On the outskirts of a small town, down in the dip between the tallest mountains, there lived a man. He had lived there for many years, and he intended to die there. He thought of death more than life, and he spent his nights walking through the same cemetery, both terrified and curious of what the darkness would bring when he joined the corpses below.
One night, when the moon was full, he came upon an older woman standing at a grave in the back of the lot. Her skin was sagging and the moon carved shadows into her hollowed cheeks. Her hair was pulled into a tight bunch, but the wisps around her ears caught leaves from the wind that scratched her skin by the ears. He tried to walk quietly past the woman so as not to disturb her, but he heard a voice call out from behind him.
“You come here every night.”
He was startled. He occasionally saw passersby in earlier hours of the night, leaving daisies or cyclamen on stones of family and friends, but a gentle nod was enough acknowledgment. A sympathetic glance stood in place of words in the cemetery. He craned his neck behind her to see if her words were meant for someone else, but he saw no one else passing through the gravestones. She continued to speak.
“You are frightened of where you will go when it is your time. I can show you.”
He wasn’t sure how the woman knew what frightened him. He had never told another person in town why he walked through the cemetery each night; they only knew he had been doing it since he moved into his house on the hill. In truth, he had been fascinated with death since the day he found his mother cold on the bedroom floor. She didn’t greet him at the door after school and the dishes from his breakfast were still on the table, glued down with drippings of syrup from the edge of the plate. When he found her lying next to her bed, her eyes wide and the birds in the window shining off her pupils, he hadn’t known what to do besides lay next to her until night came and his father found them. He remembered her looking strikingly like a porcelain doll, with her eyelashes fanned on her cheeks and her skin cold and smooth as ice. He had never told the story to anyone, but the way the woman looked at him as she made her offer made him feel as if she knew too much about him.
He hesitated. Something felt wrong. He did want to know, if only to stop the gnawing fear in his dreams, but her strangeness held him off for a moment. His mother’s stories had warned of ghosts, witches, and goblins in the night, their lights bobbing to pull you from the safety of your path. This woman reminded him of the witches in the storybooks, but his curiosity overcame his hesitation. He walked closer to her and she held out her hand. He took it, feeling the smooth coldness of her skin, so gentle it might tear if he gripped too hard. Her fingers swept his eyes closed and she showed him the darkness, the men juggling stars, the dancing bones and whirling colors and endless night.
When the morning came, he awoke in his bed, an open window letting in the cold of the morning. The gnawing fear was gone, and for the first time in years, he noticed the purple and pink light of a new day glinting on the windowsill.
He went to make breakfast only to find his cupboards bare. With his stomach grumbling he tied his boots and prepared to go into town for a supply of eggs, bread, vegetables for stew, and maybe meat if he avoided the bakery desserts. As he walked, he saw the door of his neighbor’s home open, and the wife stepped out for the morning paper.
“Well hello, good morning! Bit chilly, isn’t it?”
She waved as she spoke, but just as he moved to wave back, his eyes squinted to focus on her face. Something was...off. Was her left eye hanging lower than the right? And what was causing her mouth to dip at the corners? Before he could respond, she shut the door tight against the autumn wind. A trick of the light, he thought.
He continued on to town and opened the door to the bakery. The rush of warmth and the smell of freshly baked bread wiped the memory of his neighbor’s wife and her crooked eyes from his mind. He perused the cakes, buns, and scones, some drizzled in sugar or shining with brushed butter. He inhaled the scent of the baguettes. When he finally made his way to the counter, his blood ran cold.
The shopkeeper, who had sold the man his bread for years, looked deathly ill. His skin was sickeningly pale, and maps of green had begun to spread from his ears and the bags under his eyes. And his eyes, his eyes, shriveled in their sockets. The man felt the bile rise in his throat.
“Well good morning! I just baked those loaves today, they’re very fresh...”
But the shopkeeper trailed off as the bread fell to the floor and the man yanked open the front door of the shop, rattling the windows.
It had begun to rain gently outside and the man slipped on the slick mud as he left the shop. He stopped to catch his breath, ignoring the quick dampening of his socks, and focused on the pulse of his heartbeat, thick and heavy. I’m sick, he thought. I must have caught a cold in the night, the flu maybe. I’m seeing things. Resigning himself to a night in bed with hot tea and a blanket, he took one final breath before straightening his back and preparing to head home.
“Excuse me sir, do you have quarter?”
He turned around to see the little boy of the bar owner, who often helped his father serve drinks to the locals before bedtime. But his face was distorted, a grotesque mask of flaking skin and pooling blood. One eye bulged dangerously out of its socket with red veins twisting around the exploded pupil. His skin was mottled blue and green and his nose was gone, replaced with two dark holes digging into the skull.
The man, unable to remember how to breathe properly, in and out, broke into a run and never slowed until the door of his house was shut and locked behind him.
He didn’t remember returning home, or falling asleep, but the man finally reached consciousness again in the light of a new morning. He was still slumped against the oak door, with his back freezing from the icy air outside. He hadn’t lit the fire before bed. All he remembered of the previous night was the swollen eye in the boy’s socket, and the image made his empty stomach turn. But no, surely it was a dream. A nightmare, sparked by that woman in the graveyard. She had drugged him, perhaps, or cursed him. He went to the graveyard to seek her out and demand to know why his townspeople were decomposing on the streets, walking around as if they didn’t see their skin sliding off in a slippery mess.
The grass crunched beneath his feet as he broke through the morning frost. His breath puffed and circled around him, mixing with the dense fog over the tombstones. The stones had no semblance of order to them. There were no even rows or lines of graves. It was as if each family had merely dug out a hole where there was space, disregarding their loved ones earthly neighbors in favor of convenience. Before, this had been a comfort to the man, a sign that chaos began and ended on earth with nothing but a deep, long silence afterwards. Now it was a maze, a seemingly endless struggle to find the woman. When they had buried his mother, he had thrown flowers on her casket as they’d flung dirt back on top of her, and he briefly wondered if the families of those in the mismatched graves had cared enough to toss a rose in with their loved ones. He pushed the thought from his mind and resumed his search for the woman. Finally, he saw a hunched back near a child’s grave at the edge of the cemetery. The woman’s finger, gnarled like the tree roots under her feet, reached up to stroke the cheek of the angel statue atop the grave stone. She froze when she heard him approaching.
“You came back quickly. What troubles you?”
She did not turn to speak to him, but her finger remained poised on the chin of the cherub.
“I want to know what happened. Nobody is right anymore. They’re all...dead. Or dying, really.”
He waited for an answer, but a few minutes passed before the woman finally spoke again. His fingers had begun to grow stiff under his gloves. When she spoke, her voice was clearer. The frailty and shaky words were replaced with an almost melodic clearness.
“You wanted to see where you were going. I showed you. To understand where you are going, you must first understand how to get there.”
His hands fought the stiffness and curled themselves into fists. He lurched forward, taking a few steps closer to the woman. He could briefly smell lavender in the folds of her dress, but a more pungent and sour odor fell heavy on his senses.
“I don’t want to see how to get there. I never wanted to see that. I only wanted to see where she— where I would go afterwards.”
The woman set a bunch of daisies underneath the cherub’s feet. The grave had not been cleaned in years, and the flowers sat on top of rotten leaves and sprouting weeds.
“And I showed you that. I soothed your fears about where your soul would go when you left this world. But the soul and the body take two different paths on their journey from this world to the next, and I cannot show you one without showing you the other.”
Before he could respond, the woman had begun to shuffle down the path. Her tiny feet left tracks in the frost, and he tried to follow her. He wanted her to know how much more terrified he was now, and how she had only made things worse for him, and how sickening it was to watch his town decaying in front of him. But no matter how fast he walked, she was faster, and the howling wind carried away his shouts before they could reach her. He finally decided his pursuit was hopeless, and as he began his walk back to his house, snowflakes began to fall through the trees. They stung his face as he walked, but all he could think about were the flakes of skin drifting from the shopkeeper’s ears.
He walked until he found himself nearing the town courtyard. He hesitated, unsure if his sanity could take any more rotting corpses walking in broad daylight. As he pushed forward into the sunlight of the afternoon, he realized his concern was no longer with corpses, but with what was left behind.
Nearly blinding him were thousands and thousands of stark white flashes. Two shin bones dipped into the fountain with water rippling off their smooth edges. Eggs fell through the open ribcage of a skeleton at the cafe, splattering onto the concrete. Two bony hands reached through a windowsill above to water the gardenia plant. The fingers clicked against the metal watering can. Before closing the window, a single finger reached out to stroke the newly blooming petals.
He fell backwards into the nearest shop, turning to see that he had entered a clothing shop. Two skeletons stood facing each other at the counter. Their jaws moved in silent conversation, their teeth clacking trying to form words. Another bony structure stood in front of the mirrors draped in a crude swatch of fabric. A dress once, meant for muscled shoulders and a small belly, it clung tightly to the curves of ribs and the sharp edges of pelvic bone. The skeleton twirled in a dance, trying to loosen the fabric but only succeeding in a distorted mimicry of the human form with awkward movements.
The man threw himself on the ground, overcome with terror and sickness, becoming all too aware of his own skeleton hidden under his flushed skin. His eyes darted from soundless jaws to the twisting spine of the mirror skeleton. He backed out of the shop only to bump his hip into the soft skull of a child playing hopscotch on the sidewalk. The child tried to steady itself, but the man knocked it down as he broke into a swift run for his house. He dodged as he ran to avoid touching any of the exposed townspeople before reaching his path.
This time, when he reached his house and swung the heavy lock into place on his door, he carried himself into the back of his bedroom, through his closet door to the cabinet. His hands shook as they worked to open the lock. Running to the house was soundless, save for the beat of his heart and the pulling of his chest as he sucked in air and snow. His legs and feet were powerful, strong, carrying him home despite tightening from the cold. His heart had only lurched at the thought of a slow decomposition like the others, and how his mother’s porcelain skin must have looked in the casket. The thought of muscles growing weaker, putrified skin sliding from bone, eye sockets emptying into blackness all terrified him beyond the sight of the skeletons.
He unlocked the cabinet and pulled out a handgun. He had used it once when a snow storm made the path to town too dangerous and he thought he might hunt for food. He remembered his neighbor’s bellowing laugh as he watched the man try to hunt for deer with nothing but a handgun and a pocket knife, and he ate nothing but canned beans for supper that night.
It was only a moment before he pulled the trigger, the bullet splitting his skull and thoughts into pieces. He let out only a small gasp, remembering the men juggling stars and the flowers on his mother’s casket before he was silenced.
