is gone and is replaced by nostalgia and curiosity.
Oh, he thinks.
And he keeps walking.
