Unmarked Grave

Moral of the story: grave-digging bad. Please applaud me for my bravery in spreading this message. 

Transcript

You there. Come over here. I know. I know. I’ll pay for your drinks. I’ve got something to say to you. I think it’ll be worth my time, and yours. 

There. Thank you. Like I said, drinks are on the house. And no, don’t worry. I don’t swing that way. Haven’t ever had kids, never will, although you can tell that by the eyes. 

So. At the side of the road, the one heading out of town to the coast, there lies a small, unmarked gravestone. If there was any writing on it, nobody would be able to read it. The entire thing has simply worn away, making the thing appear to most passerby like nothing more than an oddly shaped stone. 

Almost everyone has forgotten what the stone is, or, if they guess right, it is almost impossible for them to determine whom the grave belongs to. For such a small stone, for such a small plot at the top of a hill, it follows that it was placed there for an infant, a person of little renown, or perhaps a beloved family pet. 

Of course, it was none of those things. If it were, I wouldn’t be wasting my breath talking about it. 

Every day I walk by the stone, en route to a little shack by the beach where Elmer sells me crabs. Originally, of course, my daily walk was not for seafood, but for checking up on the tombstone itself.

But why would anyone wish to watch a small, nearly unmarked grave? If I care so much about the story, about the thing buried under there, shouldn’t I also put in the care to clean and refurbish the gravestone itself? Aye, that I should, from a certain perspective. From another, well…

Well, you have to understand how things worked in the past. Like the famous phrase goes, the past was a foreign country. Thing is, the more past one gets, the stranger things become. The stranger I become. 

Ah, come on. Don’t look at me like that. I might look old, but I’m not. I’m ancient. Yes, the lynch mob type ancient. But you don’t look like the kind of person who’d call one, and if you did, well… I am one of the few ancients left for a reason. Reasons. 

But we were talking about the grave, weren’t we? See, I was around back then. I saw, heard everything. In fact, I’ve become acquainted with most things under the sun. Empires. Poetry. Flies. You know. Those kinds of things. But nothing was ever more interesting than people. Empires were always the same. Hungry. Conquering. Waving a flag. Poetry’s stunk since before I was born, and flies, well… they’re annoying. But people… people are sometimes none of that. Or all of that. 

Even in a place like this. There’s always something interesting. Drama. Jokes. A nice little fall festival. Really, if you don’t set your expectations that high about life, things can get really nice all the time, and you don’t even have to do much for them to be that way. 

And then there was…

I remember most of the past. I was there. Couldn’t much die if I wanted to, not that anyone’s really bothered to try and kill me. That’s one of the best things of not having a legal heir; no one besides the government gets anything out of me being dead, and even then, no administrator round these parts really cares enough about the global budget or any other such nonsense. So, I mean, I was alive. Kicking, as it were. Almost from the start, for I was one of the first born after the end. Mostly around these parts. 

Most of all, I remember my birthdays. Ever since I was thirty or so, I would host a party at my place. Just to have fun, you know? And, given the amount of birthdays I’ve had, the faces changed, constantly. Very few at the start, then more, and more, and…

Then there’s one birthday I don’t remember. Just one. When I was fifty-seven. A spry, young age for one such as me. When I try and broach that year, I get nothing. Nothing, nothing at all. Not until the body fell from the sky.

Yes. There’s this weird punctuation in my memories. A decent amount of stuff happened when I was fifty six. Maria died, after all. I wept for her. She was such a nice lady…

But I remember being fifty-six. I remember a decent bit from that time. But the year when I turned fifty seven? I don’t remember the party, though I must have had one. I don’t remember Sylvester dying, though he must’ve, ‘cause he wasn’t around afterwards. And I would’ve remembered him dying. Not many folks as good at telling a story as him. Certainly not me.

Fifty-seven. And a body fell from the sky. Right in the middle of the town square. Crunch. Splat. You’d have thought that it’d fallen from an airplane, had any been flying at the time. But there weren’t that was the thing. They didn’t. And yet this corpse had fallen from the sky.

That’s already freaky. As freaky as the end of the world? Not really. But when it’s been sixty years since then, and you’re the only one old enough in town to even come close to that, why, then it’d be like if the gates of hell themselves had opened up. What had happened? What had we done that was so terrible that we’d been cursed with this, this… 

Then Tommy came up. Real stupid kid. He wouldn’t have been more than fifteen at the time, but he was already built real tall and strong. Tall and strong, but nothing between his ears. As everyone stood around the corpse in a circle, as far away as possible, he walked forward to the mound of bloody pulp, and turned him over. 

That’s when he died. Tommy. His heart seized up and his eyes rolled into the back of his head. A corpse holding a corpse. Then his buddy Sam came up, tried to resuscitate the kid. He looked at the corpse’s face, too. He died. Same thing. Heart attack, I guess. Or stroke. 

That’s when it hit me. Something really, really bad was afoot. But it was still a bad thing that I could understand, you know? It wasn’t like the other folks were dying, even thought they were looking at the corpse. There was something about the thing’s face that was wrong. Really, really wrong, but did that much matter? If the thing was going to exist, it had best exist in the ground. 

I remembered the story of medusa, you know? You probably don’t. It was an old story even when I was a kid, and people have forgotten to tell most of the old tales by now. But back in the far distant past, there was a monster who killed by look, right? So this hero came along, and killed her. By not looking at her.

So I took off my shirt, wrapped it round my face, and squashed my eyes shut. I groped blindly into the center of the town square, to find the coldest, wettest of the three corpses. Wasn’t a good feeling. Probably the worst feeling. I vomited over myself three times as I hefted the thing onto my shoulder. I screamed for everyone to stear clear, to not look. And they did. Most of them. Some of them…

I dragged the corpse out of town. As far as I could before my stomach acids had replenished themselves and I was spewing on the ground again.

Do you understand how difficult it is to fill a hole without looking into it? Well, perhaps you do, perhaps you don’t. It depends on the hole, now wouldn’t it? If it’s just something that you’ve dug to shovel compost into, then it’s easy peasy lemon squeezy. When with each shovel load you hear this keen, yelping screech from below, why…

But I didn’t look in. Of course I didn’t. For hours upon hours I worked with my eyes closed. I kept my eyelids shut so tight I spent the whole time crying, until my eyes got so red and raw that I could feel the insides of my eyelids. You ever cried that much? Don’t think so. I don’t recommend it. 

Anyways, I kept going until I felt the hole was filled so deep that where it had once been now sat a small knoll. That same knoll that’s here right now. I made that. And I even sunk down to the ground and swept my arms around just to make absolute certain that there wasn’t a single gap in the newfound hill. There wasn’t. That was when I finally opened my eyes. 

It was done. It was over. I was safe. Everyone was safe, save for the guy who was now six feet under. Or twelve, rather, if we’re being accurate. That was the end of the story, right? I could have just left it like that. Gone home. Forgotten about everything that happened, lived a nice, peaceful life. Gotten into politics or something, earned myself a nice estate that I wouldn’t have to do anything about, and then later get killed about. 

‘Course, that wasn’t me. It just didn’t feel right to put the guy under the dirt without paying him his rightful respects, you know? So I laid out all the prayers that I knew, and went about making a headstone for him to mark his grave. I didn’t know his name, so I just made what you see right there. 

And that was that. For a while. I went back to working at the tannery, wasting my days away as the one ancient stupid enough to actually do a real job. That was, of course, until the recession hit. 

The recession. Honestly, that’s the whole reason why I’m out here. Don’t ask me what it is, or why it happened. But things just got bad for everyone, you know? It wasn’t like the rains stopped coming or the flowers stopped blooming, but for whatever esoteric reason, everyone just got a lot poorer. 

That’s when graverobbing got real popular around here. See, by this point, all the good gold and jewelry had already been stolen. There’d been so much just lying around for free in the past that people just buried themselves with pounds of it, trying to show off like their rich ancestors. ‘Course, that meant that when you couldn’t find work in the recession, you could easily just toss aside your morals and go picking through bones. But not the bones of the long gone. Just the gone. Bones with gravestones like the one I’d set up here. And if one of those fools ever went through this makeshift tomb, why, I know what’d happen to them. Death, just like all the others. Just by a look. 

That’s why I’m here, kid. I thought about taking the tombstone away for a while, but then again, everyone local already knows about the site. They don’t believe me about what’s buried in there, ‘cause of course none of ‘em were around to see it, or even around to hear their grandparents’ stories. So to them, well, it would just be another potential thing to rob. To get a couple rings off of, just enough to buy bread for a month or two. A quick dispensation of morals, and a stomach that no longer growls. 

So I guess at this point you know why I’ve approached you. I can remember your smell. Carrying flowers in your pocket did you no good. My sniffer, like all old sniffers, is just on another level. You’ve been out there. Watching me. Watching the grave. A thin layer of dirt on the shovel that you park behind that tree. I know the one. The with a weird twisty notch at the bottom. 

Don’t sweat so much. I’m not going to hurt you. In fact, that’s the whole reason I’m doing this. To keep you from hurting yourself. I know times are bad, but, hey… that grave is off limits. Even more off limits than any of the others. Tell your friends. Tell them I know about them too. Kiwi, Lucy, Frank. All of them.

Tell them.