The Cemetery Diaries
Summer Secrets
Here are the secrets of a scorching summer, all sealed up under baking slabs and cracked, dry earth. The graveyard served five families a hundred years ago, and now it’s just a memory hidden in the rural heart of modern suburban sprawl, tiny and disused, black and overgrown. On the anniversaries of long-forgotten funerals, the men they call codgers hike up the sunburned hill, parting the seas of straw-coloured grass and loosening the latch on the crusty iron gate. Those men are relics from old farming days. They live in constant sunset. At all other times, the stone scattered paddock is left to crumble into ruins. It sits in an ignored shoulder of pasture off the highway, hidden behind a hillock that rears out of the golden sea of grasses like a breaking wave.
You say that you don’t understand entirely. You’re young. You wonder aloud what a codger is, and I tell you. Codger is an insulting term for an old man become useless and pedantic. Oh. Is that all? Suddenly, you’re done with questioning. We lean together against the rotted fence posts, making the barbed wire groan. Every breath of the wind is a fresh affront, a blast from the furnace of the sky, or an air-melting exhalation from her bellows. The wind sighs the smells of horses, rust and cypress trees. Pressed flat against the glass bottom of the atmosphere, clouds skate overhead, white and blinding. You twist your sun-kissed hair around your freckled finger, and I think. I slump against the post, a bouquet dangling lazily from one hand.
Closely, I inspect its elements. Each rose I have brought is like a nebula or the explosion left by a dying star. The petals fold in perfect symmetry, bleeding pink into orange and sulphur into red. Lifeless white mixes with breathless blue; a blossom of drowning. And yet, every rose must wilt one day. Better to be picked, then, in the flower of youth. Better to be plucked a bud to bloom in a vase, admired and preserved as a tribute to the very phenomenon of death.
I think about something else, too, a thought that normally the night life brings out in me. The night life is all about consumption, neon and garish. Accordingly, it has a kind of morbid tinge. It is decay made into a circus. I know I’ve fallen, too, just like all the other clowns. I am immortal, not immune. There’s a story about a vampire, always an addict, seeking intoxication. Some vampires are happy junkies, while others are tragedies, emotional and torn. Addiction divides people, but at its core, it also brings us together under one damnation. We are dependent on something that makes us monstrous, whether we want to be monstrous or not.
And really, that’s what life is like. The living do some awful things. For all the fear they generate, the dead can’t harm you. But then there’s me.
I stride forward, braving the midday sun behind a pair of darkly tinted glasses. My eyes are sensitive to light– of all the parts of the human body, they are the first to disintegrate. Precious few undead have their eyes intact. On the whole, we prefer the night. Boldly, I step out amongst the few worn marble blocks, tracing inscriptions long gone; inscriptions that only my memory knows. I tell you about them, all the Southwells and Ellises, the Kents and Joys and Smiths. Some died young, cherubs in infancy. Others lived to be old and hoary as the trees that stand their guard. But all died in the end. So will you.
I place the flowers in the empty socket the scavenging wind has swept clean, and leave all their colours to rustle. The breeze stirs this new blessing, rousing scents from the roses’ slumber. You tell me they’re beautiful. I agree, but it doesn’t change my mind.
My victims to date are countless, but you’re only the second one I’ve kept track of. Those other killings were accidental, not deliberate. Not staged and planned carefully, not thought through or instilled with symbolism. Only recently have I decided to start existing like an artist, as I will exist today. You’re the second girl I’ve enticed with tales of agelessness and promises of long-lost secret places– the oldest cemetery in town, and now this secluded one.
Even as I sink my teeth in, I’m planning my next feat. I wonder where I’ll go next, and with what I will surprise myself. The top storey of a nightclub? The abandoned opera house? A derelict cottage on an acre of weeds? You hit the ground like a sack of potatoes, and I wipe my lips on my sleeve.
They’ll say it was a snake bite, when they find you. And in this cemetery, it won’t have been the first time.
You say that you don’t understand entirely. You’re young. You wonder aloud what a codger is, and I tell you. Codger is an insulting term for an old man become useless and pedantic. Oh. Is that all? Suddenly, you’re done with questioning. We lean together against the rotted fence posts, making the barbed wire groan. Every breath of the wind is a fresh affront, a blast from the furnace of the sky, or an air-melting exhalation from her bellows. The wind sighs the smells of horses, rust and cypress trees. Pressed flat against the glass bottom of the atmosphere, clouds skate overhead, white and blinding. You twist your sun-kissed hair around your freckled finger, and I think. I slump against the post, a bouquet dangling lazily from one hand.
Closely, I inspect its elements. Each rose I have brought is like a nebula or the explosion left by a dying star. The petals fold in perfect symmetry, bleeding pink into orange and sulphur into red. Lifeless white mixes with breathless blue; a blossom of drowning. And yet, every rose must wilt one day. Better to be picked, then, in the flower of youth. Better to be plucked a bud to bloom in a vase, admired and preserved as a tribute to the very phenomenon of death.
I think about something else, too, a thought that normally the night life brings out in me. The night life is all about consumption, neon and garish. Accordingly, it has a kind of morbid tinge. It is decay made into a circus. I know I’ve fallen, too, just like all the other clowns. I am immortal, not immune. There’s a story about a vampire, always an addict, seeking intoxication. Some vampires are happy junkies, while others are tragedies, emotional and torn. Addiction divides people, but at its core, it also brings us together under one damnation. We are dependent on something that makes us monstrous, whether we want to be monstrous or not.
And really, that’s what life is like. The living do some awful things. For all the fear they generate, the dead can’t harm you. But then there’s me.
I stride forward, braving the midday sun behind a pair of darkly tinted glasses. My eyes are sensitive to light– of all the parts of the human body, they are the first to disintegrate. Precious few undead have their eyes intact. On the whole, we prefer the night. Boldly, I step out amongst the few worn marble blocks, tracing inscriptions long gone; inscriptions that only my memory knows. I tell you about them, all the Southwells and Ellises, the Kents and Joys and Smiths. Some died young, cherubs in infancy. Others lived to be old and hoary as the trees that stand their guard. But all died in the end. So will you.
I place the flowers in the empty socket the scavenging wind has swept clean, and leave all their colours to rustle. The breeze stirs this new blessing, rousing scents from the roses’ slumber. You tell me they’re beautiful. I agree, but it doesn’t change my mind.
My victims to date are countless, but you’re only the second one I’ve kept track of. Those other killings were accidental, not deliberate. Not staged and planned carefully, not thought through or instilled with symbolism. Only recently have I decided to start existing like an artist, as I will exist today. You’re the second girl I’ve enticed with tales of agelessness and promises of long-lost secret places– the oldest cemetery in town, and now this secluded one.
Even as I sink my teeth in, I’m planning my next feat. I wonder where I’ll go next, and with what I will surprise myself. The top storey of a nightclub? The abandoned opera house? A derelict cottage on an acre of weeds? You hit the ground like a sack of potatoes, and I wipe my lips on my sleeve.
They’ll say it was a snake bite, when they find you. And in this cemetery, it won’t have been the first time.