It was just a flower. A familiar flower with an outdated name. But as I stared at it, my skin grew clammy and I felt my chest restricting. My breath coming in and out in wheezing gasps. I ran.
When I was 7, my parents were killed on a camping trip. I was with them, and I survived. I was missing for two days until I was found, wandering, beaten and bloody and mute. I was clutching a small bouquet of wilted wildflowers. I had no memory of that time. Until now.
When I was small, no one would look at me for long. Their eyes would flick up, then flit away like a startled bird. I didn’t realize until I was about 6 that people found my looks… disturbing. There was a mixture of pity and revulsion teetering on a beam of required social behavior. Except for my Mother. She never shied away from looking. Her smile made me feel beautiful. She touched me as well, which other people seemed afraid to do. Of course, children were altogether different. They not only looked, they stared, mouths agape. They didn’t just touch, they poked and prodded… and sometimes chased.
Some blamed it on the beetles, and the name stuck. It was an event they could point to and remember, instead of blaming themselves. Instead of blaming the quickening slide past the point of no return, to the end of everything. Well, not everything. The end of the age of humans. Humanity died long ago, the rest of us just waited for the inevitable.
Everything was already fucked before the beetles. We took down the climate, and so many species we couldn’t even keep track anymore. We made new ones, to help eat the plastic, clean the earth, eat the earth-cleaners, but we didn’t expect the side effects. We turned a blind eye to the warnings, the warming, the sea water. So here we were now, the darkling days. The next part of the end.
I came back to my desk from a meeting, to find a persimmon quietly waiting atop my closed computer. I looked around, but no one was looking at me. I shrugged and smiled at the little gift and decided to figure it out later. It was the holidays - the eat too much, sentimental, give everyone gifts time. I loved persimmons and was a sucker for unusual fruits. I saved it till ripe and ate it without worry two days later at my desk. I promptly forgot about it, until the following Wednesday.
I walk out of the back door into a landscape of beauty and murder. No one uses their front doors here. Front doors go out to the stretch of lawn before the worn road. Back doors lead to driveways and barns and yards of green leading to fences and woods.
Even now I’m not really sure if this happened to me or if my mother told me this story so many times that I feel like I was there. My mother never tired of telling terrible stories about my father. My father never tired of doing horrible things that made perfect terrible stories for my mother to tell. Those were their jobs, and how I saw them. My father, a distant, cruel figure made of money and alcohol and sarcasm, who existed to torment others, especially my mother; my mother, a creature molded out of tears and grief and fresh-baked pies who existed for her children and her martyrdom and bad choices. They were both casted so well, especially in my blurry memories from my childhood. Movie of the week fodder – or maybe an HBO limited docuseries on dysfunctional marriages.
2017
I stood near the river, assessing the old bridge, afraid to get too close. It had been 19 years since I had been back, had been this close to the bridge. My stomach knotted, and I questioned why I was here. I had done so well, making sure to never come near, rarely ever coming back to Mandrea Springs, much less this close to my childhood nightmare.
After I got “better”, a systematic act of pretending to forget, it was still too fresh to think of returning. Besides, my parents had moved me halfway across the country and there was no longer a reason to go back. No one believed what I remembered anyway. They looked at me with pity, calling it trauma. As the years slipped by me, it became more of a measured reaction, a plan, an obsession really. To keep myself from sinking again. Now I was 32, and I reasoned that I had nothing to prove, I had come back from there. But the bridge still called me sometimes, in my dreams and in waking hours. Sometimes I couldn’t help the needing to know, the sharp desire to understand. It sat like a small rat in my belly, gnawing just frequently enough to remind me it was there. I was no longer living halfway across the country.
I’m the caretaker in a very small rural cemetery. This job is passed down through my family but I’m afraid if I don’t have a child soon there will be no one left to keep watch. To put the dead back to rest.
This is a tough job for one person. They won’t stay dead. They won’t stay in their graves. For some reason the land here is strange, and anyone buried here wont stay resting for long. The cemetery doesn’t see many new burials anymore, but that’s a good thing. Only members of certain very old families maintain plots here. They don’t visit much.
“Hang the ashes.” That’s what Katie told me. She turned her head as she coughed again. More blood rumbled up from her throat. “When it’s over, burn me up real good and hang the ashes.” I wasn’t really sure that would keep them away, but I said yes, wanting to give her what comfort I could. I held her hand till it was over. I had to move fast once she quit breathing.
