by C. K. Bickford
Sunset was the only time Rose understood what others meant when they said the cemetery was spooky. Shadows reached out from the tombstones like fingeres, searching for loved ones who had lost track of time. The pinks and purples of the sky clashed horribly with the grey stone, like a skeleton at a child’s birthday party. Soon it would be dark. Soon, Rose would be, in a way, alone.
She paced through the graves, picking up any pieces of trash or dead flowers, caring for the resting spots of the dead who no longer had anyone else to do that job for them. She greeted her favorite tombstones by name as she went, nodding like an employee in a hallway full of coworkers. It made them feel almost alive to have an interaction that was not about their death, but the standard monotony of life.
It was not a large cemetery, but the trees and bushes kept her field of vision short. Once, the city had asked her to remove them, saying that it would make Memorial Day ceremonies easier. Rose had said, “Easier on who?” and they had let it go with a poorly concealed eye roll. We’ll just change it when she’s dead, they had thought. They didn’t understand that in a town like this, few people wanted to grieve in public. If they opened it up, the dead would be alone.
This was why Rose hadn’t seen the woman standing next to the grave earlier, and why the woman hadn’t seen her. Her long blonde hair was tucked into her jacket, and Rose understood that she had almost decided not to come. She must have hurried from the house in an unthinking frenzy to make herself go. It must have been very hard for her to stay here now, alone and with the dark so near.
A leaf crunched beneath Rose’s foot and the woman turned to face her. She recognized the woman, had seen her here a few times. Once she had even stepped towards Rose, and Rose had known, as she had many times before, that the woman wanted to speak to her. Instead she had hesitated for a moment before walking away without a word.
Today, she stood her ground.
“Is it true what they say about you?” the woman called.
Rose walked towards her slowly, her hands shoved into her pockets.
“It depends,” she said, “what do they say?”
The woman wrapped her arms around herself, warming herself against the chill. Rose could see now that she stood in front of the grave of a man, Thomas Kline. Rose often thought of the dead in terms of the span of their life. Thomas had died at 41, just enough time to make a family, to make and then question hopes and dreams, to set out on one path and then decide to jump to another with plenty of years left to become a whole new person.
Too young, she thought, far too young.
The woman watched Rose looking at the tombstone. She was already crying. Thomas had died more than a decade ago, and the gravestone identified him as a husband and a father.
Must be his daughter, Rose thought.
The woman cleared her throat. Rose could tell from her nervous hands and the way she avoided eye contact that the woman was a skeptic who wanted nothing more than to believe.
“They say,” she started, but her voice was choked and quiet. She cleared her throat and went on, “they say you can see them, that you can talk to them. Is that true?”
Rose said nothing. She needed more of the woman’s expectations. It was easier to let them tell her what she already was to them, rather than to become something new.
“I don’t really believe it,” the woman said, “I’ve never believed in gh—” an unexpected sob broke free from her, and she covered her hand with her mouth.
“Molly,” Rose said, “Molly Kline.” Molly’s red rimmed eyes went wide. “How did you know that?”
Rose shrugged. This was how it worked.
“I’m married now, though. Do you know my new last name?” Rose nodded to the tombstone.
“Does he?”
Molly let out a small gasp as she whipped around to face the headstone again. “No,” she whispered, “no, he wouldn’t know that.”
Rose walked closer. She was only two arm lengths away from Molly now. She took note of her clothing. Nice, probably expensive, but with a few faded stains down the front.
“Can you tell him that?” Molly asked, turning back to Rose. “I want him to know that. There’s so much I want to tell him.”
“You can tell him yourself,” Rose said.
She knelt next to the headstone and pulled away some weeds. The stone was dirty. Not so much that it warranted a cleaning from Rose, but enough that she knew no one else had thought to clean it in a number of years. She tried to remember if she had ever seen any flowers here, or if families had ever gathered here. All she could see was the tombstone all alone on the hill, except for its brethren.
“What else do you know?” Molly asked, “is he telling you anything?”
Rose held her hand out to touch the headstone but pulled it back without doing so.
“What do you want to know?” she asked, standing.
Molly rubbed her hands together to warm them.
“My father died when I was fifteen,” she said, “he… I never knew what happened. I was just pulled out of class and he was dead. Mom was really quiet about it. She just said he had a heart attack. There were other rumors at school. That he’d killed himself, that my mom had killed him, that he’d been having an affair and the other woman had been the one to call…” Molly knelt down and rubbed her thumb over a clod of dirt that clung to part of his name. “I believed each of those stories at different times, sometimes for years, sometimes only for a moment. But I’ve always wanted to know… my mom is dead now. She can’t tell me the truth.”
“He must have a death certificate,” Rose said.
“I’ve already looked at it. It said heart attack, but…”
“But you wonder if someone did your mom a favor.” Molly shrugged.
“It’s probably silly.”
Rose could see that to her it was anything but silly.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “I don’t—”
“It would just be good to know how it ended for him,” Molly interrupted. “You know? Like, did he suffer? Is he suffering now? Is he okay?”
While Molly talked, Rose could feel something shifting in the air, like a wind had suddenly changed direction, except that everything was still. Molly let out another quiet sob, her tears falling to the earth below. Rose imagined them seeping through the dirt to rest on her father’s coffin buried six feet below. She stepped closer to Molly and knelt next to her. The head stone was right there in front of them, less than an arm’s length away. Rose reached an arm out and wrapped it around Molly’s shoulders. Molly turned and buried her face in Rose’s shoulder. She cried without restriction, without embarrassment.
“I want to know what he would think about my daughter,” Molly said between sobs, “I want him to know I finished school, and that I still have his football jersey. It’s just not fair that he’ll never get to see these things, that he’ll never get to know his grandkids, and I’ll never know why he’s gone.”
This was how it worked. The living told Rose what they wanted, and Rose tried to hear what they were too afraid to say. Rose waited until Molly pulled away on her own.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “you must think I’m insane.”
“No,” Rose said, “this isn’t uncommon.”
Molly pushed her hair out of her eyes.
“So nothing?” she asked, “he’s not saying anything else?”
Rose sat back and crossed her legs.
“He says you can throw the football jersey away.”
Molly’s mouth fell open.
“But—”
“He doesn’t seem to care that you finished school. You wanted to be—what, an engineer?
You should have stayed home with the kids.”
Molly stared at her, tears welling in her eyes again.
“He’s not interested in grandchildren—”
“That’s not true!” Molly shouted, standing up in an instant. “You’re lying, that’s not true.
He would never say those things.”
Rose pushed herself slowly from the ground, her knees already stiff.
“No, he didn’t,” Rose said.
“Why would you—”
“Asking the dead questions is a dangerous game, Molly,” she whispered, “you think ‘I just want to know how he died, I just want to know what he would think,’ but once those questions are answered more will appear to keep you awake at night. It’ll be an endless cycle. Right now, you’re haunted by a ghost you don’t even think is there. What will you do if you ask a question and he talks back?”
“I just want—” Molly started, “I just want—I want to know—”
“You want him back,” Rose said, as kindly as she could, “and that’s not something I can give you.”
Molly sobbed again, this time curling into herself. Again, Rose waited until she fell quiet. The air around them was warmer than it had been a few minutes ago. Rose wondered if Molly noticed, if she could feel what was happening unseen right in front of her.
“Why now? Why all these questions now?” she asked.
Molly wiped her nose with her sleeve.
“My daughter,” she whispered, “she knows she has a grandpa on her dad’s side. She doesn’t understand where her other one is. She asks about him all the time and I don’t know what to tell her. It took years for me to stop thinking about him every day and now it’s like—it’s like—” she took a deep breath, “—it’s like the kids at school all over again, whispering about me. She doesn’t know, she’s only six. But it hurts.”
“Bring her here,” Rose said, “let her meet him.”
Molly shook her head.
“Isn’t that a little morbid? Should kids really—”
“Did your mother’s silence help you?”
Molly didn’t say anything back. After a few moments, Rose moved to walk away.
“Wait,” Molly called, “wait. Can you just tell me? Is he really there? I just… I need to know if he’s there.”
Rose turned back and studied the headstone for a few minutes before shoving her hands in her pockets again.
“Does it feel like he’s there?” she asked.
Molly followed Rose’s gaze and saw nothing but the dirty, grey stone.
“I guess… I don’t know. I thought I would feel something, but…” she reached out again and ran her hand along the top of the headstone, brushing away the dirt.
“He loved you very much. I can see that without talking to him. That’s what matters,” she turned away again, “you’re in two different worlds. It should probably stay that way. But this spot…” she turned back to Molly, “if you want to tell him things, this spot would be better than anywhere else, right?”
Molly didn’t say anything. She ran her hand across the tombstone again, clearing away as much dirt as possible.
“I can bring you some cleaning supplies,” Rose said, “if you come tomorrow.”
Molly stopped and looked at her hands, as though suddenly aware of what she had been
doing.
“Okay,” she said, “yeah. Okay.”
She stood, wiped her hands on the front of her pants, then turned and hurried away without another word. Rose was used to that. She walked back towards Thomas’s grave and finished wiping away the loose dirt that had been left behind. Her back ached as she stood back up, a not so gentle reminder that she would not always be the one to do this.
“Thank you,” Thomas said. He was standing behind his tombstone, hands in his suit pockets.
“Sorry,” Rose said, “It’s better if they don’t know you’re talking back.”
“I understand,” he said, “I can’t believe she thought her mother killed me.”
“So then—”
“Heart attack,” he said, patting his chest. “Not a surprise, really. My dad died young,
too.”
Rose wondered if Thomas’s hair was the same blonde as his daughter’s. Ghosts like him, ones that had been nearly forgotten, had a washed out look. Like they had been left in the sun for too long or done one too many cycles in the dryer.
“You know I can’t translate for you again. It’s a little bit easier on the dead to talk to the living, but not much.”
Thomas looked pained.
“Is there anyway I could go with them?” he asked.
“No,” Rose said. It was a lie. If Molly brought the football jersey and was willing to spill a few drops of blood, there was a spell that could do it. But cemeteries didn’t just exist to hold bodies. When ghosts got into the world, bad things happened eventually. No matter how kind the ghost had been in life.
“You’re in two different worlds,” Rose repeated to Thomas, “this is sort of like a border between them.”
Thomas nodded and ran his hands along his own headstone as his daughter had done. “It’ll be nice to have it clean,” he said.
“I know,” Rose said.
“And you think she’ll be back tomorrow? And that she’ll bring the girl?”
“I do.”
Thomas was looking around the cemetery now, taking in all the names and faces that had surrounded him for decades.
“It’s nice to be awake,” he said.
Rose watched him wander away from his tombstone. He was tentative, as though afraid an invisible leash would suddenly pull him back. He would be able to explore as much of the cemetery as he liked. That was how the wards were set up.
Rose finished her evening check of the graves. Ghosts were rising more quickly now, pulling themselves out of the earth and jumping from tombstones. It was an unnerving sight, not because they scared her, but because she wanted nothing more than to talk to them. That would have been a mistake. The lines between them were already so thin. One wrong move could erase them completely. So she kept her eyes straight ahead and ignored the voices that called out to her.
“Rose, can you plant some sunflowers—”
“If you would just contact my daughter, I know she’d visit—”
“I had a nice visit from the grandkids today Rose, did you see them?”
The path finally reached the old iron gate that led from the cemetery to her backyard. Before she could hurry through, one last voice called out to her.
“Rose?”
She couldn’t help herself. She turned to see him, looking just as he had the day he had died. Soft brown hair, a strong jaw, and wearing the suit he had been married in. She almost said his name, but stopped herself just before the sound could escape her lips.
“Just give me another chance Rose, I know I could handle it this time.”
The gate creaked in response as she swung it open and ran all the way to her backdoor. Her head swam as she kicked off her muddy boots and ran inside. She pressed her back against the wood door and forced herself to take a few deep breaths.
You’re in two different worlds, she reminded herself, no matter how close they are. Two different worlds.
The thumping in her chest seemed excessive for such a short sprint.
Maybe that won’t be the case for much longer.
It would be nice to talk to him again.
Rose pulled off her work clothes and crawled into bed without showering. She would regret it tomorrow when she would have to wash the bedding, but that was okay. It had been a difficult night.
A song floated on the wind and into her open windows, a deep alto voice that felt like it was massaging the inside of her skull.
Molly will be back tomorrow, she thought, I’ll teach her how to keep the grave. Thomas will like that. And maybe I will plant some sunflowers.
The voice sang on and Rose’s eyelids grew heavy. Soon she was in the soft place between awake and asleep, when everything seems far away and too close at the same time. Her second to last thought was the realization that could not tell if the voice was alive or dead. Then she wondered if it really mattered. Then she was asleep.
C.K. Bickford is a medical librarian living in Iowa who primarily writes short speculative fiction. She has previously been published in Worm Moon Archive. Her twitter is @Inknosed and her Instagram is @_caroline_kay_