Fifteen minutes early is on time. He’d been early for everything his whole life. Job interviews, movies, concerts. He’d never missed a preview. He’d heard every sound check, sat smiling politely with napkin on his lap when his date arrived. He was the first in every line. All anybody remembered about him was the back of his head, clipped neatly with a 4 guard, blended into a generic men’s haircut with care by an automaton stylist who’d long ago forgotten the prestige her cosmetology degree once promised. Sometimes a neat haircut is all that hides the ugliness on the inside. That and being early.

So everyone at the Japanese Automotive Funeral Home was deeply offended since he wasn’t in the casket when they arrived. They sat feigning patience, wondering how this beacon of punctuality could betray them so terribly with his last act. On time is who he was. Now he was a stranger.

Fifteen minutes past ten that Thursday morning he ambled into the lovely peach-painted chapel. Pew by pew people looked from watches to his face. Pew by pew everyone walked out. The priest exited by a side door to remove his vestments, smoke a cigarette, and read comic books in the flickering light of the Easter candle.

Alone in the chapel, surrounded by a gaggle of stained-glass angels, he walked to his casket and looked inside. The plush satin looked to him like jagged stone. No reason to get in with nobody around. Let them wait forever. A life ahead of the clock had earned him that much.

He closed the lid with a final thump. Punctuality, politeness and faith locked inside, buried that afternoon beneath a headstone chiseled with a single word: Drausinus.

The gravediggers took a smoke break.

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Death looked up from his last few millimeters of Bud Light and backwash, interrupting Rommel’s game of throw peanuts at drunk people.

“Rommel,” he said, “I think we got a problem.

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Next: Part 5.2 - no money down