A Funeral by the Sea

 It's wonderful to see the world lopsided. There's a certain weightlessness to it...a momentary defiance of gravity. How liberating it is to think that not everything follows the same trajectory, not everything that goes up must necessarily come down! Things can remain midway undefined in their coordinates. 

He was glad he was a bit tipsy. They were still collecting firewood for the pyre. The old woman who had lived on the footpath for as long as he could remember was found dead in the morning. A cluster of bones, lying open-mouthed, an early morning blue trapped in her cold steadfast eyes. No one knew her name. No one came to claim her body. The dog sat whimpering, unwilling to leave her side. So, they decided to bring it along to the funeral. It sat there, hungry, yet undefeated in its sorrow. Two orphaned puppies encircled it with their furry warmth. A nice family, somebody said. The wind was getting stronger, and so was the sound of the ocean. The pyre needed to be lit lest they called it quits. The monsoon clouds lurked threateningly in the west. 

A child ran laughing towards the rushing waves...a man quickly caught him by the arm and picked him up.

It was getting cold, and he hadn't brought a jacket along. Patiently, he waited for them to set the corpse on fire, so he could huddle by the leaping flames and steal some warmth.