Handbill Handout

Part 10 J decided to leave the cemetery for the day.   A bank of grey (or was it gray? J couldn’t tell) clouds were looming in that particular way that clouds do when they aren’t scudding or floating.   J wondered what else it was that clouds did besides loom, scud or float but he wasn’t well-read enough to come up with anything quickly and thinking about cloud movement wasn’t getting him home any quicker.   Thunder murmured faintly in the distance and J took this as a sign to get in the car and start driving home. As J drove through the gates the sky opened up into a very, very ordinary summer rainstorm.   There was nothing noteworthy about the rainstorm.   There were no lessons in it or metaphors, no lightning of particular beauty, no actors blinking into the drops while slowly looking upward and being redeemed in some way or having something revealed to them for the first time. It was just rain. J turned on the windshield wipers ...

Part 9   The sparrow hadn’t ever crossed over the fence to the horse ranch next door.   (You remember the horse ranch right?   It was in Part 5). It hadn’t even gone close enough to the fence to even be seen by any of the horses.   Horses don’t see particularly far unless they try to and they don’t try to without a reason and a sparrow isn’t much of an incentive to make a horse look hard. The sparrow had more than enough food in the cemetery itself and the humans were, in general, harmless enough so the sparrow didn’t need to seek interaction with any more species than it already encountered in the graveyard.   I got tired of misspelling cemetery and switched it up right there in case you’re wondering why I wrote “graveyard”.   While you’re wondering things I bet you’re wondering why I’m going on about horses and a sparrow. Well, I haven’t ever read any stories that had an interaction between horses and one and only one sparrow b...

Part 8 Meanwhile there was a bird watching all of this action.   Or rather the lack thereof. The bird was a house sparrow and had lived in the cemetery its whole life.   I say “it” because I’m not sure what gender the bird was or if it even identified with a particular gender.   I’ve already pointed out that I’m not an omnipotent narrator.   The house sparrow lived its life eating grass seed that the maintenance people scattered about the cemetery augmented with the occasional insect, the odd berry and occasionally a bit of human food scraps scrounged from a trash can.   You wouldn’t necessarily think it was a nice place to do so but some people brought their lunch with them to the cemetery and tossed the leftovers in available trash barrels. You wonder what the dead would think of the living walking around them eating food but then you remember the dead probably can’t think at all, at least not in the conventional sense.   So it w...

Part 7 The water wasn’t particularly cold but it was refreshing. That was pretty much the only thing that went right for J for the rest of that day as he trudged from row to row looking for familiar nameslike a pilgrim with a defective map. The names were not giving J what he was looking for. There was an older woman gardening at her late husband’s plot five rows from the hedgerow who occasionally glanced at J’s trudgery but was mainly focused on weeding the half-circle garden plot in front of her husband’s stone and keeping ants off her hands. She didn’t know it but this was the last time she’d bother visiting the plot because her new significant other thought it was morbid and finally convinced her to move to a condo two states away so graveyard visiting was too logistically difficult.   Besides, the dead stay dead whether you garden on top of them or not. J trudged back to his car and decided to try his luck in a different section.  

Mid 70s but boy is it humid.  More rain coming later, they say.  They're changing all the bus routes that go from where I live to where I work a week from Monday. I've noted before that the never-ending changes that go on in this city and in particular the mundane ones color one's recollections of a given time in one's life.  I don't know why I find it interesting as it probably isn't important in any way to note the passing of things like tollbooths and bus routes.  Going further back I was wondering about the last time I used a token.  I don't remember what year it was, what season it was, was I going to work or something social?  I could look up when the city made it worth my while by having metrocards reduce the cost of my commute vs. what I was paying with tokens but that, for someone of my age, would be "cheating". Writing something down on the date of a transition somehow isn't "cheating".  Seems arbitrary, but this is m...

Part 6 J’s childhood friend’s father served in Vietnam in the sixties.   He never talked about it, though J’s childhood friend remembered that when they went camping in the early 1970s and the truck with the mosquito-killing fog came around his dad would make the whole family get in the station wagon and roll up the windows until it passed and the fog cleared.   J’s childhood friend’s father died in of leukemia in 1975.   J’s childhood friend also remembered his father not liking the sound of helicopters. Agent Orange got sprayed by helicopters and was linked to illnesses including leukemia so you can connect the dots. None of these memories gave J’s self-esteem a shot in the arm so he discarded them like empty popcorn boxes and looked for a different headstone.   Also he remembered to drink some water because it was still pretty hot.  

Part 5   For reasons unknown to anyone but the Unitarians who owned the land the cemetery was laid out in such a way that sections of recent burials were adjacent to sections that were filled a few decades before.   So it was that J in looking for someone he knew stumbled across the grave of his childhood friend’s father. The grave was partly in the shade of a large hedge that abutted a horse ranch where well to do folks stabled their daughter’s horses (it was inevitably the daughter’s horse, given as a gift to assuage the guilt of weekend events missed due to chemically-fueled adventures with fellow finance bros).   The horse ranch was exceptionally well kept, the smell minimal even on the hottest August day. The only conflict between the horsey set and the cemetery was when the column of trees that preceded the hedgerow had been stricken by a virus and cut down thus opening a line of sight from the riding paths to the graves and reminding the wealthy of an...

Part 4 I keep misspelling cemetery.   For whatever reason I type an a for the last e but fortunately the ComputerMaticEditor 5000 that I type this typing on changes is for me so I don’t look like an even bigger idiot than I already do based on this body of work not to mention my day to day behavior. I almost added a u to “behavior” but then I remembered I’m back in the States where we don’t have time for such ridiculous things. I should get back to J at this point because it’s pretty damned hot at the cemetery with an “e” (in cemetery, not in “hot” obviously) and I don’t remember if I wrote him a bottle of water or not. J fortunately remembered to bring a bottle of water. Well thank heavens for that. J was actually pretty good at remembering things which might make you think that J was a conscientious person who was good at interpersonal relationships.   If it made you think that it fooled you because J was a self-centered asshole who looked out for...

Part 3 J started his cemetery time with the most recently deceased.   If I were a completely omnipotent narrator I could tell you why, sadly as someone who just does this for a hobby and gives it away for free I am not nearly omnipotent so I can only guess at J’s motivation.   My guess is that he hoped to run into people he actually knew.   The moral superiority one feels when one is still alive and knows someone who no longer is can be intoxicating.   One feels like one deserves to still be breathing air while the other person was either unlucky and fell to a tragic fate or somehow deserved to no longer be a collection of chemicals possessed by a delusion of free will. Those are the only two ways someone winds up dead as far as I can tell. They aren’t mutually exclusive either.   To some folks the death of (redacted) would be a terrible tragedy;   (pronoun redacted) was unlucky and the death was premature. Others would feel that t...

Part 2 Don’t be alarmed. Sorry, that sentence assumes that you were here for part 1, which ended with “The dead were quite but limited in what they might do only by the boundaries of imagination”. I suppose some of you might think this is the point where the story descends into a series of scrupulously detailed necrophiliac click-bait episodes designed to harvest your information for Russian hack-bots. I assure you that’s not the case.   For one thing, this platform has been dead for at least eight years.   Once the world jumped on the sites collectively known as “social media” the written word which for a few years had had a resurgence via e-mail, web bulletin boards and blogs died beneath an avalanche of pictures of Gene Wilder and Kermit the Frog with single sentences in impact font selling ideas like they were Burma Shave.   Mind you, Gene Wilder and Kermit the Frog were not usually in the same picture, much like the entire Burma Shave slogan...

Part 1 Right off the bat I have to tell you that the title is a lie.   The subject of this little story is a guy named J who didn’t actually live in the cemetery in the way that most people in the modern world define “living”, that is he didn’t get his mail there or sleep there (overnight anyway) or have a high speed Internet connection for his porn or whatever other entertainments one consumes over such a thing. Rather he spent his waking hours walking through the stones looking for names familiar to him, either possible relatives or friends or friends of relatives.   He started this habit the day after he retired because after years of working among the living and traveling to and from work among the living and taking his meals among the living he was done with them.   The living were boring and predictable in their habits. The dead were quiet but limited in what they might do only by the boundaries of imagination.