Laura By Saki Pdf Link

Laura beamed. "How wonderfully honest! Most people come to funerals to pretend they cared. You come to celebrate. I like you."

She rather liked coincidences.

"I am practical," she countered. "Living people are so terribly particular. They want you to remember their birthdays, their ailments, their opinions on the drainage system. The dead ask only that you stand quietly by their grave for ten minutes and look appropriately sorrowful. It is the most restful social engagement left in England." laura by saki pdf

Dear Laura, it read. You were right. Hatred is more reliable than love. I have spent these last weeks trying to love the world, and I find it insufferably tedious. The living are, as you once said, terribly particular. They expect gratitude, reciprocity, and other exhausting performances. I miss you. I miss our funerals. I miss the way you used to rank the sandwiches afterwards. Will you not reconsider? Laura beamed

There was a young man—lean, dark, with the kind of restless hands that looked as though they were perpetually searching for something to break. He did not weep. He stared at the coffin with an expression of cold, scientific curiosity. Laura was fascinated. You come to celebrate

Julian began to linger too long at gravesides. He started talking about the "nobility of suffering" and the "quiet dignity of grief." He bought a black cat and named it Mourning. Laura was alarmed.

The wedding was small, sharp, and awkward. Egbert did not attend. He sent a letter instead, warning Laura that she was making a catastrophic mistake. Laura framed it and hung it in the hallway, next to a funeral card for a child she had never met. For six months, the marriage was a triumph of mutual misanthropy. Laura and Julian attended twenty-seven funerals together. They kept a ledger, ranking each for quality of music, depth of grave, and quantity of genuine tears shed by the bereaved. A funeral with no tears was considered "efficient"; a funeral with hysterical weeping was "excellent sport."