Minimal photograph of a human skull lit against a dark background — image for the story ‘Death Became Them’ by Terence Patrick Hughes.

Death Became Them

By Terence Patrick Hughes

About the Work

In Death Became Them, Hughes turns his sharp, unblinking eye on a town where death is as common as gossip — and treated with about the same reverence. The story traces the rhythms of funerals, wakes, whispered judgments, and the strange social calculus that determines which dead are mourned, which are tolerated, and which are quietly forgotten.

With characteristic clarity and dark humor, Hughes exposes how communities perform grief, how liquor becomes a kind of currency in mourning, and how the stories we tell about the dead often reveal far more about the living. It’s a piece that balances rueful wit with an unvarnished honesty about loss, memory, and the small-town rituals that pretend to make sense of both.

Publication History

Excerpt

PLENTY OF FOLKS IN TOWN HAD DIED AT ALL AGES and all times of day or night, some gruesome, some passive, and every one of them referred to afterward as having been ‘too good’ or ‘too young’, or on rare occasions both. That’s what the attendees whispered to each other at the wakes and funerals that seemed to mount one upon the other in such quantity that many a mourner was forced to choose the departed friend or acquaintance who would garner most of their time on a particular evening, a choice which was most often swayed by the amount of liquor being served at each prospective parlor.

Critical Notes

A sharp, darkly funny meditation on death, ritual, and the small hypocrisies of grief — Hughes at his most observant and unflinching.
— Stone Coast Review Reader Response

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Inquiries

For reprint or rights: admin@terencepatrickhughes.com

Image generated using AI, art-directed to reflect the atmosphere of Death Became Them.