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Part 1:
From American Gods by Neil Gaiman
o.k. this is a little long yes. get over it and read it all anyway. it does hold some significance.
A small woman walked in through the door, and hesitated. Her hair was a coppery red, and her clothes were expensive and very black. Widow�s weeds, thought Shadow, who knew her well. Audrey Burton, Robbie�s wife.
Audrey was holding a sprig of violets, wrapped at the base with silver foil. It was the kind of thing a child would make in June, thought Shadow. But violets where out of season.
She walked across the room, to Laura�s casket. Shadow followed her.
Laura lay with her eyes closed, and her arms folded across her chest. She wore a conservative blue suit he did not recognize. Her long brown hair was out of her eyes. It was his Laura and it was not: her repose, he realized, was what was unnatural. Laura was always such a restless sleeper.
Audrey placed her sprig of summer violets on Laura�s chest. Then she worked her mouth for a moment and spat, hard, onto Laura�s dead face.
The spit had caught Laura on the cheek, and began to drip down toward her ear.
Audrey was already walking toward the door. Shadow hurried after her.
�Audrey?� he said.
�Shadow? Did you escape? Or did they let you out?�
He wondered if she were taking tranquilizers. Her voice was distant and detached.
�Let me out yesterday. I�m a free man,� said Shadow. �What the hell was that all about?�
She stopped in the dark corridor. �The violets? They were always her favorite flower. When we where girls we used to pick them together.�
�Not the violets.�
�Oh, that,� she said. She wiped a speck of something invisible from the corner of her mouth. �Well, I would have thought that was obvious.�
�Not to me.�
�They didn�t tell you?� Her voice was calm, emotionless. �Your wife died with my husbands cock in her mouth.� To Shadows surprise Audrey Burton was also at the funeral, standing toward the back. The short service ended, the casket was lowered into the cold ground. The people went away.
Shadow did not leave. He stood there with his hands in his pockets shivering, staring at the hole in the ground.
Above him the sky was iron gray, featureless and flat as a mirror. It continued to snow, erratically, in ghostlike tumbling flakes.
There was something he wanted to say to Laura, and he was prepared to wait until he knew what it was. The world slowly began to lose light and color.
Shadows feet where going numb, while his hands and face hurt from the cold.
�Good night, Laura.� Then he said, �I�m sorry.� He turned his face toward the lights of town, and began to walk back into Eagle Point. A car drew up beside him. The window hummed down.
�You want a lift, Shadow?� asked Audrey Burton.
�No,� he said. �And not from you.�
He continued to walk. Audrey drove beside him at three miles an hour. Snowflakes danced in the beams of the headlights.
�I thought she was my best friend,� said Audrey. �We�d talk everyday. When Robbie and I had a fight, she�d be the first one to know- ...and all the time she was fucking him behind my back.�
�Please go away, Audrey.�
�I just want you to know I had good reason for what I did.�
He said nothing.
�Hey!� she shouted. �Hey! I�m talking to you!�
Shadow turned. �Do you want me to tell you that you were right when you spit in Laura�s face? Do you want me to say it didn�t hurt? Or that what you told me made me hate her more than I miss her? It�s not going to happen, Audrey.�
She drove beside him for another minute, not saying anything. Then she said, �So, how was prison, shadow?�
�It was fine,� said Shadow. �You would have felt right at home.� (End Part 1)
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