The Glacier
Issue Three
Winter 2024

THE HAPPY HEARSE

A guy walked into my shoe shop and sat down on one of the little benches. He wore brown penny loafers, with actual pennies tucked into them. I hadn’t seen that in a very long time. The fluorescent lights on the ceiling glinted off the copper coins. He must have taken them out to shine them every day.
“Nice shoes,” I said, approaching him and reaching out a hand to be friendly. “I’m Benny.”
He’d been wheeling his head all around the store, scanning the shelves, looking, I guess, for the perfect shoes to replace the outdated ones he was wearing. But seeing my hand almost right in his face, he looked up at me. Then, as if he had just realized that he, too, had a hand fastened to the end of his arm, he reached up and took mine. He couldn’t quite get himself to meet my gaze, though. Also, his hair was wet, slicked right down against his forehead.
“Raining out?” I asked, though sun was streaming through the floor-to-ceiling window that looked out onto the street.
At last, his eyeballs found a circuitous route that led right to mine. “Seth,” he said. “My name.”
I laughed, all friendly. “Sorry about your brother!”
He squinted at me, looking confused.
“You’ve heard that a hundred times, I guess? Cain and Abel and everything…” I regretted opening my mouth. “So! A new pair of loafers for you?”
The man shifted on the bench, like he was trying to get comfortable. Then he bent over and slid the gleaming pennies out of his shoes and cradled them in the palm of one hand. Looked back up at me. “What year were you born?”
“Nineteen seventy-two,” I said. “The year Nixon visited China. They made an opera about it. Not about my being born, but about Nixon. Why do you ask?”
“Yeah,” he said, smiling at last. “I got it right. These pennies are for your eyes.” He nodded toward the window.
I hadn’t seen it before, when I was checking for rain, but a perfect black hearse was parked out front. Had little white curtains in its windows and everything. “Jesus, I almost forgot!” I said. “Can you remind me why this is happening.”
He nodded, said earnestly, “That bad thing you did concerning the blue fleece jacket with the notes sewn into the lining.”
“Yeah, I thought so.” I got up to switch off the Open sign, then went into the backroom and brought out my empty lunch box. It had a picture of Nixon and Mao on it. “Mind if I change my shoes?” I asked the guy.
“I’m on a schedule,” he replied.
“Just take a second,” I said, and I walked over to a display near the front door, grabbed a pair of tan desert boots, and sat down on the bench beside the guy to put them on in place of the black All-Stars I was wearing.
“Those do look better,” he said. “I gotta admit.”
The thing about when you die is that, the next day, space ships will finally land. It’s the thing you’ve been waiting all your life to happen but you’re going to miss it. It’ll be days or weeks before the world gets to find out whether the aliens are friendly or hostile. You can never tell right away. You sure can’t tell by just looking at them. Their faces have so many weird features, not just eyes and noses and mouths but other things, too, so you can’t really read their expressions. Also, where they come from, they don’t shake hands to be friendly.
With a thumb and forefinger, I took the pennies from the guy’s palm. Then I held them up against my closed eyelids. “Whoot! Whoot!” I said in a high voice. It was hard to tell if I was being a teenager goofing around or an alien visitor just speaking normally.
Then we both laughed, me and the guy with the penny loafers. A laugh track joined us, like there were hundreds of people watching us and laughing, too.
“That’s funny when that happens,” the guy said.

Stuart Ross has published over 20 books of fiction, poetry, and personal essays, most recently the poetry collection The Sky Is a Sky in the Sky (Coach House Books, 2024), the story collection I Am Claude François and You Are a Bathtub (Anvil Press, 2022), and the memoir The Book of Grief and Hamburgers (ECW Press, 2022), winner of the 2023 Trillium Book Award. Stuart has given readings throughout Canada, as well as in the U.S., the U.K., Slovenia, Nicaragua, and Chile. His poetry has been translated into Nynorsk, French, Spanish, Russian, Slovene, and Estonian. He lives in Cobourg, Ontario, Canada, and blogs infrequently at bloggamooga.blogspot.ca.

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