People to Remember

What an incredible gift to have love to recall and people to remember. Her treasure chest of life was a void.

The L from Lormier to 14th Street-Union Square. Transfer to the Q, then up to 86th Street. (Brief apartment intermission). Hop back on the Q from 86th to 57th Street.

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Backstory: I have a note on my phone called “story ideas” where I jot down anything that pops into my mind when I’m on the go: character names, cool settings, lines of text. For the longest time, I had the following line sitting in that app untouched: “She used to walk through graveyards and read the names on tombstones, say them out loud, because she thought everyone deserved to be remembered.”

Then I wrote this story.

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In her free time, she would walk through graveyards and speak the names on tombstones.

People around town found it strange. Why not read a book or have a cocktail with a friend, or perhaps take a normal walk down the sidewalk or on a trail through the woods?

It was mostly parents who gossiped. They didn’t want “that woman who spent her free time with the dead” shaping their children’s minds. But even the town’s biggest skeptic, Tammy Marner, and its greatest gossip, Celine Kat, kept their complaints secluded to small-circle whispers (that usually occurred over cocktails or walks on some trail in the woods). Because, despite her graveside habits, she was the best teacher in the county. They loved to shame her, yet unequivocally relied on her, spawning a maddening mental conflict in most of the town’s mothers, and a mere uninterested shrug in most of the town’s fathers.

Perhaps it was strange, but she’d always found the dead less exhausting than the living. She was also alone. No husband or children. She was an orphan with no siblings, biological or chosen. Now she was 53, and it seemed that everyone else had someone to hold or someone to remember: a parent who’d passed, a child who’d gone to college, a dear friend who’d lost the battle against some ailment. Everyone complained about these things. Sulked and whined and orbited in endless woe. But her jealousy of what they protested was ravenous. What an incredible gift to have love to recall and people to remember. Her treasure chest of life was a void.

After years of living in that pain, she realized it must also exist from the other direction: the pain of having no one left to remember you.

So, she began walking through graveyards and speaking the names on tombstones so that she could gift remembrance to those laid to rest under the fading, weather-worn inscriptions.

It was a ritual one might deem beautiful if they bothered to understand.

Until the day she said the wrong name.

It was a sunny day. Cloudless and brisk. The oldest part of the town’s cemetery rested at the top of a hill overlooking Main Street. It was a maze of arched trees and coiled roots. The headstones were so decayed that by dusk, it was almost impossible to distinguish them from the rocks and twigs that adorned the earth. No flowers here. No visitors here. So, she ventured up the hill as often as her arthritic knees would allow.

From the top of her inconsequential town, the trite things seemed small. But the cratered moon against the pale-blue sky was all-consuming.

Edward Walter Davidson.

Rosetta Flemming.

Clarence Hope.

The tombstone that ended her life was so eroded that it nearly had no name. It was small and slight, just like the boy who rose from the earth when she deciphered the letters correctly.

The moment the name left her tongue, a small hand pushed through the hardened earth. It squirmed and contorted like an insect, and she watched, mesmerized, wondering whether this was a dream, nightmare, or delusion.

An arm. Then shoulder. Hair dripping dirt. Another arm. Now both clawing, dragging up the torso. Legs. Small bare feet.

He was no more than 10 years old and therefore a tragedy. Anyone having died so young would have to be. Yet her sadness was purely logical. In her body, she felt nothing but disgust. Not because he was covered in filth and decay, but because of the darkness in his eyes.

This was not a boy who had died young. This was a boy who had lived 10 years too long.

He smiled at her, and in that smile, she knew it was the end. Even in her younger years, when she had faster reflexes and better joints, there would have been no escaping the dark pull of this creature.

It did not scare her to face death. She was well-read enough, grounded enough not to fear inevitable things. She’d spent enough time in cemeteries to find actual joy in that which was finite. What scared her was what she had somehow released: what she was about to leave behind.

The small hands reached for her. They pulled her hair like a child teasing their crush on the playground. The boy brought her face towards him, and his grin widened and stretched. Inside was decades of decay and undergrowth and animal excrement. He brought his open mouth to hers. It was not like a kiss, but like a breath.

Against her lips, he breathed out, and she was forced to take in death. He sucked in, and she felt life leave.

The last thought she had on that blue, cloudless day was that perhaps a life empty of attachment had been a blessing. Perhaps it was remembrance that was the burden.

Some things were meant to perish; some people were meant to be forgotten.