The following story originally appeared in Amazing Stories of the Flying Spaghetti Monster

My mother sat at the kitchen table, smoke from her cigarette curling around her head. She stared vacantly at an invisible spot just in front of her.

“You need to go upstairs and look in the bedroom,” she said. “And remember to be thankful.”

I was going to question her but that part about being thankful sounded good. It wasn’t my birthday or Mega Buffet Day but I wasn’t going to quibble. I went upstairs and into my parents’ bedroom, wondering what the surprise could possibly be.

My father lay face down on the floor.

“Dad?” I said.

I walked toward him. I was going to reach down and nudge him but what if he were …?

“He’s dead.” Mom appeared in the doorway.

“How did it …?”

“That’s not important. The important thing is that it was meant to happen and we should thank the Monster.”

“But I don’t believe in …”

She had moved next to me and now quickly silenced me with a finger over my lips.

“We don’t talk like that in this house. You’re going to help me with the ceremonies, aren’t you?”

“I’ll help however you want me to.”

“Besides, we hadn’t really gotten along for a while. I’m pretty sure we were headed for a divorce. He drank all the time and sometimes he hit me. He may have been having an affair. Of course I’ll have to start masturbating again. Sex was really the only thing I got from him. You masturbate, don’t you, Charlie?”

I slowly nod my head, still trying to digest the death of my father.

“Of course, I’m female so it means masturbation is even better. Did you know a woman can have two types of orgasms?”

“I … never really thought about it.”

“It’s true. You’ve got the clitoris near the outside, and that one can send you through the roof. But then you’ve got your G-spot way back in there. It varies from woman to woman. Hit this the right way and you can have a really long, deep orgasm. Of course I don’t really mean ‘you’. You don’t have a vagina. That was one of the things I liked about your father though. When we coupled, the head of his penis hit my G-spot perfectly and it felt like I came the whole time. I’ll probably have to buy a dildo. Ready to get his clothes off?”

I was well-familiar with the ritual. We stripped off his clothes and took him down to the car. He was too stiff to fit in the backseat so we had to fasten him to the roof with cables.

Mom told me she was too upset to drive to the dump, so I did.

“Now that your father’s gone, I’ll probably lose everything. You understand that, don’t you? I haven’t worked a day in my life and we … I mean, I still owe on the car and the house. I’ll probably have to move into your apartment. But if that happens it was meant to be. The Monster has a plan for each of us.” She looked west, toward Ristorante Familia. She spent the rest of the trip calling family members.

We reached the dump and drove around the lot until we found the corpse pile.

Mom slid her phone back in her purse and said, “Well, Aunt Carla’s not coming. Bitch.”

I honked the horn to clear somebody else’s grieving family members and pulled up to the pile of corpses. It looked like it had been a busy week.

I got out of the car and looked at the bodies, all in various states of decay, all traditionally nude.

“All this sadness,” I said.

“All this joy,” Mom said. “Each of these bodies represents a joyful life lived on earth and an eternal life after. When our time comes, when we’re stripped naked and taken to the dump, we’ll see your father again. I’ll hopefully have remarried by the time that happens.”

I didn’t really believe her. It still seemed overwhelmingly sad to me. I tried to keep myself from crying but a small sob and maybe a tear or two escaped.

Mom looked over at me. “You better bottle that shit up. Keep it all in there. Nobody wants to be around your negativity and pessimism. You’re going to have the loneliest funeral ever.”

I moved the car out of the way and waited for the other family members to arrive. Our family was small and insular, mostly ignorant and afraid of outsiders, so there weren’t that many people there. We stared at the pile of corpses and exchanged stories about my dad. It was hard to find positive things to say about him so we just decided to laugh a lot as we told about finding him passed out, picking him up from the police station, discovering missing objects and money, nursing our wounds. The laughter added a layer of respectful levity. Or maybe, to an outsider, a kind of frenzied madness.

When we got bored Mom finally said, “May the Giant Spaghetti Monster bless his soul,” and we all went to Ristorante Familia.

We sat around a large table presided over by Father Vincent Severity. He didn’t really say much. Mostly he only spoke to relay a bawdy story from his soldiering days or to have a violent outburst directed at a member of the wait staff. We all had the same thing—a plate of spaghetti covered in marinara sauce and two meatballs. We couldn’t begin eating until Severity blessed the food.

“Today is another celebration of the Giant Spaghetti Monster’s awesome generosity. It is not just that He has reclaimed the life of Peter Thorazine, it is that He welcomes Peter Thorazine into the afterlife. So we will partake of the Giant Spaghetti Monster—the pasta of his flesh, the sauce of his blood, the meatballs of his dual brain. Amen.”

We were all ravenous and ate quickly. A server took all the empty plates away and brought us buckets. We all vomited into the buckets to symbolize the rebirth of the Monster. Then we all went out to try and find unfortunate hungry people to partake of the vomit, as a symbol of the Monster’s generosity.

It was dark by the time I got Mom home. I didn’t know how she was doing and I didn’t really care.

“Well, see you next week,” I said.

“You don’t need to bother coming over. I’ll probably be trolling the bars looking for a new husband. If it’s the Monster’s will …”

“Whatever.”

“All right. I’m going to go inside and masturbate now.”

She got out of the car and I drove away before she even made it onto the porch. I turned on the radio and figured Mom must have messed with the settings. It was a Monster rock station where the singer just sings about the Monster instead of a girl or a guy. It sounded creepy and strange. I scanned the stations until I found something that didn’t have any words at all. I thought about getting something to eat because I was starving but tradition dictated eating nothing but the ceremonial dinner until the following day. I drove back to my tiny room in the ghetto and tried to fall asleep amidst the hunger and the sounds of people fucking and fighting.  I heard a number of gunshots and thought to myself how that was just another example of the Monster’s generosity. I put my hands over my growling stomach and thought about all the things I was thankful for.