---

Gregor The Undertaker

Clods of dirt tumbled through the air and impacted heavily on the cedar box below. Gregor watched from the shade of an alder tree. He was leaning against its trunk, dressed all in black despite the stifling heat. His only movement was the recurrent motion of his kerchief up to his forehead to wipe away the sweat beading there.

“…earth to earth, ashes to ashes…” the priest was also wearing black, as were the three mourners. Gregor wondered at that. Three is not a larger number of mourners, although it is better than two, or one or, as sometimes happens zero. The priest, of course, did not count.

“…dust to dust, looking for that blessed hope when the Lord Himself shall descend from heaven with a shout…” The priest’s melodic voice resonated in the moist air and Gregor shut his eyes to listen. After all these years Gregor still enjoyed the burial prayers. From those cumulative sounds of human loss Gregor had an ear for the implication beneath – that this person was loved – there was something for that he supposed.

The priest began to wrap it up, his pace a bit faster than normal. Gregor thought he might be eager to get out of the heat. “…and so shall we ever be with the Lord, wherefore comfort ye one another with these words.”

An old woman was the last to pick up the ceremonial shovel. She hesitated there at the open grave, the shovel held shakily in front of her, seemingly unsure of what to do with the dirt.

Gregor saw this all the time. There is a finality to placing dirt upon the box in which your loved one now resides. In Gregor’s opinion the dirt was the most important step toward true closure.

But some did not have the courage or constitution to go through with it, and this woman was one such mourner. She peered down into the open hole in the ground, her face awash in confused agony, and dropped the shovel at her side. Gregor quietly sucked at his front teeth. He would never see this woman again, but he would bet good money she would live to regret that.

Slowly the small group moved off, the three mourners following the lead of the priest who made a bee-line for the air conditioned waiting area at the cemetery’s entrance. As they began to walk away Gregor rolled his shoulders in their sockets and stretched his neck from side to side. Time to make the donuts.

Once the group was well out of sight, Gregor pushed himself straight off the tree and strolled toward the grave with languid grace. This was Gregor in his element. Taking off his black jacket and carefully folding it over a chair – leaving him in black shirt and tie, with black pants and shoes, and a black shallow brimmed hat – Gregor jumped down into the grave. His feet landed on the cedar box with a hollow thud, his legs bent at the knees. He began to whistle.

He worked with well practiced ease. There was enough room in the hole for him to stand to the side of the coffin, his feet in the dirt and from there he bent down, grabbed the coffin lid at its edge and lifted. It came up smoothly, being unsealed because it was Gregor’s job to do the sealing, and inside the waxy figure of a gray haired old man lay in repose, his arms crossed at his chest.

The dead man wore what looked to be an expensive, if outdated, suit. His hair was slicked back, the hairline raised on his forehead, and he wore the demeanor of an old Italian mob boss. The suit was pinstriped, black with white stripes, real old fashioned. He had patent leather loafers that were shined to a high gloss and, Gregor noted, his fingers were adorned, almost one ring on each digit, with haughty looking jewelry.

Gregor pursed his lips and nodded as he bent forward to begin prying away his cut, taking each ring in turn off the stiff, somewhat swollen fingers. As he did so he remarked to himself how the man still smelled of a pungent, masculine cologne, even four days dead, and the picture of the man came into shape.

Here lay Don Giacomo, crime lord of the east side, leader of the infamous Famiglia Calamonaci. He ruled with an iron fist and a will of steel. When a capo came to him with a problem, Don Giacomo told him how to fix it and, if the man failed at that, Don Giacomo did his own fixing. He was famous in life for never taking on a debt, neither money nor deed, and that was the key to his power.

Gregor paused in his narrative for a moment as a heavy sapphire and white gold ring got stuck on a stubborn knuckle. As he worked to dislodge the ring he considered what Don Giacomo’s favorite saying might have been.

“He who is indebted to no one,” Gregor mumbled to himself, bringing his cheeks up in a Marlon Brando-esque puff and putting on his best mobster accent, “has the means to control everyone.” Gregor nodded to himself, lower lip pressed out like some Vinny-Boom-Bah cartoon character of a mobster.

This was Gregor’s pastime, the way he made his real money, as well as the way he turned an impossibly macabre profession into something a little more bearable. Don Giacomo was just one of the hundreds upon hundreds of corpses Gregor had presided over – and robbed blind – and for each Gregor made up a story.

That damn sapphire ring just wouldn’t come off. Gregor bent down with a grimace and really got a grip on it, his face down inside the coffin, inches above the dead man’s thoracic cavity. As he began to pry with all his strength he heard a voice very close to his right ear.

“I wasn’t mob you fucking asshole.”

Gregor shot back from the sound, his heart racing like mad in his chest, a muffled yell forcing its way through his lips. He fell backward onto the dead man’s be-suited legs and yelled again, crab-walking with his hands in the coffin until his ass was on the dirt and his back flat against the cold wall of the hole. Only then did he stop to breath again, his eyes glued to the dead man’s face.

Except the face wasn’t dead – not entirely. The body did not move an inch, but the eyes were wide open and milky white and, when he spoke, the mouth crunched open at the corners, as if the man had suffered a stroke.

“I was a baker you bigoted piece of shit.” The dead man’s words oozed out his mouth as a gravelly vibration of sound, a deep chested groan of a sentence, unnaturally baritone. “Give me back my rings.”

Gregor was paler than the dead man now. His hands shaking he tossed the rings back into the coffin and, in one frenzied motion, stood up and slammed the coffin lid down onto the undead figure. From inside the thick wood, as Gregor grabbed one of the hoist straps and began climbing out, the gravelly voice could be heard.

“Dickhead.”

Gregor scrambled out of the grave as if his life depended on it. When he was free of the hole he shook uncontrollably for a moment, as one might when a spider is found crawling up one’s pant’s leg. Then, without a moment’s hesitation he raced toward the exit and his parked car, forgetting his jacket folded on the chair, and drove away, not even bothering to leave notice that he had quit.

---

If You Enjoyed This Story – Or Any Of The Hundreds Of Other Legends From The Multiverse – And Want To Give A Dollar To The Madman Behind The Curtain Who Writes Them All:

Subscribe to the RSS feed or leave a comment anywhere on the r/LFTM subreddit with “!subscribeme” or “subscribeme!”, and you’ll receive a notification whenever a new story or continuation is posted.

---

READ MORE FLASH FICTION

ACTION	APOCALYPTIC	DARK	ESTABLISHED UNIVERSE	FANTASY
FUNNY MAYBE	HORROR	MISC	WTF IS THIS?	SAD
SCIENCE FICTION	SCIENCE FANTASY	TWIST ENDING	RANDOM

READ LONGER STORIES

THE DEMON’S CANTOS	INCIDENTAL SUPERHERO
BENEATH	THE HUMANITY SAGA
THE TRAVELER	I, LYCANTHROPE