A Pocket Archive (49)

I never liked the cemetery in my home town.

I had been raised with the knowledge of Life after death in the Ressurection, but it was difficult to believe it whenever I was standing there, surrounded by the rows of dark stone epitaphs. Though neatly trimmed, the grass was dry and sounded scratchy whenever the wind rustled it, and I shuddered when I thought about how it would feel underneath bare feet. The whole cemetery sported only a few intermittent patches of green among the the parched brown turf that separated the tombstones, primarily only over the newer graves. Every here and there, sprinkler heads peeked up from random locations, but there was no tell-tale circle of green around any of them, just a white crust around the tops where hard water had built up and stayed. I remember doubting whether any of them worked.

I think I must have been about three or four the first time that I remember being there. It was for a memorial day service, and I remember being stuffed into a puffy jacket that was almost too small for me due to the chilly late-spring weather, holding my father's hand (or more precisely his thumb, since his hands were so big) and huddling close to his leg while digging my other hand into my pocket to keep it warmer. The wind was very cold that day, battering all the little plastic red, white, and blue flags in the cemetery, and I remembered it stinging against my cheeks, making my nose run. At some point, I wiped it on my sleeve, looking off to the side as I did so.

One of the gravestones near us had a framed, faded photograph of an older woman peering out from cloudy glass. She wasn't as pretty as my grandma, but she was smiling and looked happy, which made me like her. Below her name (I was too young to read it), there was a stone vase containing bundle of sunbleached silk flowers, which may have been fushia once, but which had since faded and become tattered from the incessant wind. The flowers had anchored to the vase with a thin, blue plastic cable, which I only knew because they were halfway hanging out of it. No one had come to ever come to replace them. It made me sad for the woman behind the glass, and I wondered if she had been forgotten too.

One thing was clear to me, however: there were no living things in this cemetery. I also knew from the dry grass under my feet and from watching my mother in her garden that living things don't generally come out of the ground in Wyoming— not without substantial help, at least. But here, it seemed everyone had forgotten, allowing the memory of the occupants to be buried with them, leaving them to decay like everything else.

I had never feared the idea of death itself- after all, it's not the end of existence. But I did fear being left in that horrible, ugly cemetery, surrounded by articial flowers and the neglected stones of forgotten people who I didn't know. And I certainly didn't like the idea of people I love going there either.

Perhaps that was why I once again found myself in a phantasm sleep, dreaming that I was standing between the members of my little family, all three of us staring down into the yawning mouth of an open grave. One of my hands was engulfed by a bigger, stronger one, while the other was wrapped tightly around one that was mitten-clad and much smaller. Somewhere in the background, I could hear a few sniffles and the droning sound of a prayer, the words addled by the strange air of dreams. I don't know where my mother was, but it sounded like it might be her crying. Across from us, my sibling, solemn and wordless, began shoveling dirt onto the casket below, which somehow turned into ash the second it landed on the lid, twining with the wind. It stung my eyes, and for a moment, I thought I could smell Marlboro cigarettes mixed with garage fumes and woodsmoke- the way my dad smelled when he got home from work.

Beside me, the Angel squeezed my hand and looked up at me, her hair a shock of autumn color against her unusually somber attire, and her big, beautiful sage eyes shiny and frightened. She didn't understand what was happening.

I didn't either. Somehow though, I intrinsically knew that casket was locked from the inside.

I squeezed her hand back, and her lips moved silently and she stared up at me, mouthing a question that I couldn't answer.

'I don't know baby, I don't know.'

Willing myself to awaken, I blinked a few times, staring at the ceiling and watching the fan blades spin in the darkness above us. Next to me, the giant snored softly, having somehow tangled almost all of the blankets around himself like a tight cocoon. I gave them a gentle tug, then, seeing how they weren't going budge, reached instead down to the pile of blankets that I kept on the floor by my side of the bed for this exact reason.

*****