REDUNDANCY
by Alan Dean Foster
AMY was only ten, and she didn’t want to die.
Not that she really understood death. Her only experience with it had come when they’d buried Gramma Marie. Now the funeral was a wisp of a dream that hung like cobweb in the corners of her memory, something she didn’t think of at all unless it bumped into her consciousness accidentally. Then it was no more than vaguely uncomfortable without being really hurtful.
She didn’t recall a whole lot about the ceremony itself. Black-clad grown-ups speaking more softly than she had ever heard them talk, her mother crying quietly into the fancy lace hankerchief she never wore anywhere, strange people bending low to tell her how very, very sorry they were: everything more like a movie than real life.
Mostly she remembered the skin of Gramma Marie’s face, so fine and smooth as she lay on her back in the big shiny box. The fleshy sheen mirrored the silken bright blue of the coffin’s upholstery. It was a waste of pretty fabric, she remembered thinking. Better to have made skirts and party dresses out of it than to bury it deep, deep in the ground. She liked that idea. She thought Gramma Marie would have liked it, too, but she couldn’t ask her about it now because Gramma Marie was dead, and people couldn’t talk to you anymore once they were dead. Not ever again. That was the thing she disliked most about death; not being able to talk to your friends anymore.
Thinking about it made her shiver slightly. She knew she was in big trouble, and she didn’t want to end up looking like Gramma Marie.
. . .
