They slip through the gate under cover of darkness, basket swinging, grins like school children playing hide-and-seek in the night. Her fingers caress the smooth marble headstones, the basket in his hand grazes the tips of the grass as they wend their way between, toward the hill at the centre of the graveyard. A great maple stands at the hill’s peak, in relief against a sky of equal black. Silhouette trees round the park and obscures it to the world beyond, its phantom visitors open solely to the vault of heaven above, obscured behind obsidian cloud. They come, the two, holding hands. They come, eyes flirting. They come, smiles barely contained on lips that twitch and tickle around the edges. They come, the muscles in their legs burning with slight exertion as they climb to the top of the hill.
He flings the blanket wide, with a flourish, its edge pinched between his fingertips. The blanket drifts to the ground like a mat of feathers, and spreads across the sullen earth, a bistro tablecloth over a mat of late autumn grass. She kneels and opens the basket, plucking out plums and tiny sandwiches filled with green cucumbers and yellow egg and bits of red onion. He seeks and finds two thin flutes and two wide goblets, and brandishes twin bottles, something red, something bubbly. A grins belies him in the dark. In fact, he hasn’t stopped grinning, since he opened the door for the girl in her long, flowing skirt dress and Bardot blouse and raced her out to the car, to drive madly, past reds and greens and silent streets, to arrrive, here, high above the canal, and the town that wound around it, its sparkling lights, reflecting off the rolling surface, patterned after the invisible stars above.
The night clouds roil, not with thunder or anger, but with silence. They churn against a breeze caught high up in the firmament, felt not a whit down below. Down on the cool grass, a cork pops, with a gasp and a giggle, and effervescent gold speeds up the centre of a flute and over the edge. Fizz leaps onto their lips and dances across their tongues and they smile with sly intent. Their eyes meet and flick away. Meet and flick away. There is laughter.
Somewhere, a clock strikes midnight.
It starts slow, imperceptible in the shadows. Here, a passing fancy blinks, there, a gentle spirit stretches a crooked hand. The shadows lengthen, stretch, become things unto themselves. They press against the roof of the earth under which they lay. They steal glances out the gaps, the rough grate of stone sepulchre doors seeps into the night. They climb over the roofs of the mausoleums, and peer from the edges of headstones and tree branch alike. Wind whispers through the leaves, they too mere shadows, their autumn reds lost to a midnight sky, their oranges and yellows muted by the rising ghosts that emerging from cross and tomb.
The blue and purple ghosts of the graveyard finger their way up out of their resting places, their spectral tendons reaching up toward the horizon below which they’ve been buried. They break through the sod and once more the soft, wet dew of autumn grass mists upon their ghostly forms. A shift in the air touches the pair, a soft chill that raises the hairs on their arms and the back of their necks. Still, they smile. He dips a strawberry in chocolate, and touches it to her lips. Blushing, she returns the gesture, teh sweet juices running off his chin. They embrace as the spirits emerge from the soil around the hill, and take up space as the shadows of the night.
They come one by one, at first, then in pairs, reaching out and holding hands as the first tender notes of a widow’s song rises up out of the ground. A mandolin, or perhaps a ukelele, tickled by the fingers of the dead, floats along the breeze, barely a sound. The hymn grows clearer, and pulls the couple to their feet. Wine glasses fall, discarded and dripping, upon the blanket, and feed their bubbling wares to the soil.
The music crescendos, the sound of drum and piano, of bass and horn, as orchestral magic blossoms into the night. The widow’s solitary croon gains a harmony, then another, then another. All around them, the dead take up partners and a slow, graceful waltz commences. Laughing, the man takes the girl’s fingers in his palm, and steps off the blanket into the grass, bowing in a slow, four stepped turn. The music fills their ears, and the dance changes, morphs, becomes a cantata, a rounding blend of falsetto and tenor, bass and soprano. The dead switch partners, tossing each other to and fro with a manic abandon, a maddened cotillion screamed in dusk.
More shadows appear, separating from the crooked and twisted lines of branches that crosshatch the night. They slither down trunks, leap out from headstones and burst from patches in the dirt. They sway and they swirl, and take the hands of the boy and of the girl. She twirls, her skirt poodling out and shredding, freeing her legs and arms to the cool autumn night. The cold snap licks her goosebumped flesh. The man laughs, and takes the hand of a widow, and arches her backwards. They spin away in frenetic loops, as the man and the girl once whirled the frozen canal, their skates carving a sphere into the surface beneath which a river roiled. From the canal come more of the dead, more of the forgotten, more spirits, more shadows. They dance and thrust, wailing and whirling like dervishes, barely distinguishable from the night. More and more, they come, generations of dead, generations of spirits, long-forgotten and never known, piling, squeezing, surrounding until the mass is one vast vortex, a tornado of dead beyond counting, the weight of it curling up into the sky, blotting all, blotting the ground, the graveyard, the maple on the hill, the canal and the town around it.
The woman feels her feet lifting, her heels rising, her toes falling upward from the blanket and into the bottom of a maelstrom, the centre of this vortex of the dead, its toll growing with each passing moment, as the residents of the park, the graveyard’s permanent spirits merge with those of a world long gone, lives long disappeared from the memories of those they once touched and love. The sky fills with souls lost in the valley, lost in the river, in the town, in the forests and hills beyond and before, from time before time, they grow, burying her and the man in shadows of the the damned and the forgotten. Widows screech their horrible forte, their anguished melody, and from the maelstrom comes a hand, his hand, one last strawberry barely holding on in his fingertips, and she stretches, strains, tears limb and ligament to reach it, its bristles in her fingers. She suckles the last bits of flesh. Juice stains her lips and falls away, drops disappearing into the maelstrom.
Then his hand is gone and the song of the damned rages about, no longer a jaunty tinkle, no ukelele, no mandolin, but an orchestra of hell born, in maddening descent, discordant and competing, jagged, dissonant, raucous thunder and crashing destruction, a wall of sound, at ends piercing and hollow, the depth of its sorrow mashing up against the memories of joy, of ecstasy, of frantic euphoria, and she’s swept, swept up, swept out, swept free and distraught. She clutches for something to hold onto, for a twig, a grasp, a headstone, a way to outrun it, to pull free and pirouette off mausoleum pillars and brooding obelisk, dashing against piers and columns, to leap the altars and exedras, searching, screaming, reaching out for a hand, his hand, wherefore art thou his hand, and his voice cuts through the noise, “come sit next to me, my sweetheart”, and at the final moment, she loses all that she is, torn to molecular shreds, and dashes against the tree on the hill, landing gently where their blanket lays, their spilled basket, their fallen flutes and she collapses, at the centre of the maelstrom, set down onto the grass by the low cant of widow’s loss, and soft, dead hands, swept up from the blanket, swept up, up, up into the air, into the sky, into the night, her eyes blind with leaden cloud and tears of widow’s loss become the whimpers of the damned and the ochestra falls beneath their crooning low, and she falls to the blanket, now worn and moth-eaten. The food from the basket is spoiled and rotten, the glasses, desiccated and empty, smeared with patterns of once upon a time. The leaves of the maple crinkle and detach, drift down upon her, and she lays, eyes closed to the earth, and remembers – strawberries and skating, midnight picnics, and lips brushed with chocolate and fizz.
The widows’ song fades to a murmur, and the orchestra drops away, piece by tortured piece. A sweet, sad, lonely flute whistles, a joyful mourn from a lone trumpet peels out in the distance and disappears, and the final polite tings of the ukelele announce their exit. A soft voice hums, spiderthin and insubstantial. The girl slumps to her knees, gathers the basket, picks up the champagne flutes, tucks the tattered blanket under her arm. She starts down the hill, spent and hollow. The last notes ring, as the shadows fade to their rest, and the weight of a history of lives long gone recedes to whence they came, with one more. The woman weeps, silent, single tears that hang on the cleft of her cheek, and in the distance, whispering up the frozen banks of the Rideau, a gentle croon sings her name.
Target: 1500 words
Written: 1869 words, novel: Father Lightning
Read: Catch-22, Joseph Heller
Comics: Gen 13 5, Gen 13 0, Team 7 1-2
Music: December 28, 1988, The Underground, Seattle, Nirvana