Glass Coffins
by Andrew Kozma
I did not want to be attending the living memorial service for my mother, but there I was, the spiritual officer’s voice droning on like a TV left on in another room. My mother was in a coma, kept on life support for only pennies on the dollar by the YuWant Life, a solar-powered medical pod being piloted in Houston. Everyone called them glass coffins, despite part of the city’s deal with YuWant being we’d always refer to the life support systems by their trademarked name. City parks were dotted with the new homes of those still in comas from the plague, light glinting off their reflective surfaces like off of ocean waves, back before the Gulf Coast was choked with a mix of environmental repair drones and the bodies of the wildlife they were meant to save.
“Oh, look, the food’s here,” I said, not wanting to think about the world outside of this moment. I wanted some sort of reprieve. The tiniest bit of hope.
“Not our food,” Jeannie said, a glimmer of satisfaction in her voice. She’d always preferred reality to fantasy.
The arriving caterers set up a folding table, tableclothed it, weighed it down with breakfast tacos, kolaches, donuts, a large coffee urn with fancy paper cups shaped like mugs, and in moments people gathered, many sitting on the surrounding glass coffins. The life-sustaining machinery was the perfect height for both head-bowed mourning and leisurely sitting, legs crossed in front, as if at an office holiday party for a company that’s not yours, all the anxiety about getting fired for saying the wrong thing replaced with a burning desire to eat and drink everything in sight because who cares?
There were no cloths put over the glass coffins the guests sat on, nothing to make it seem like they were the furniture they were being used as. That would interfere with the solar power system, of course. And those sitting ignored the people they were sitting on completely. The visible glass shifted to compensate, darkening to capture more light. I couldn’t hear what any of those guests were saying, their voices static overlaid with the non-denominational company spiritual officer detailing the various features of the YuWant Life as part of our mom’s memorial package.
“The glass coffin is completely soundproof, temperature-controlled, UV-protected, vitamin-injected, internet-connected, basically an AI-directed refrigerator like the YuWant Food, free trials available,” the spiritual officer said with a seemingly genuine mix of sadness and embarrassment.
None of the catered guests blinked when I walked over to grab one of each food item provided and poured myself a cup of coffee, drowned it in sugar and cream, downed it, and poured another. They didn’t blink, but I was an intruder down to my smallest atoms and only felt I was passing when doing what they were doing. Eating. Drinking. Smiling. Laughing.
I sat atop a glass coffin already crowded with three people, but they moved to give me room without complaint. In the midst of their gathering, I shouldn’t have been able to hear my mom’s memorial, and yet the spiritual officer’s voice was still audible. More specs on the coffin, how durable it was, how the glass was self-cleaning, how conversations can be recorded and piped in so the patient never feels alone, how gardener nurses will come by on the reg to give personal check-ups, cut back the grass, and add flowers to match the scent pumped in via climate-controlled vents.
The people next to me were complaining about all the extra work being piled on them. In the glass coffin below me, the head of the coma patient just peeked out, half-open eyes blurred with some kind of jelly to keep them from drying out. His hair was shellacked into place. He looked like a wax figure melting in the heat.
I hadn’t looked at my mother since she’d been accepted into the YuWant Life program.
“Harold was a bore,” the woman next to me said. “But his accounting was off the charts.”
“I never liked him,” said the man at the other end of the coffin.
“You never liked anyone.”
“I liked Emily. She brewed the best coffee and always spoke in meetings so I didn’t have to.”
They both laughed. Above the face of the man in the coffin was a name tag: Harold Bleeker. The fourth person on the coffin with us laughed quietly, so quietly it took me a bit to realize she was sobbing. When the man and the woman mentioned another co-worker in a coma, I laughed along with them. They turned to me, managing to look both friendly and suspicious.
“What department do you work in?” the woman asked.
“HR.”
They nodded, as if it was only right I be here checking up on employees, coma be damned.
I wanted to be free.
I looked back at the memorial I was supposed to be attending. Jeannie met my eyes with a scowl, then turned away. My mother’s glass coffin darkened as a cloud passed overhead.
The sobbing woman continued to sob.
I was free.
