Southern Legitimacy Statement: This story arrived while I was sitting in the cemetery in Morgantown, West Virginia at the end of S High Street. It was a place I frequented often on sunny days, or cool days, too if it didn’t rain. I’d sit amongst the tombstones writing and reading or wander, adding names to my list for future pieces of fiction. Often I’d contemplate the lives the people had lived, how they’d died, what work they’d done. It was one of the places that helped grow my love for West Virginia and the people in it. Somehow surrounded by all those lives, I felt I understood the place. What they’d tried to achieve. What was lost along the way.
Remnants
Some dead rest easier than the living, but not all. Sometimes the children come creeping out and around, clamber into my lap, and sink into the circle of my hips and knees. Like this one right here. I attempt to surround her vaporous body with my arms, my skin hanging like wings strung across a clothesline.
I wrestle with her ephemeral self and tell her, “Won’t you please settle your rascally ass down.” She doesn’t listen. Her braids rub my body like ropes, the sisal splinters pricking my breasts and hollow chest.
Nearby, a vireo appears out of a juniper spotted with red berries. It jumps onto a grey tombstone just near us and sings a sweet-throated song. Her trills could sustain a mountain let alone a cemetery. She is delicate and alive, unlike this one writhing and wriggling in my lap.
“Put your arms around me.”
“Take them away.”
“Why won’t you pat my tummy.”
“There ain’t no tummy,” I tell her.
“Well pat it like it’s there. No right here, silly.”
“You silly crawling up out of your grave and clambering around amongst all this clover and these headstones like you’re alive. You ain’t alive.”
She pouts then, crosses her fossilized arms. If she had a lip to stick out it would shine as round as a plate, a firm, wide curve like these stones with the names of four children from the same family who all died on the same day. I’m sitting just below them in the grass as I often do. Maybe they died in some typhus epidemic. Or a house fire flared up in the middle of the night. Perhaps rheumatic fever took them. Papa outlived his children, but died young, too. The mama outlived them all. Lived until she was 89. Can you imagine all those years rolling away with your family lying up in this cemetery? I bet she spent a lot of time here like I do now. Maybe this one right here is hers, used to finding her mama rattling around the stones, pruning and planting flowers, or maybe just sitting and talking to the ones she loved best. Then one day mama’s a ghost, too, and there’s no lap to hold this child anymore.
There comes a point when you know more dead people than live ones. When sitting in a graveyard on a pale blue day with the warmth of the sun baking into your brittle bones surrounded by friends feels more like home than home.
When we were children, we’d come to these wide grounds in the middle of the night to play hide-and-go-seek in the dark amidst the dead. Our bodies running fearlessly from stone to stone where we’d sidle down to hide, gripping their rough sides. Our live flesh clutching the remnants of theirs.
