In the scarce light of dusk, with the instrumental backdrop of cicadas and wasps tuning up for the night, anxious sounds of the orchestra before the floodlights went on, the Moon coming to summit, softest treaded footfalls wandered through the silvery outlines of trees to the thick brush of the middle cemetary, where the most bodies had been buried. With her mouth in a solemn twist, bitten upon, she covered it with a dark gloved hand and crouched down, looking at the burial site of a child. Around her the starkness grew and grew shadows convulsed like in ecstatic joy at gathering with kin, the sun gently dipped to hide, leaving nocturnal shapes to grow in sinister size.
She felt a pang of eerieness fill her chest as she slowly rose again, passing by the next consecutive row of plots, fingers drawn across the edges of her pockets and finally slid within tenderly, as her eyes were given way to a sprawling, low, bent tree, under which revealed several more graves, some with tombstone and some not. In the distinct, smokey purple of the hour, she harboured a strangers sadness, a witness' empathy. Unlike herself and in an inspired mood, she begun to imagine her emotion like a mirror, and if held, was to reflect the vespertine-hued hour, the sky above, incendiary with low, reddish clouds; the sadness borne of coming across so many deaths, dated at so very recent. Why she thought like this she did not know, but she figured it was her method of dealing with what she had started to face lately, only in an abstract way.
Her decision to come here, and to do so alone, stemmed by Alain's discretions in the last couple of days, words that stayed with her, the pictures of autopsies pinned to his library walls. Heaving chest with shakey breath, she shook her head and turned on her heels, to make a glacial-slow route back through the graves and trees, hanging her head with the weight of what she had seen for herself.
She left no written condolences, no flowers, no footprints behind, a secretive figure that was as much a ghost disappearing through the groves of the dead, than a young woman haunted by the shade of death; ephemeral on the bleak horizon, making her own way home, mending hope in her heart defiantly that she might change this town in her own, small way.
She felt a pang of eerieness fill her chest as she slowly rose again, passing by the next consecutive row of plots, fingers drawn across the edges of her pockets and finally slid within tenderly, as her eyes were given way to a sprawling, low, bent tree, under which revealed several more graves, some with tombstone and some not. In the distinct, smokey purple of the hour, she harboured a strangers sadness, a witness' empathy. Unlike herself and in an inspired mood, she begun to imagine her emotion like a mirror, and if held, was to reflect the vespertine-hued hour, the sky above, incendiary with low, reddish clouds; the sadness borne of coming across so many deaths, dated at so very recent. Why she thought like this she did not know, but she figured it was her method of dealing with what she had started to face lately, only in an abstract way.
Her decision to come here, and to do so alone, stemmed by Alain's discretions in the last couple of days, words that stayed with her, the pictures of autopsies pinned to his library walls. Heaving chest with shakey breath, she shook her head and turned on her heels, to make a glacial-slow route back through the graves and trees, hanging her head with the weight of what she had seen for herself.
She left no written condolences, no flowers, no footprints behind, a secretive figure that was as much a ghost disappearing through the groves of the dead, than a young woman haunted by the shade of death; ephemeral on the bleak horizon, making her own way home, mending hope in her heart defiantly that she might change this town in her own, small way.