They Stole My Grandmother's Coffin for a Wedding Bed

Three years of scrimping got me a hundred and sixty thousand, enough to have a full burial casket built out of fine solid wood.

It was for my grandmother, past eighty now.

My uncle and his wife talked my cousin Homer Pruitt into it, a boy who never once said no to them, and in the dead of night they pried the lock.

They hauled the casket out and draped it in red cloth.

They turned it into the wedding bed for his new marriage.

I went to demand it back.

Homer shoved me to the ground with his own hands.