Empty Frame

The security footage would later show nothing.

I've replayed it exactly forty-seven times now, frame by frame, and all you can see is me—Kieran Hayes, thirty-four, divorced, two years into a job I took because it required minimal human interaction—walking toward an already-empty tomb at 5:51 AM, stopping, and having an animated conversation with the morning air. The timestamp never glitches. The image never warps. Technology, it turns out, has its limitations.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

I was pulling the graveyard shift at Memorial Gardens that Sunday—yeah, I know, ironic. The cemetery sprawls over forty acres of what used to be Illinois farmland, all rolling hills and strategic oak trees planted to suggest permanence. They'd hired me after some vandalism incidents two years back. Mostly, I sat in the security office watching Netflix on my phone and doing my rounds every two hours. The dead, I'd learned, make uncommonly peaceful neighbors.

At 5:47 AM, I was three episodes deep into a true crime series, nursing my third coffee—the cheap stuff from the break room that tastes like burnt rubber but keeps you vertical—when the motion sensors went off in Section C. The monitor showed the area in that grainy green of night-vision cameras. Nothing visible, but that wasn't unusual. We got deer mostly, sometimes raccoons. Once, memorably, a confused DoorDash driver at 3 AM insisting the app showed the delivery address as "Plot 447, Section B."

I almost ignored it. Almost went back to my show where some British detective was about to reveal the killer in a drawing room. But then came the tremor.

Not an earthquake—I'm from California originally, I know earthquakes. This was different. Like the earth had suddenly inhaled, held its breath, then released it all at once. My coffee mug walked itself across the desk and dropped, shattering on the floor in a spread of brown liquid that looked, in the pre-dawn light, disturbingly like old blood.

The Carpenter plot was in Section C.

Three days fresh, that burial. I'd been there when they sealed it Friday afternoon. High-profile case—the kind where reporters camp outside the gates and my phone buzzes with alerts about crowd control. The man had been thirty-three, a local teacher who'd apparently pissed off all the right people by suggesting radical things like debt forgiveness and universal healthcare. The conspiracy theorists had been having a field day. Some claimed he'd been murdered by the state. Others insisted he'd faked his death. The Facebook page had to turn off comments after someone posted a theory involving lizard people.

I grabbed my flashlight even though dawn was already bleeding gray through the oaks, painting long shadows across the headstones. The walk to Section C took three minutes normally. That morning it felt like three hours and three seconds simultaneously. Time does funny things when reality starts to fray at the edges.

The stone was moved.

Not broken. Not damaged. Not vandalized with spray paint or shattered with sledgehammers like I'd expected. Moved. Rolled aside like someone had simply asked it politely to step away from the entrance, and thousand-pound granite had obliged. The edges were clean. No chisel marks, no evidence of machinery. The ground around it was undisturbed—no tire tracks, no footprints except my own.

My first thought: grave robbers. My second: lawsuit. My third: I'm going to lose this job and have to go back to retail. My fourth, which I tried to ignore: the tremor, the impossible stone, the way the morning birds had all stopped singing at once.

I should have called it in. Protocol was clear. Any disturbance, any breach, radio immediately and wait for backup. Do not approach. Do not contaminate the scene. I'd signed papers acknowledging I understood this.

But my feet carried me forward instead, flashlight beam dancing across morning mist that rose from the grass like the earth's own breath.

The burial chamber was empty.

Not ransacked-empty. Not robbed-empty. Pristine-empty. Like a hotel room that had been cleaned but never occupied. Like a stage set before the actors arrive. The shroud lay folded at the foot of the space—actually folded, with military corners that would make my ex-marine father proud. Who folds their shroud after rising from the dead? Who takes that kind of time?

The air smelled wrong. Not bad—wrong. Like ozone before a storm, mixed with something floral I couldn't identify. Lilies, maybe, though none grew nearby. My grandmother would have called it the smell of "thin places," where the membrane between this world and whatever comes next grows tissue-paper delicate.

"You're early."

I spun around so fast I nearly brained myself on the entrance. A man stood there in jeans and a plain white t-shirt, the kind you buy in three-packs at Target. Dirt under his fingernails like he'd been gardening. Bare feet, which should have been wet from the dew but weren't. He looked familiar in that way where you can't place someone—maybe from the coffee shop where I grabbed breakfast, maybe from a dream you can't quite remember, maybe from every face you've ever trusted instinctively.

He had a gap between his front teeth when he smiled.

"The—the cemetery doesn't open until seven," I managed, my voice cracking like I was thirteen again.

"Time's a funny thing," he said. "Linear for you, less so for me now. Kelly's coming soon. She'll be worried. You should tell her..." He paused, tilting his head like he was listening to something I couldn't hear. "Tell her what she already knows but needs to hear. That love doesn't end with endings. That every death is just a comma, not a period."

"Sir, I need to see some ID. This is a restricted—"

"Kieran Hayes," he interrupted, though I wore no name tag, had never told him my name. "Thirty-four. Divorced because you were afraid of being truly seen. Working nights because the living remind you too much of what you're not doing with your life. Your mother—Diane—she's been waiting to hear from you since the argument last Christmas. The one about your father's will. She didn't mean what she said about you being just like him. Forgiveness, Kieran, is a door that opens from both sides."

My flashlight died. Fresh batteries I'd put in at the start of my shift, dead. But I could see him clearly in the growing dawn, could see through him, almost, like he was made of stained glass and the sunrise was streaming through.

"How do you—"

"I know a lot of things now," he said. "Like how you keep your father's dog tags in your truck's glove compartment but can't bring yourself to wear them. Like how you dream about the daughter you and Miranda never had. Like how you've been thinking about that bottle of pills in your medicine cabinet more often lately."

My knees went weak. I sat down hard on the damp grass, not caring about the moisture seeping through my uniform pants.

"It gets better," he said, crouching beside me. This close, he smelled like that impossible mixture—ozone and lilies and something else. Bread, maybe. Fresh bread. "Not easier, necessarily, but better. The pain you're carrying? It's not a life sentence. It's compost. Things grow from it if you let them."

"This isn't happening," I said.

"Probably not," he agreed. "At least not in any way that will show up on your security footage or hold up in a police report. But happening and real aren't always the same thing. You'll learn that."

He stood, offered me his hand. I took it. It was solid, warm, calloused like he'd worked with wood. He pulled me up with surprising strength.

"Walk with me," he said.

We walked through Section C, past the veterans' plots with their uniform white markers, past the children's section that I always hurried through on my rounds, toward the eastern gate. He knew names as we passed graves, mentioned them like old friends. "Melissa Fong, finally at peace after ninety-three years. Shane Derek, who died thinking no one would remember his paintings—there's a gallery opening next month featuring his work. Baby Hayes—no relation to you—who lived six hours but changed her parents' entire world."

"How do you know all this?"

"Death," he said, "is like taking off a heavy coat and realizing you can finally see your whole outfit. Everything makes sense from that side."

The sunrise hit just as we reached the fence. The light went through him—not around, not reflecting off, but through—like he was a prism breaking dawn into its component colors.

"Wait," I called out, suddenly desperate. "Are you—is this—am I having a breakdown?"

He turned back, that gap-toothed smile again. "Does it matter? Your mother's awake now. She's making coffee—the good stuff, not like what you drink—and looking at her phone, hoping. Call her, Kieran. Life's too short and too long to waste on silence."

Then he was gone. Not walking-away gone. Not ducking-behind-something gone. Gone-gone. Like a channel changing, like waking from a dream, like the moment between lightning and thunder.

Kelly Torres arrived twenty minutes later, while I was still standing there like an idiot, holding my dead flashlight and trying to process what couldn't be processed. She wore paint-stained jeans and a Columbia University sweatshirt, her dark hair pulled back in a messy bun. She'd been his student, I learned later. The one who'd organized the protests after his death, who'd kept vigil at the tomb.

She took one look at the empty chamber, one look at my face, and started laughing. Not hysterical laughter. Not breakdown laughter. Joy. Pure, ridiculous, impossible joy that seemed to bubble up from somewhere deep and ancient.

"You saw him," she said. It wasn't a question.

"I don't—I can't—"

"Yeah," she said, tears streaming down her face. "Yeah, I know. Me too. Earlier. At my apartment. He made me coffee. Can you believe that? Resurrection, and he takes time to work my Keurig."

The police found nothing. The cameras showed only me, walking to an already-empty tomb at 5:51 AM, standing there, talking to morning air. They drug-tested me twice. The detective, a tired-looking woman named Patterson, finally closed the case as vandalism, unknown perpetrators. But Kelly knew. The others who came throughout the day knew—twelve, maybe fifteen people, all with that same stunned look, like they'd touched a live wire and lived.

I called my mother that afternoon. Sat in my truck in the cemetery parking lot, watching families bring flowers to graves, and dialed the number I'd deleted and re-saved a dozen times.

"Kieran?" she answered on the second ring, hope and hurt tangled in her voice.

"Mom," I said, and then couldn't say anything else for a full minute while we both cried.

We talked for two hours. About Dad. About the will. About the things we'd said and hadn't said. About forgiveness being a door that opens from both sides. She's coming to visit next month. We're going to go through Dad's things together, finally.

The tomb stays empty. They've made it into some kind of shrine now. People leave flowers, prayers written on Post-it notes, questions no one can answer. Sometimes, in the early morning shifts, I see others there—the ones who've seen him too. We nod at each other. We don't need to speak. We're a club no one asks to join and no one would believe exists.

I still work the graveyard shift. Still drink terrible coffee. Still struggle with the bottle of pills that I haven't thrown away but haven't opened either. But something's different. The weight's less. The darkness has cracks in it where light gets in.

The security footage still shows nothing. But then again, it wouldn't, would it?