Sarah dabbed her eyes as the preacher spoke soundless words that just went right through her. He had most likely said the same awful words yesterday and the day before that at another melancholy funeral.
Sarah chewed on a loose name as her step mother sobbed loudly into her handkerchief, she now regretted all the times she gave her a hard time in the past troublesome years. Her father sat next to Irene with her arm draped around her as a gesture of comfort. Yet there was little comfort in the atmosphere around them.
The preacher bowed his head to the audience and stepped from podium and walked to the farther part of the church.
Everyone began to get up, still holding their soiled tissues. Sarah's family came up and hugged those of who responded with whispering words of sorrow and hollow feelings.
Sarah muddled her way out of all the crocodile tears and move forward to the coffin that sat in the middle of the church's stage, the same on that would soon occupy auditions for the Christmas play. Sarah had forced herself to look inside the small cherry wood coffin.
There laid her precious baby brother, the same baby brother she saved from the hideous labyrinth only two years ago and came to be so close to.
Toby had on a baby blue tux on and his hands were folded like a school student waiting for the teacher to arrive. Beside him was his favorite stuffed animal, Lancelot. His towhead hair was combed neatly to the right side of his face.
"He would have preferred it to the left side," Sarah mumbled before reaching down into the coffin and trying to move his hair, but she couldn't, it was too stiff with hairspray.
She took a deep breath and forced herself to tear away from the coffin. She walked down the steps and followed everyone to the outside of the large church.
Sarah met up with her father and step-mother and hugged them both tightly. Sarah looked up into the tree above them and began to sob harder than she ever had before.
Robert and Irene both assumed Sarah's sobbing was because of today's said event, but little did they know that she had just seen a familiar cream colored owl.