Graveyard Shift

5:39 AM

Arthur’s used to the idle stench of death–the caravans of spoiled blood that slither up through worn capillaries in the dirt towards the scarce, yet unmistakable light sliding off the moon, only to be scorched by the object of their pursuit, left to bake among headstones and spew dull, placid rot into the air.

This new scent, however, is in motion. It opens its own vessels. It strikes as the moon slips from view but before the sun assumes its position, wielding the momentary confusion in the sky as a cloak to protect its potency.

Arthur glances at the shrubs lining the gate–rather, they intrude upon his eyes by way of shredded limbs and emaciated leaves. He’d done his best to make the greenery presentable during his shift; it is not easy to dress up a corpse and convince people it lives.

He sighs and begins to trace the scent. As he staggers forward, the light from his lantern plays in the spaces between graves and manipulates shadows into mothers, fathers, daughters and sons in motion, endlessly stringing the same spool into new forms, draping the threads over rose thorns and fallen petals. The stage play continues without acts, a cast of faceless characters organized into rows and columns that rotates on and off the stage, half-formed lives projected from vague epitaphs and propped up on the screen.

Arthur ignores the procession completely. He appreciates structure in his stories, the expectation of a break in the actio–

“About time!”

An elderly woman springs from the foot of the grave, cleaving through the dirt without disrupting the structure. Worms have ripped the hairs on her head from their pores and taken their place, drooping downwards to gnaw at her eyes. Her bones are visible through the tears in her glaring purple blouse, its gaudy hue perfectly–unfortunately–embalmed. She attempts to straighten her posture and arranges what’s left of her face into a snarl, only for her dilapidated skeleton to fold over and her expression to collapse moments later. This does not stop her from trying again.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Arthur scoffs weakly, half asleep. “I’m only ten minutes late.”

“Late!” she croaks, her rickety voice knifing through the air. “Late is late. I spelled the time out very clearly in the dirt.”

“And yet you still felt the need to ruin my hedges.”

“I had to! Dense as most men are, I had to hit you where it hurts.”

“Well, you got me,” Arthur grumbles, scratching the side of his beard. “Real pain in the ass it was, fixing your mess.”

“Good! For as long as I had to live in this miserable town, it’s only right I get to be a pain in someone’s ass. I deserve it!” The whine in her voice bores deeper and deeper into Arthur’s ears with each word.

“If you were so unhappy, you could’ve moved,” Arthur responds. “Then I wouldn’t be in this situation.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, boy. The Duvall family has lived here for generations! I can’t just up and move!”

“...Fine. Be miserable, then.”

“I was! And I still am, for the record. This whole death affair is making my bad knee ache worse than ever, and this shirt is so terribly itchy, and I lost an earring in my coffin, and I’ve had that earring for thirty years, it was my favorite earring–”

“Okay, okay. Please, tell me what I have to do to make you go away forever.”

She sidles towards him. Seeing that she has no intention of sidestepping, Arthur parts the sea for her. She continues towards his truck, and he trails behind; against the grotesque gray of her skin, the layers of grime and mud devouring the chassis become almost transparent.

“I’ve got somewhere to be, boy. Let me drive.”

“Not happening,” Arthur mumbles, nearly shoving past her. “I’ll drive you wherever you need to go. But if you’re leading me on, I’m taking you straight back here and burying you again myself.”

“Don’t be a sissy! I haven’t driven in so long. My good-for-nothing grandson had my license taken away.”

“...Exactly.”

“Get off that high horse,” she sneers. “It’s not much longer ‘til your ‘family’ comes and tells you what you can and can’t do and locks you away in a home. I see the gray in that beard, boy. The time gets away from you fast! I set traps outside my house to catch it, but it never took the bait. Then the dogs in the HOA came after me about my lawn–”

“Please just get in the car.”

A prolonged turn of the key resurrects the engine and the truck lurches forwards, then backwards with a slight tilt to the right, then forwards again… and backwards with a more pronounced tilt to the right this time, and–

“Lousy backer-upper!”

“Give me a break!”

They set off, the truck vaulting over bumps in the road and throwing up diesel on the way down. As they drive, the naked dirt around the graveyard evolves into a thick forest dimly revealed by feeble headlights, the road relentlessly staving off weed infestation, the pines on either side drooping towards their neighbors across the pond to form a canopy ensnaring the space below. Arthur does not remember this road being so narrow, or these trees being so involved with one another.

“This seat is a racket! My back hurts already!”

Arthur does not respond; the icicles bursting from her eyes do not wait for a response to begin pelting the side of his head.

“Make this thing go faster, boy! My skin’s rotting all over again and it itches.”

Arthur does not respond.

“Have you cleaned this windshield at all since I died? I can barely see!”

Not the windshield’s fault, Arthur mouths voicelessly.

“Say, boy, how did you end up working at a graveyard? What’s the point? What’s dead is dead! Are you sure you’re even alive yourself, spending all your time weeding and trimming for a gallery of corpses? I’m lucky there’s someone as sorry as you! If you weren’t so attached to such a sad life, I’d have no one to get my ghost to the other side, by cracky! My thanks to the Lord for creating suckers like you–”

Arthur slams his fist on the dash.

“I care about this place! That’s why. Even people as… as miserable as you need someone looking out for them. You care about this town, too.”

“Not a chance!” she retorts.

“If you don’t, then why are you still here?” Arthur’s eyes veer towards the old woman, abandoning the slim road ahead. His foot plants itself on the gas.

“Hell if I know!” she barks. “It’s not my fault my spirit has unfinished business! It’s got a mind of its own!”

“You seriously don’t know? Then where are we go–”

“DEER!”

Arthur’s head snaps back towards the road, whiplash propelling his pupils into the folds of his cornea and inciting panic in his senses, but instinct catalyzes a signal that snakes across a network of well-paved synapses down from his head to his chest to his right leg to his foot and…

SCREEEEE!

He hits the brake. The truck’s suspension clings to the chassis as it attempts to fly away.

The deer is safe. Its vacuous gaze shifts away from the headlights over to the herd on the left side of the road, in which it finds substance and a purpose. It removes itself from the way.

“You’re… too careless, boy. You and I both know there’s deer out at night around here.”

Arthur nods. “...Right.”

He looks ahead, where the deer once was. He realizes there is nothing. Darkness has invariably gutted the landscape, so dark that he can no longer perceive the contours of the trees, so dark that his headlights begin to doubt their own state of brightness, so dark that the ethereal outline wrapped around the old woman is all that is left to illuminate his own thoughts.

“What are you waiting for? We’re wasting time!”

“...Huh?” Arthur’s eyes are wide and his throat has been seized by fear.

“Step on the gas, boy!”

“But it’s–”

“I was right! You are a sissy! If you’re that scared of the dark, I’ll call out the directions towards where my soul’s pullin’ me.”

He nods and injects speed into the truck. Its wheels chug along a displaced path, its grooves and bumps shorn away by the abyssal black seizing at the world. Arthur begins to feel himself drift into nothingness, too, his thoughts suspended in an impossibly dense solution of darkness, until…

“Take a left here.”

Arthur jolts back to reality and swings the truck to the righ–

“I SAID LEFT! Is there anything at all between those ears?!”

“My bad.”

He corrects his course and continues. The old woman’s directions continue as well, with a little less bile in her voice after each turn. After some time, however, they become purposeless. Arthur gradually unearths the path forward, nestled deep in his muscle memory. The darkness remains impenetrable; his hands and feet do not need light to reenact a decades-old story.

“Right here,” the old woman says softly after some time.

Arthur brings the truck to a halt and kills the engine. He steps out into the darkness, and wraps around the front of the truck to help the old woman out of the car. Her hands have nearly withered down to the bone now, and the worms have all but extinguished her eyes. He walks on air towards the destination, leading the old woman down a gentle slope, avoiding the imperceptible sticks in the wa–

“Let go of me, boy! I can handle myself just fine!”

“...Kay. Sorry.”

The firm material under his feet quickly turns into something looser, sparking remembrance.

Where else but here, he thinks. He wants to think some more, but his brain is interrupted.

In an instant the darkness is fried to a crisp and its ashes fertilize the dirt behind them, trees and shrubs and bushes and stubborn weeds and fallen leaves sprouting. Light finally finds its way to the sand ahead of them, cruising within divots and skipping back along the sparkling ocean on a return trip to its source–a rising sun.

After a struggle to pull his eyes away from the newborn sky, Arthur glances towards the old woman. Daylight, weak as it is at the moment, is accelerating her decay. She is a skeleton now, and her bones will not last long under the intensifying sun. Her nonexistent eyes are fixed on the horizon.

“Can you see it?” he asks.

“Of course not, don’t be daft! But I can sense it. This knot within me is… unwinding. I think I just wanted to make sure this spot was intact.”

Her left shoulder hollows out, and her arm falls to the ground. She falls, crumpling downwards and planting her knees in the sand.

“No matter how upset I became with my life… I never let it tarnish this shore here. My secret getaway from it all… I wish I had been able to watch one more sunrise here while I was still alive.”

The shift in her posture confirms Arthur’s suspicion: the person whose existence he believed in under that surface of anger has been returned to him, one last time.

“You would… you would get along with my grandson, I think,” she whispers, her vocal cords dislodging themselves from her skeleton as she talks. “He was… always putting up with my bitterness… when no one else would. Such a strange boy…!”

Her torso collapses. Her legs disappear into the sand.

“I gave everyone every reason to leave me to die in this town… and yet he never did. I would bring him here sometimes, as a treat for putting up with me, I suppose…”

Then her skull is all that remains.

“I wish I could tell him… he’s finally rid of me…! Ha…”

“I’ll pass the news along,” Arthur assures her.

This assurance seems to be all that her spirit needs to finally let go.

Arthur watches the lingering vestiges of his grandmother fade into sunrise mist. He reaches inside his jacket for a cigarette, but the box is empty. He does not let this upset him.

Rest easy.