At last laid to rest on the Isle of Poplars, the wayfarer adrift. By Carlos del Puente Stories

 The Isle of Poplars was not an island at all but a floating argument, a quarrel-shaped landmass where trees grew in the geometric patterns of unresolved family debates. Its roots coiled like the entrails of a clock swallowed whole by the earth, and its leaves whispered gossip in dead languages. Here, the wayfarer—known to his mother as *“that ungrateful echo”* and to his father as *“the tax deduction I never claimed”*—was buried beneath a cairn of mismatched cutlery, for spoons, in this family, were considered holy relics of indecision. His coffin, a repurposed grandfather clock missing its pendulum, ticked backward in protest, as if death were a meeting adjourned prematurely by a particularly petty uncle.    The parents arrived first: his mother, a woman who wore her grudges as hats (today’s was a feathered tricorn from the Great Quarrel of ’87), and his father, a man whose mustache curled into the punctuation marks of unsent letters. They stood at the shore, where the water was not water but liquid algebra, lapping at their shoes in quadratic equations. “He should’ve been buried in a teapot,” hissed the mother, adjusting her grievance-hat. “A teapot!” echoed the father, though his mustache twisted into a semicolon, suggesting he’d planned to say something else entirely.    The twin siblings arrived next, conjoined at the opinion—a two-headed hydra of contradiction. One head insisted the wayfarer’s death was a metaphor for capitalism; the other argued it was a poorly timed pun about existentialism. They carried a wreath of deflated balloons, each printed with a different political slogan, because nothing said *“eternal rest”* like a helium-free manifesto. “He hated balloons,” sighed the left head. “He hated existence,” corrected the right. Together, they lobbed the wreath into the algebraic sea, where it dissolved into a syllogism.    Then came the uncles and aunts, a parade of malfunctioning metaphors. Uncle Mortimer, who’d replaced his skeleton with a filing cabinet, clanked forward, drawers spilling overdue invoices and a petrified owl. “Burying him here is *economically unsound*,” he intoned, slamming a drawer shut on his own thumb. Aunt Eudora, whose skin was a patchwork of expired warranties, cackled as she released a flock of bureaucratic starlings from her handbag. “The island’s zoning laws forbid melancholic interments!” she screeched, though the starlings immediately unionized and began picketing the coffin.    The grandparents—both natural and in-law—emerged from a fold in the horizon, dragging their respective baggage. Grandma Natural, a woman composed entirely of unanswered *“Why?”* questions, floated inches above the ground, her hair a storm cloud drizzling rhetorical inquiries. Grandpa In-Law, meanwhile, was a walking lawsuit, his limbs bristling with cease-and-desist orders. “This burial violates subsection 12-B of the *Universal By-Laws of Grief*,” he thundered, though Grandma Natural interrupted by materializing a gavel from thin air and banging it against his left kneecap.    Amid the chaos, the wayfarer’s ghost sat cross-legged atop his coffin, nibbling spectral toast. *“I told them to cremate me,”* he muttered to a disinterested seagull (which was, in fact, a reincarnated philosopher cursed to critique existentialism through squawks). *“But no, they had to turn my death into a committee meeting.”* The seagull retorted with a Kierkegaardian screech, which roughly translated to *“Subjectivity is a landfill,”* before stealing a crumb of ectoplasmic bread.    The central conflict erupted when Uncle Mortimer—whose filing-cabinet ribs rattled with fiscal resentment—declared the Isle of Poplars a *“hostile workplace environment.”* “The trees are unionizing!” he bellowed, pointing at a poplar that had begun distributing pamphlets titled *“Roots Against Exploitation.”* The family splintered into factions: the parents formed the *Coalition for Aesthetically Appropriate Funerals* (motto: *“Death is a décor choice!”*), while the twins launched a guerrilla poetry campaign, scribbling haikus about class struggle on the coffin with permanent marker.    But it was Aunt Eudora who acted against the execution of the central theme. “The wayfarer isn’t *adrift*—he’s *misclassified*!” she protested, hurling a stapler at Grandma Natural’s storm-cloud hair. “He’s a contractor, not an employee! No severance package!” Her dissent manifested physically: the algebraic ocean solidified into a spreadsheet, trapping the coffin in a cell labeled *“Unpaid Overtime (Eternity).”* The Isle of Poplars shuddered, its debate-shaped geography collapsing into a flowchart, and the wayfarer’s ghost sighed as his toast turned to dust. *“Typical,”* he groaned. *“They’ve managed to bureaucratize the afterlife.”

By Carlos del Puente relatos