A Grave: a Mistake

Harry opens his sockets to the familiar darkness and, though his vocal cords are long gone, sighs out relief in the shrug of his bones. It is his once-a-year opportunity, his Halloween rendezvous, and he wills the soil above him to shift and part. He rearranges the grains of dirt methodically, leisurely, until he feels the final vibrations of them against the concrete of his coffin casing.

That is a harder task; he focuses very intently on the challenge, on lifting the slab from its well-intentioned placement above his coffin. Slowly, surely, he feels it rumble to one side, and he lifts the lid of his coffin to peek out.

It is dark, darker than it used to be; he sees only shadows and shapes now, limited by what psychic powers of perception he can muster. He wonders as he clambers from the hole if this is what babies see upon cracking their eyes open, if he has returned to some primordial sight he’d lost from years of assumed clarity. He wonders, too, why it gets darker each year. He tries not to wonder, with his right foot touching the grass, and then the other shortly after, whether there’ll be a year when he’ll go completely blind or, worse, won’t wake up.

No matter. He counts the graves as he passes them, unable to read the headstones; one, two, three, four and then a right. Two rows, and a left into the next, toward the shadow of the enormous oak he’d smoked cigarettes under as a teenager.

Over the hill, he knew, was (or once had been, he couldn’t perceive that far) the shell of Heinrich’s maraschino cherry factory. On humid summer nights one could smell the cloying scent of grenadine floating on the breeze. One could talk for hours there, suspended in time, feeling as if one’s endless musings floated in a cherry-scented haze around one’s head. He sits there now, careful of his fragile coccyx, and waits in the thin blur of moonlight. There is movement around him, a field of wakeful bodies counting their own rows, but he shuts his eyes against them. He saves his strength.

He still dreams, though, of the maraschino factory. He dreams of the tendrils of mentholated cigarette smoke, the smell of clean skin beneath it all; he tries to conjure the spirals of her hair beneath his fingers and reaches his metacarpals out as if in reaching he will be able to conjure them. Instead, he perceives the press of something hard against his fingertips and opens his sockets.

She is only a white shape, a marshmallow haze, but he would know that haze anywhere. She draws closer and descends to sit beside him beneath the tree, her finger bones lacing into his. He remembers the way her lips used to curl into a smirk in the last light of day, how he’d catch them with his own before the smile could slip away. He cannot kiss her now; he doesn’t think he’d want to.

He tries not to wonder, with her fingers clasped in his own, what it would have been like if he’d asked her. He wonders if they would have had children, would have spent their days bickering and sneaking furtive kisses in doorways and slipping each other a dollar for milk, please, if you could. He wonders if they would have been buried together, side by side, and would only have to part the dirt between them to reach out and touch for all the days of the year, for all the days until they stopped waking.

There were, though, complicating factors. He cannot recall what they were; the clarity, the open eyes, are long gone. Now, here, she is beside him, white and blurry and familiar in the darkness. But she’d smelled like clean skin, once. She’d had skin once.

He wonders what she’s wondering.