The Cemetery Dance

Content Warning: Mentions of death and grief.

 Dirt. 

There’s nothing but dirt. 

Heavy. Wet. Shoving its way down your throat. Clinging to your skin. 

No one tells you this. 

About the clawing. The battle. That you have to fight your way back into the light. Break through the wood. Endure the bugs. Their legs, racing over your skin. Or what’s left of it anyway. 

Because you’re not really skin.

Not even bones. Nor blood. 

Just shimmer. Suggestion. Moonlight on glass. Dust motes in a sunbeam. 

Spirit. 

And you have to fight just to be remembered. To move on at all. 

Isn’t death supposed to be a sort of sleep?

But this is war. And these are the rules. 

So you break out into the night and you’re drowning in the moonlight. In the taste of the night breeze. Briny. Muddy. The air off of the river. If you could breathe, you’d swallow it. Lungful by lungful.

  You’re drowning in the sight of the Spanish moss dangling from the cypresses. In the way that the moon paints the stones rising from the mossy earth in a silver sheen. In the trees, crickets are humming. Fireflies flicker. The branches wave and rattle together. 

And you want to race barefoot out of this cemetery. Feel the mud cold between your toes. 

But you can hardly move. You can see the ground through your own feet, the blades of manicured grass. And you can hardly move. 

And you’ve still got on the sweats you were wearing when—well, you know when. And how completely unfair. To be dressed in anything less than your best. Today, of all days. Or now, rather. Of all the moments. 

Molasses. 

That’s what you feel like. Thick. Slow-moving. And stuck. 

Is the wind brisk? Balmy? 

Is the night dense and humid, like a weighted blanket? 

Is there dew in the grass?

If you can’t answer such questions, is there a point in existing? Even if it’s only halfway?

Is there? 

Somewhere in the distance, a coyote howls. 

Long. Lonely. Rattling your bones. Echoing in the hollow place you once had a beating heart. 

You’re not sure you could make a sound, even if you tried your hardest. 

No scream. No sigh. No tears. 

Who knew the quiet could be such an ache?

It’s as if your bones are going to bend right in two from the weight of saying nothing at all.

Is this half-translucent silence—this limbo, state of suspension—all you have to look forward to? Forever. Just like this? 

A voice. 

Raspy with disuse. But warm. 

At first, you just think it’s the wind. Or wishful thinking. A whisper between the leaves. 

“Yes dear, we all ask those questions at first.” 

But no. Not your imagination. Not just the wind or a wish, or yet another thing you’re longing for that is hovering just out of reach.

A woman. Or something of the like. 

In a long dress now out of fashion. Muddied boots. A long braid swings behind her. 

And her all in shades of silver and grey, flickering like a shadow in the midnight breeze.

Do you look the same way?

Half there and half not? An impression more than anything, a pantomime of a person? 

For a long moment, you say nothing at all.

The old woman—can a ghost truly even be old?—just hovers there. Feet barely brushing the grass. Just waiting, a steady expression on her face. A soft smile. As if familiar with this process of hovering. The overwhelmingness of it all. 

You’re feeling everything. The breeze, the grass, the moonlight surround you like water.

But you’re feeling nothing. You don’t even have a body. Or pain receptors. Or firing neurons. No synapses.

None of those things from science classes that you never even bothered to care about until now. 

Because those are the things that make up a person, you remember. Think you remember. Because you did only have a C minus.

Besides the point. 

If you don’t have any of those things, if you aren’t alive, can you still be a person?

Can you still matter?

“What am I?” you ask.

And you say the words out loud. 

You sound nasal. Like you’re about to cry. Like a child pouting.

Do you truly say the words out loud? Could anyone else hear them? Or just you, and this woman? 

It’s that thing. The whole tree falling in a forest thing.

“Well, the word we tend to prefer is spirit, dear. It’s so much kinder than ghost. Speaks much more to the vitality of you. Ghost is so dreary, don’t you think?”

Ghost. 

The word reverberates around you. Echoes off the trees.

Possibly it tears the sky itself apart. 

You want to vomit. Can you vomit? Would it be a ghostly puddle, stuck between worlds? Or do you just get this quivering sense of nausea? The world spinning under your feet, your stomach twisting. Forever. 

You fall to your knees. Swear you can taste bile, feel it bitter on your tongue.

Nothing happens.

Nothing.

Is that what you’re doomed to? Forever?

“Oh dear,” the woman—ghost. Spirit?—says cheerfully. “Perhaps it’s a bit too early for that. Up you get now, and I’ll try to properly welcome you.”

The woman’s voice sounded like the creaking open of a door or the swaying of the ancient cypress boughs in the graveyard around you.

You stand up. 

Because what other choice is there?

You’re not really standing, you just now realize, looking at your toes. Drifting. Toes brushing the grass. 

A hovering silvery shadow. 

Well.

A ghost. 

That brings the nausea right back. 

“What—what happens now?” That is all you manage to say. 

You’re fighting the phantom vomit again.

The woman smiles, her teeth blindingly silver. She is all teeth. Thin smile lines. All etched in silver light. 

“Oh, not to fret. There are so many possibilities.”

The moon above, you’re just now noticing, is bright and full, a silver coin. Spookily so. 

Appropriate.

Now you feel like laughing. Loudly. Unevenly. Like a lunatic. 

It bubbles out of you and you cover your mouth. That does nothing to stop the sound.

“Are you gonna tell me I have unfinished business?”

Your shoes are united. Laces brushing the grass. Had you actually died with your shoes untied?

The woman smiles, drifting in a loose circle around you. 

“Some of us do. Jobs left undone, family that you’re missing. A lifelong dream you never managed to accomplish. Or maybe you just wanted to help people.”

This reminds you of your parents. Of your siblings. Cold snowflakes. Worn running shoes. Chipped nail polish. Uneven laughter. 

The sound of tears. 

Heavy sobs. Lines on cheeks. Your mother’s shaking hands. Your sister, dropping a used tissue on the ground, where it drooped like a flower in the rain. There it is, by the base of your gravestone. Still. Returning to the earth.

How had you forgotten?

Scared. They must be so scared. Lonely and empty and—and—

And you run right back to your grave. 

Cowardly. 

And there you stay, for who knows how many days. Hovering. Haunting. Just above the gravestone.

Some days, it rains, and the dirt around the grave turns to mud. Puddles reflect fragmented pieces of the sky—like you reflect pieces of a person. Cold water tracing lines in the stone. 

On other days, the sun is high and you hide in the cool dark dirt. 

Cloudy days go by in a haze of sorrow. 

Nights are best. 

You sit on your stone. Watch teenagers sneak and light cigarettes. Count the stars. 

At least they’re always there.

So is the woman, among the shadowy, but now familiar, gravestones, a silent audience. But she keeps her distance. Watching. Always watching with a patient expression. Sometimes, there are others with her, silver blurs you don’t want to look too closely at. One ghostly companion is more than enough.

And there’s your family too. Every day, a different one of them. Tears. Silence. Whispers. Rage, from your brother. Stomping and shouting. 

  So many times you reach out. The sun shines right through your fingers. Never do you touch anything. 

Not a thing.

No touching hands. No pulling your family members close. No making them feel any better at all. 

A ghost.

Not even a spirit.

Not a life force.

A useless image. Useless.

You’d flicker and disappear if you could. Can you?

It’s night again. Another useless night. The moon is a crescent now. A scratch or nail mark against the skin of the sky. Bleeding silver light. 

It’s cold now. Fog churning up off the river. Great grey clouds of it. You wish you could feel it: the cold stinging your skin. Numb lips. Numb hands. Watching your breath in the air. 

To breathe. 

What a luxury. One you always took for granted.

Until finally, that voice again.

“Oh no, it’s not as bad as all that, dear. It just takes some getting used to, is all. Up you go now.”

You’re not even sure if she touches you. Can ghosts touch one another?

But you’re standing up now. 

Looking up at the moon. It’s almost as if it’s smiling.

“They don’t need me,” you say. Your family. How can you help them, anyway?

She says nothing. 

“What are my options? Stay or go?” 

Stuck. Like molasses.

The woman nods. Why did you never ask her name?

“More or less. But it’s not so simple. There are rules to follow. It’s the cemetery dance,” she says cryptically.

Smiling cryptically too.

Ugh.

This.

Suspended animation. How endlessly complicated. 

“You can pass on if you wish, dear. Cross through the veil and into whatever awaits you there. But only if you decide to take the leap.” 

“Where does that go?” You ask, looking at your shoelaces.

Perpetually untied shoelaces. And endless itch in your fingers. 

The woman laughed then. Like a raven croaking into the night. Smiles lines creasing.

“Well, child, if any of us knew that, wouldn’t we all go?” she laughed again. “No, it’s just a step into the dark, dear. The price you pay for peace is uncertainty, apparently. But well,”

She tweaked the side of her nose. 

“That’s why they call it faith.” 

What can you say to that?

“Or you can stay,” the woman continued, apparently unfazed. “To be a guardian to the confused new souls, like you, to be a comfort to those left behind, and to keep cemeteries sacred spaces. Like I do. Like we all do.”

When you look, they line the edges of the cemetery. Shining silhouettes. An audience cast all in silver. 

Those you’d never bothered to approach before, but always seen in the corner of your eye.

Watching, but keeping a respectful difference.

You try to take a step towards them. Forget you don’t have feet. Stumble over translucent shoelaces. Remember you can float. 

Fight the urge to scream. 

These souls seem so settled. So content in their chosen existence.

You’d always been a wanderer. Even when you’d died. How you’d died. In a screech of metal. Wind still in your hair.

Could the murmur of the river, the cypresses with their beards of Spanish moss, the endless stars above be enough? Was it? 

Could you know peace, always staying the same? Standing back and watching your family grieve, then move on? And leave you here, always here in this cemetery?

And was it even helping them? 

No. 

Why had no one told you it would be this way? All this fighting, when you most wanted to hide?

It was paralyzing. This grief. It made you want to bury your head back in the dirt. 

Your chest hurts all the time. From the act of not breathing, more than anything.

You had already climbed out of the dark. 

Could crossing the veil be any worse?

They say death is supposed to be a sort of sleep. Could it be?

“What do I have to do?”

They’re all around you now. The spirits of the cemetery. All of them. A loose circle of shades.

Everything is gilded in moonlight. 

The whole cemetery, touched by silver. 

The woman smiles knowingly.

“Just close your eyes. Be willing to let go. Step into the darkness. Oh and, don’t be afraid my dear. Think of it as the next great adventure.”

And it doesn’t matter what comes next. If it’s everything you’ve ever been taught or hoped or if it’s nothing at all.

It will be better than this. Stasis. Trapped in one place. 

Never moving.

Never changing.

Never feeling anything except what already lives in your own head. 

“Thank you,” you say because it’s only right.

You turn towards the river as if the current can pull you onward.

The last thing you see before you close your eyes is the silvery silhouettes, moving around you in a circle.

The ghosts. The moon. The stars.

All tangled up together. 

And all at once, you realize: this is the cemetery dance. This is the way to keep the cemetery sacred. 

By helping others out of the darkness.

Out of their guilt. Their grief.

By lighting the way through the sadness, guiding the way for the lost.

You are so tired of being lost. 

The stars. 

The sound of the river. 

The wind in the trees.

You are so tired of being lost. You close your eyes.