“Why’s that one so overgrown?” He pointed with his chin, rope calloused hands rubbing together for warmth.
The other shrugged, “I just dig the graves. I don’t tend them.”
“Maybe you should start, look! The vines’ve clung in so deep, they’ve worn away the carving. Y’can’t even read what the name’s supposed to be.”
“You can read?” The question came mild, almost to be mistaken if not accompanied by the wiry up-curl of mockery and the glare that arose in response.
The glare turned from its target to become as morose as it was sharp, “I can guess! Or…imagine!” He paused, chin jutting contemplatively again, “but with this one you couldn’t try. The carving’s so near gone, it’s just a plinth now.”
“A plinth’s as good a marking as any. Some poor sods don’t even get that! Not even one of stone, so it won’t rot away after enough rain like the wooden ones.”
A hum came, followed by a thoughtful: “still.”
Spade leant in the crook of his arm, head hung over in exasperation and fingers quick to the roll of his indulgence of choice, response came as tired of this game as he was of playing it on shift, “still?”
“…it’s worse when stone forgets.”
Eyes rolled, “how so?”
“At least with men…it’s not their fault, y’know? The mind’s a fickle thing. I’d half the time forget to wear my hood, be it not on my own head. Even then, I often waste time looking for it!”
“That’s just you, though. Plenty have the minds for these things. And put them out all the same.”
“Is that better or worse,” came the next musing. “To forget by mistake or by design?”
The rolled vice was lost to a nearby snow drift in the sardonic dramatics of the other’s frustrated response, to cast his hands to the sky in ignorance.
The annoyed shuffling through the frozen drift, bitterness at the biting his fingers suffered and minor celebration at finding the damn thing rather than having to waste another, tinted the answer: “depends how you look at it, I suppose.” A long fierce drag was taken before more words would tumble from frozen lips. “Still not my job to help minds along, fickle or otherwise. I just put them in the ground. Nothing else to be said about keeping their names lingering above it. In memory or stone.”
-M
