Grave Stepping

I almost step on an old man’s grave and his son says to watch out for hell. His father’s down in there unfortunately, and if I step on him then, well—

Warnings are quick to itch my instincts. I nod at the warning son. Come on now, feet, retreat, I command. Do hold onto the warning, but certainly hold on tighter to your mother, I command. For she is dead. My mother is dead. 

So come on now, feet, retreat, retreat. 

I can’t be falling into hell.

***

There’s a hole in the ground where my mother’s bones will lay for all of ever. She’s not here yet, however. She’s encased and waiting back at the church right now, so I’m the one getting the first view into her new home. I look down into the hole, peek into its shape like I’m pillaging deep into the deep of the unlived parts of the eternities. 

I’m part lunatic. I will admit that. For the hole is plenty big enough for my mother’s casket, for her to have an arsenal of personal space, even if her body doesn’t need room to wiggle anymore. This discovery pleases me severely. My mother will not be completely lost in the sunken dirt of her new forever home. She’ll be as comfortable as a cat in a cradle, I see. 

This makes me happy. 

I’m crazy.

***

The old dead man and his warning son are not unfamiliar to me. They are family, for the most part. They come from my mother’s side, but I know them as much as I know the weight of a summer star. So to me they are from the outside—outside family not joined through the sharing of community or blood. 

I am adopted, young enough to be my mother’s grandchild, with nieces and nephews older than me, with siblings old enough to be my more believable parents. I am a child to elder parents who rarely had friends over, family visits mostly set for big occasions and the occasional little. I am adopted, different from my parents in blood and in skin, but my mother is my mother, dead in body or alive.

Here in my mother’s cemetery I walk past her mourners, those who resemble billboards to me. Some of them are family I know, some of them are family I don’t and will never know. Others are not family at all, their faces like copies I have seen before but could not put a life to a face. The meeting of strangers for such occasions is apparently normal.

I feel the wind of shared mourning graze me like a bullet. But I don’t want to share. I must be alone. So now I begin a private stroll around my mother’s cemetery.

***

My mother has plenty of dead neighbors with her now: her parents, other family, and other people’s dead. This cemetery is small, compacted and square, with enough room to take laps and spread out while never really losing sight of a grave, the dead in the closest of proximities. 

I think I want to know these other dead. They are my mother’s new neighbors after all. I feel like a voyeur as I look down at them through my glasses and my imaginations. Maybe I am a voyeur. But I am also a sufferer and a writer. 

Listen, I’ve come to a decision here, here in my mother’s cemetery. I’m going to create comfort and stories. Sue me. The couple a row down from my mother were time travelers who finally lost to time. The young woman who died before marriage isn’t waiting for marriage in death. She’s a ghost detective, and she’s busy. Leave her alone.

The children who died of now treatable illness are playing all the children’s games. They are very happy. They are very much alive in their deaths.

We just can’t see them.

***

My mother’s cemetery is littered with the life of the living and the dead of the dead. 

I walk around under the simmer of the afternoon sun, my flats brushing through trimmed and blushed grass. I’m sweating under the sun and under grief. I pay attention to the colored wreaths, flags, and flowers decorating graves—festive in a way, like I’m back on the sidelines at a parade with my parents, everyone waving color to the air.

I keep walking, but I’m not one-directional. I walk one way and then the next, go in circles around the gravestones nearest to my mother and then I go further and further out into the cemetery. I roam like my feet are on forever go. When I stop to talk to family I don’t hear what I’m saying or what I’m listening to.

I don’t look into faces either. I have sisters somewhere here among the mourners I pass by. I have brothers somewhere here too. I am the youngest at twenty-eight, and my siblings surpass me in many areas by living lives outside of my imagination—as partners or parents like my mother, some of them both and some of them neither. My siblings, people to me who can live outside in the world, even if they didn’t want to, where I am the dweller of the home and of fiction.

I don’t want to talk to them, so I walk under the sun. I know I have a father somewhere here too, his grief a pain I don’t want to bear at the moment. I keep walking.

Oh life. Let me continue my stories.

***

The dead only sleep and have fun in the ground in their cemeteries. During the day they’re wherever they want to be, in their paradise.

We just can’t see them.

***

There’s a hole in the ground with nothing but bug-seasoned dirt and the thriving bugs themselves. I cannot see them all, but this is their home too, and soon they will need to share it with another. 

My mother’s still not here yet to see the heart of her new home, with the support of her family at the dead of her side. I won’t get to see her lowered into this deep black. This is both good and bad to me.  It was expensive, the enormity of my mother’s casket, and not seeing it be where it’s supposed to be upsets me badly. 

What also upsets me: I don’t want my mother in an eternal ground.

I’d prefer her sitting in comfort, chest-free under a decade’s warm nightgown, bare feet dry with experience and life, ankles crossed on the couch while she watches people get surgeries or their pimples popped on TLC.

“How can you watch this?” I would ask her after walking by the screen.

My mother would wave her hand and laugh. “Oh, stop it. It’s a human body. It’s not gross.”

Here in my mother’s cemetery I look down into the hole that was dug for her. Was that a flicker of a screen I saw in the deep black? Probably not, but…

Who knows?

***

Spoken words flutter by my ears before I can squish them as I move around the cemetery. I hear the voice of a family member, who at the church service commented on a song my mother loved to death. This voice is laughing, reminiscing, and I despise it. 

What mother is this that they speak of? For the mother I knew didn’t listen to country music on blast, didn’t dance around the house or under the scorching lights of a dance hall. 

My mother drank television like cold soda, her feet dancing when we went to stores, yard sales, or when she became an interior designer and couldn’t stop moving the energy that energized her, which came and went like a flame. Because the mother I knew was an elder from when I was a baby to when I am now.

So who is this woman that they speak of? Stop talking about her.

She is not a part of my stories.

***

My relationship with writing is a complication. It started as most do, through childhood poems written about the sun and our love for our mighty parents. Then as I grew I started writing children’s stories, which will never see the light of the light. Then I started writing poetry again as a teenager, when the world outside my bedroom was a horror villain, and I just liked to be alone with myself. 

These poems or confessions, these journal entries were never child friendly. I didn’t know myself so I didn’t like myself. Once I read a few aloud to my best friend at the time and her boyfriend. Awkward silence, awkward everything.

Later I started writing the beginnings and middles to young adult novels, where the girls were never happy because they didn’t know how. This depressed my mother.

“Can’t you write happier stuff?” she would ask me, though I now know that she was proud of my writing, often telling friends and family, nurses and doctors, about the writings of her youngest daughter.

“I don’t write happy,” I told her then, and it was true. I used to think that there was something inherently wrong with me because I couldn’t keep a conversation as well as others, because being around people for too long ached my stomach like acid. 

And to be the quiet girl was to be the suspicious girl, the un-fun girl. Who would want to read or be that?

If you were a girl in my writings you better watch out. You were never going to be happy.

Sorry.

***

My mother will fit in so nicely with the other women of the cemetery. In my stories there will be witch queens, goblin queens, ghost queens—human queens—women of no royalty. A congregation of women is always a beauty of a thing.

My mother too is a lover of beauty, of all faces, so she will thrive here. She doesn’t fear differences. Not now in her death, nor in the years of her living, like when she chaperoned on a school field trip for me and let me hide the fear on my face when a boy with facial trauma wanted to sit with us on the teacup ride. When I was afraid she wasn’t. When I saw a face my mother saw the beauty of a boy alive.

But listen, please, while my mother is still kind, she can absolutely snatch blood now. Maybe she’s actually a vampire now. That would make visiting me easier. She’s still sweet, but maybe she holds a little mean and doesn’t tolerate disrespect or injustice anymore. But she’ll still be my mother. She’ll still be alive enough to talk to me. 

She’ll also be free from sickness, free from demise.

***

A conversation with a family friend who I don’t know ends. People are standing static, squatting by graves like wrestlers, walking around and chatting like they’re at a backyard barbeque. Others are as quiet as I am. Though in most of the mourners I can hear the crumbling of hearts and it destroys me. 

The wind of shared mourning grazes me again, and I fidget. But I’m still very upset with the cemetery’s living people right now. All of them.

Do they not see where their feet are stepping, who they’re stepping on? Grave stepping isn’t hopscotch. It’s not a game. I think we’re being much too loud. But maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe the dead want noise. Maybe my selfishness should go take a lap.

I can’t give the dead the audibility of my spoken words. But I can continue to give them the words of my silent stories.

***

Bloodless gnome king battles. I can see it. Lightspeed travelers traversing the different kingdoms of the dead. I believe it.

In my stories I see dead men’s hands digging and digging with shovels through tunnels, light and winding, connecting a wizard realm to a griffin paradise. In my mother’s cemetery I see ghost fathers teaching their sons and daughters how to spook and how to save. They’re having a ball. Don’t try to catch them.

Men who drowned in cement now bend earth. Men who fell by machine are now machine-proof. Some men are not good here, though. Some of my dead, the old dead man and touch of his hands, and some of the other dead, they are not good.

Most are. Most men of the cemetery are just living their dead lives. But some of them aren’t living those lives to the fullest. Some of them are sitting in wait.

***

My father is a man with a stolen identity. If I could I would call the police for him, if only they would take us seriously. Husband has been stolen from him just as viscously as daughter to a mother has been stolen from me. But at least I am still somebody’s daughter. My father is no longer somebody’s husband.

The hurt of his loss is a carving on his elder face, his face which is usually slow to show any inklings of distress. 

My father, a gentle man, but still a man born when men were taught to never show their face. I mourn for my father too, the theft of his being. I see him in my mother’s cemetery of the living and of the dead. He is surrounded by support that I cannot give him now. 

I keep walking. I make a version of him in the ground, waiting for the return of his queen to his touch. In this story I won’t give him an ounce of blood lost, no sadness because even though he is a reader like me, a reader of science and fantasy, he doesn’t much like it when I write too much blood.

Once I started a novel with a prince losing his family in a coup for the ages. At the end of the chapter only he and one of his guard dogs makes it out alive. I gave the chapter to my father to read. He didn’t think much of it.

“Too much blood,” he had told me.

“It’s a coup, dad,” I had told him back.

“Still…”

The version I make for him won’t have to wait long for his love’s arrival in this story. There will be no loss of blood.

His queen will greet him under the afterlife’s sun with a smile and the press of her heart.

***

Are there theme parks in the afterlife? If so, can I visit my mother and take her on a trip to the afterlife Disney World? Can our hands deadlock up in the air, almost grazing the sky, because she taught me to reach my arms and my dreams, not lower them? 

Are there discount stores in the afterlife? If so, can I visit and bring my mother on a trip, coupon savings a mountain’s height because she taught me saving isn’t depraving. 

Patience brings the fruit.

***

I have been able to avoid hell in its entirety on my travels. Here in my mother’s cemetery I’m becoming a professional. Yes, I am a professional stepper now, which is good because I am thirsty and don’t require added heat. I still have fears, however. I fear walking on someone else’s life. The people at rest, would my stepping wake their memories, the good and the terrible?

Would the fairy shatter her wings if I step too suddenly and destroy her?

Would the demon slayer stumble if I step too long and disrupt her?

Would the siren braiders cease their communal braiding if I step too hard and annoy them?

Would the children playing seek hide forever if I scare them by stepping for much too long?

I hope not. For the sake of my mother, for the thriving of my mother’s heart.

***

This new change in home address shouldn’t bother my mother too greatly. She was also a mover in her living life. She moved houses like she did furniture and furniture like she did her feet around the house.

I can count off the charts how many times I came home to see myself in a new living, entering a new kitchen, with a smiling mother happy to show off her work. My mother liked changes in space, in scenery, I try to tell myself. 

She also wanted to die.

***

Her Alzheimer’s didn’t kill her. Her diabetes didn’t kill her. Her liver problems didn’t kill her. Her other ailments, the extent I cannot all name, didn’t kill her. Her age didn’t kill her either. We don’t know exactly what it was that took my mother’s life, but she wanted to die, to escape the terrors of the taking of her memory—to evade the way few things made sense to her anymore.

My mother wanted to die, to rejoin dead family and friends, to regain her hearing and the vitality of her past self. And while this will be her final move, she must be happy.

Truly, she must.

***

The women of the cemetery will show my mother how to grow eternal loving fruit and how to brew, how to build anything with angel hair, and how to dance without using feet when she leaves her days in heaven for the nights down in the cemetery. 

My mother will be happy.

Some of the women will teach her how to salvage and how to hunt, how to hurt the predators, the trickers, the warlords, if she needs to. Others will introduce my mother to all the children. My mother will be ecstatic. 

Maybe she’ll adopt again, another daughter who she can binge watch TV with and eat sugared sweets with like she did with me—a daughter she can go shopping with and talk to during the dead of the night about anything like she did with me.

Maybe she won’t adopt at all, however. Maybe my mother will no longer be a mother, indeed. Maybe she’ll be what my other family sees, what they remember of her from when I didn’t exist. Maybe my mother will be every version of her and none of them at all.

Oh life, family, I am the storyteller. Don’t take my breath from me. 

If my mother remains mother I want her to have another daughter. I don’t want to be replaced. I want to be her forever youngest child and daughter.

I also want my mother to be forever happy.

***

At my age my mother was married with kids. At my age she was living what I sometimes give to the women in my stories but never to myself. Why? My anxiety of people and life? The bliss of space alone in my room, no expectations?

Writing is easier than life to me at times. This I’ve come to accept through time, through an understanding of myself and my tolerances. Being quiet is not an illness. Preferring moments of solitude doesn’t make me anti-human.

I can be human and to myself, and the crafting of my stories now bear witness to this transformation, my female characters being both happy or sad, both vengeful and purposeful, just all-around human. I can write happy and sad. Sad is not always bad. I can always approve a wholesome sad ending on any day. Why not? I’m human, and humans rejoice and humans suffer.

I am just graduated from college with a Bachelor’s in English. I am a human adult, but I am still a child too. I want to be a writer, to tell stories. I cannot give my mother an outgoing daughter in me, which sometimes she asked, and which I often denied. I used to feel sorry for this. Now I do not. 

I want my mother to be happy, but I cannot give her what I cannot. But here in my mother’s cemetery I can gift her stories, ones we would both like to ingest, with no sad endings or sad women,  with girls in visibility. 

Please let me continue.

***

My skin aches under the sun and under strain. It may be crumbling. My mother wanted to die, so yes, she must be happy. I want to keep telling stories of her, but I find myself crafting something a little different. I would like to call for a gardener once my mother’s casket is in the ground. I’ll sneak back in the face of tonight. I’ll pay with my own money. 

I’m thinking of asking for a watering can if the gardener will meet me in secret. This is for the sake of myself and for my mother. I’m thirsty enough to wilt. And my mother needs water to rebirth. I want to water my mother back to life, you see. The seed of her casket will rise from dirt-ash, and she’ll be free back in life. 

She wanted to die because she wasn’t the same as she used to be.

I look around at the graves in my mother’s new forever home. I don’t care about community anymore. Screw the lovely company of the dead. I’ll plant my mother a seed and give her back herself.

Oh life. What are you doing to me?

***

I can’t control the workings of my brain. Don’t even ask about my heart. The stories for my mother must continue. If I cannot grow her back, I will give her a different change. Yes, it will be more believable. I will make my mother a fabulous witch. 

We’ll have a Hocus Pocus moment, and I won’t need to summon her back with a spell book or anything. Because dormant witch genes already thrive within my mother’s body. They wake when she’s put back in the ground. Why you ask? It’s simple. 

Witches can’t die.

***

I don’t care what anyone says. Witches can’t die—not by the burn—not by anything. What happens when a witch is put in the ground or is fire-killed at the stake is that they sleep. Until they awake again.

I will wake my mother now. By calling on the witch genes within her, I will bring her back to me, and she’ll be a little different. That’s a given. Her teeth will have more teeth. Murdered women, witch and other, will mentor her through her transformation. The exhaust of my mother’s forgiveness will blow away quicker than a wick once she’s back on earth. 

She won’t forgive with ease when she’s not invited on a family trip out of state, won’t forgive with a woman’s grace when a boy insults her weight in a dying mall’s cafeteria.

My mother won’t just forgive with the flutter of her eyes when my brother slams doors when he’s angry or when I won’t open my door when I want to be alone, even after I promised to go out with her but denied her last minute again.

My mother might hurt with her mouth or the flicker of her hand if she has to.

I’m ok with that.

***

My mother won’t come back backwards, nor inside-out. She’ll be a beautiful witch, and to be beautiful she won’t have to be young. She can still be in her seventies. She can still have an extra set of teeth.

Teeth don’t always draw pain, however. I see my mother smiling with a life and peace that will lift my breath.

Oh life. Yes.

***

If I step on a grave I step on a life forever gone. This is true in fiction and reality. If I step I step straight into a lineage, their pasts that deserve to be told, pasts I cannot decipher without my own narration and story building. 

When I step on graves I become one of the dead, ingesting their love, their trauma, all their possibilities. In my mother’s cemetery I walk with the living and the dead. All these dead have moved to this street that I’m visiting, and I have access to all their front doors.

I just don’t have a key without the workings of my mind.

***

What is my mother thinking and feeling now? She’s not in the ground yet, but she must have seen the welcome video by now. 

A group of women, not her neighbors, but the first welcoming women, took the warmth of her hand and led her to the welcoming room in the afterlife, feeding her diet coke and sweets, explaining what would happen when her body was returned to the earth.

That surely happened. Right?

***

I’m a walking sweat. I think I should drink something soon.

My body can wait. 

My heart can’t.

***

There absolutely is diet coke in the afterlife. Believe it.

When my mother comes to the cemetery to sleep her nights I hope the women on this street or the women from the welcoming group, or the women from the neighboring cemeteries bring extra bottles of diet coke for her. And for themselves.

After the sweets there will be entertainment. Watching living life must really be the dead’s dose of reality TV. I hope all the dead here have found one of my mother’s mourners fascinating, a sight to their fancy. It’s still early, but I hope my mother is watching us, is missing us.

But I also hope that she is thoroughly entertained.

***

I’m happy for my mother’s happiness.

I suppose.

***

How about another story here? How about a witch nurse? Can the dead hurt physically anymore? If so, I hope my mother becomes the nurse she could have always been if she never doubted herself and her abilities. 

Zombies. Ghouls. Not my mother, no, but I guess they’ll have to exist too in my stories. Some will be good and others will be not so good. But since there are ghost detectives, slayers, and powerful witches in the afterlife, they can take care of themselves, and if they hurt my mother will heal them. 

She will be safe in her death and in my stories. Always.

But as I walk around the freshness of my mother’s cemetery I suddenly see broken hands shooting out of the grass and distorted bodies tumbling out like falling teeth, and I’m so mad at death and what could be lurking in the dirt and even in the sky. I have a human brain. I don’t want my mother living in a crazy afterlife. But I still have a human brain. 

I can never not think of what could go to dread.

***

I walk around my mother’s cemetery with a head stuffed of fantasy, reality, dreams, and fears. The sun rains down heat. I’m sweating but I can no longer feel the cracks in my skin or the ache in my throat. I walk by the mourners and a valley of graves. I feel the shapeshifters shift under my feet, the burst of magic like a flame while the mages practice their magic. 

Under the ground I feel the essence of people just being people in a different type of life that is not accessible to me.

 My mother is among them. Or will be soon. The dead are not quiet. Over the sounds of the living I hear the laughter of the dead, the continuation of their lives. I’m happy that my mother will never lack company, but…

But—

***

There’s a hole in the ground where my mother will lay for the earthly eternities. It will be heated like fresh cookies in the winter and cooled like frozen yogurt in the summer. With enough space to make snow and earth angels in the ground my mother will lay and I won’t see her again in this life.

Whatever she’s doing, whoever she’s with—

I’m not walking around my mother’s cemetery anymore. I’ve stopped only the movements of my body. I don’t stand with my family or her mourners, but I don’t try to push them out. I stand by the hole in the ground because I cannot tread on the heart of my mother’s gravestone, the heart of her. If stepping on a grave steps me deep into a life gone by I shall wait then.

I won’t wait for a gardener. I’ll wait for my mother’s casket and her stone. And then I will step all over her. With my feet, with my body, with my everything.

Oh life. I love my mother. 

I want to love her forever, to hear what she hears, to see what she sees. To live what she will forever live.