Anna scratched at the thick twig, carving and slicing it with the switch blade our father had given her some years ago. She molded the wood expertly, a master at work on her craft. She was smoothing out the wood and sharpening the end of it,manipulating it into a piercing point at the end. The stake she had prepared earlier sat in her front pocket, sticking outobnoxiously like a tool placed in the wrong holder.  The one she made now was to be mine.

We needed wooden stakes for tonight. For the ghouls, vampires, zombies and other foul creatures that roamed the land of the buried. They were to be our last line of defense, the lightsaber to a Jedi, the six-shot revolver of the cowboys in the old west.

Anna always had a talent for wood-work and mechanical things.  Not like me. Our father had described my academicinclinations as “left of field”. Sometimes, after he swallowed down his usual serving of pain numbing beer, his tongue would loosen, his mind would vomit out the things kepttucked away in the dark corners of his mind.

‘My boys a queer,’

His breath always smelled bitter and foul when he spoke like that. His eyes would squint and darken, his stomach would bloat, plopping up to the roof like a fleshy, plump mountain, on which he would rest his rotating roster of beer cans without a shred of shame.

‘Tommy?’

Anna held out the stake toward me.  She knew her work was top class. Still, the fear of disapproval haunted her like a clinging ghost. The wood felt smooth in my hand, as if it were perfected in a factory, the formular to its excellence figured out long ago.

‘It’s perfect,’ I said.

Our bags were packed and ready for the night.  If there was one thing me and Anna were unison in, it was packing bags and making double sure we had enough rations for the journey.  Anna looked after the sleeping arrangements; I was the chef. On the menu tonight: a packet of salt and vinegar chips finished with a night cap of marshmallows.

The graveyard was enormous, stretching out into the sun setting horizon like a lifeless city. As we entered the main gates, I remember thinking it would take months to walk to the other side. Things always seemed so much bigger when I was a child.

Anna strode ahead of me, holding the straps of her bag andtucking her thumbs behind the fabric of them, holding the material just off her shoulders. I followed timidly, a heavy weight of doubt and regret beginning to rest over my head. My somberness must have caught Anna’s attention.

‘You know that we won’t need to use the stakes, Tommy,’ She gently pressed a knuckle into my shoulder, giving me a slight nudge. ‘They’re only there to scare the monsters away. Like a repellent!’

I gave her a forced smirk that stood no chance of fooling her. She nudged me again and laughed. That was enough for her.

By the time nightfall had sunk in and extinguished the day’s light, we had seen no monsters, or ghouls; no witches or vampires lurking in the shadows, waiting for us to pass obliviously so they could sink their fangs into us from behind. No zombie hands burst from the dirt in front of ancient gravestone’s, no rotted corpse limped towards us from the darkness ahead, it’s rotted tongue swollen and leaking from its peeled back mouth, it’s clothes tattered and forgotten.  We did see the dead, though.  

We passed gravestones that still had flowers placed next to them, where photos of the deceased were engraved into the stones. Small toys sat atop of some, stained and limp with weak despair, their floppy heads hung down in mourning. Most stones had passages on them, some only names.

William ‘Bill’ Hart

Loving father, grandfather and husband. Resting in the stars with his brothers.

1923 – 1999

To the right of the scripture was a small, round photograph of “Bill hart”. He was an old gentleman in the photo, but he was healthy and happy. He possessed a cheeky smile that stretched from ear to ear, and the most content eyes I’d ever seen.  I remember wondering how he would have looked in his final days of life, if he still smiled like that then, if his eyes were still content.

Casey Louise Myer

I wake up every day and pray yesterday was a dream. You will never be forgotten.

1979 – 1996

She was only seventeen. I imagined her locked away down there in her box, how her skin would have tightened, how dry and hollow she must’ve become, how even the morticians chemicals and make up couldn’t save her from decaying into filth.

‘How about here?’ Anna’s voice shocked me back into existence, back to the land of the living. I felt a sense of guilt wash over me as I left Casey Myer’s grave, like I was leaving her to rot forever and alone, like she knew I was leaving. There were no flowers near her grave. Maybe they had forgotten her.

Anna had found a patch of grass so vibrant and green that even in the darkness I could tell it was so. In the center of the grass was an old, rounded pergola. In the daytime, it would have been a relief to gaze upon, a break from the tragedy and hopelessness that was buried all around you. But in the night, it loomed with a dark and uninviting presence, a sort of warning to stay away, to turn back. It stood with a strangefrailness while still seeming powerful and proud. The darkand bland night sky behind it moved in the moonlight, the sleeping clouds drifting passed like floating, fluffy, giants of the night.  

I didn’t want to sleep there. To sleep there was to go against all instincts. To sleep there felt impossible, like trying to get two magnets stuck together when they’re the wrong way round.

‘Anna… maybe we should just go home,’ I tried to sound tough, as if I were man enough to make mature decisions, as if I were making this suggestion out of calculations and not fear.

‘Maybe we should, Tommy. But I suppose that’s the point.’

A faint wind howled passed, vocal and whining, sounding as though it were in pain. Anna stared at an old, flaking park bench that sat in the center of the back wall of the pergola. She seemed intrigued by it, more than anything, but it was that kind of cautious intrigue a cat would get when it tried to swat a snake. Interested, but cautious.

‘Maybe there will be somewhere better further along, baby brother. Would you like to find another place to sleep tonight?’

I nodded as eagerly as I ever had. I had nodded so fast that my brain almost shot out from the front of my skull.  I imagined that place to be the social hub for the foulest of the dead, a drinking spot for the aggravated ghosts that were locked away from the sunlight, only free to roam the earth when the living slept and the sky darkened.  I was as eager to leave as I had been not to enter.

We moved on and eventually found an old gum tree on a hill that overlooked the tombstones.  Its naturalness and wise aesthetic had me at hello. My sleeping bag was set up before Anna had even given the command. She smiled at me when noticing I had already tucked myself deep into it, only a small tuff of my hair and a pair of beady, little eyes visible from my fabric cocoon.  Anna looked like our father when she was smiling.  It was so strange; I had only ever seen him happy in photographs, yet I saw his happiness so vividly when she smiled, like he had transferred his over to her when she was born, depleting half his soul to give her twice the sustenance. He lost the other half when I was born.

We spoke of many things that night, tucked away from the cold in our airtight sleeping bags, our belly’s full of potato chips and marshmallows.  Mainly, we spoke of our father. It had almost been a year since his death, though his terrifying presence was so strong that it still lingered in the walls of ourhome, like those sicknesses they say stain the plaster of hospitals, waiting in the shadows to strike the weakened and dig their roots into them like weeds in a garden.

It was me who had found him. I never forgot how his eyes were, how still they seemed. He sat in his outdated recliner, his frame hunched forward, a can of cheap beer in one hand, an unlit cigarette in the other. As far as I was concerned, he’d drunk himself stupid into a coma like every other night. It was only when I saw his eyes that I knew.  

They didn’t turn murky or start to wander off in different directions or anything gruesome like that. They just lay still;frozen in time, like eternal, round photographs in place of where his real eyes once were.  I stared at him for twenty minutes, stuck in the same limbo that his eyes were in, just me and him, trapped in quicksand as the world spun around us.

‘It was a relief though, wasn’t it?’ To my shock, Anna was lighting a cigarette as she asked the question. She had lit it as if I’d seen her do it a hundred times, like I were so comfortable with it I may as well have lit up my own.

‘Anna!’

‘What?’

‘Smoking? Why are you smoking?’

‘Why not?’

‘Because it will kill you!’

Disregarding my appalled reaction to her lethal vice, she continued with the original topic, taking drags of the cigarette and blowing out the smoke between sentences, her timing and placement of the drags already fluent and natural. The smoke raised toward the moonlit night, climbing through nothing as it made its way toward the dark clouds above.

‘But it was a relief. I remember even when I found you with him, how it came off my shoulders, that weight, that shit feeling just evaporating. Don’t you think so, Tommy?  Didn’t you feel that shit just go away the moment you saw he was gone?’

I didn’t reply to her. I understood what she was saying, and in time, I did feel that way.  The evenings were calmer, my back never ached from the belt straps he would whip across it, no more sleazy, drunken friends staring at Anna with squinting, wanting eyes; no more laughter and clinking of beer bottles to keep me awake through the nights.  But all I thought when I found him was how happy he seemed in those photographs,and how he would never be that again. He’d never be anything again.

‘Well, I know that’s how it felt for me.’ She sighed, slinkingback into her sleeping bag, throwing the cigarette away after only half smoking it. The way she disregarded the smokegave me hope that maybe it was just a fad, something she did to look cool but deep down hated doing.

The next morning’s light woke us early. The day was clear and cloudless, the sun bright and potent with warmth.  My dreams had been predictably gloomy. Casey Myers’s brown, nearly skeletal corpse had chased me through our home. She was screaming at me, begging me to stay with her, pleading with me not to leave her alone in the ground with the grubs and the dirt. I felt that she wanted to grab me and drag me down into that coffin with her, where I would become nothing and rot away, her desperate, terrified, bony fingers clasped eternally around my arms as we both decomposed together.

I dreamt of my father, sitting on that recliner he always sat in, drinking those beers he always drank, smoking those cigarettes he always smoked.  He was alive in this dream, cursing at me about some story I’d written about a homesick Mare.  The dream weaved through the others, sometimes colliding with my chase scene with Casey Myers; sometimesleaking into more pleasant ones, like one of Anna, my Mother and I eating egg salad rolls inside that pergola we’d decided against sleeping in, though instead of it’s eerie night time setting it was day, the sky blue, the grass green, the air warm. My father would appear from nothing, his words slurred and his balance un-even, a can of warm beer hanging on by a thread in his fingers.

‘Fuck the mare. Bring her back. You took her, so bring her back. How do you expect me to go on?’  It was as though he was talking to something behind me, like to him I was a hologram; sent by the devil only to torment him.

It was around lunch time when we arrived at her grave. I knew we had made it because Anna stopped dead in her trackslike she’d hit an invisible wall.

The grave was beautiful, as beautiful as the woman it held. There was no photo of her on it and I was glad of that.  I loved to look at photographs of my mother, but when I was here, I liked to picture her myself, imagine her like my dreams imagined her, create worlds where she still existed, not look at photo’s where she once did.

Emily Grace Bell

1963 January 6th – 1993 May 3rd

Loving mother of Anna and Thomas, soul mate of Robert.

How can I go on without you?

 Nineteen-ninety-three, May third.  My birthday; haunted by the death of my mother.  

We stayed at her resting place for at least an hour, helping ourselves to more marshmallows and chips, sitting cross legged above her as if she were there with us.  Anna told me stories, some I had heard before and others I hadn’t. We spoke to her, telling her of our plans and of what had happened to us, what things looked like in our futures. 

Then, as the living always must, we left her. I conjured no images of my mother chasing after me in corpse form, begging me to stay, heartbroken as to why I would leave her. What my sister and I needed to say had been said, the murkiness within us purged out, our souls free and cleansed, for now.

Through my younger years, I rarely visited my mothers’grave, and especially not my fathers. The thought of death terrified me; the finality of it; the blackness of it. But as I grew older and life began to chip at me; beg me to ask the questions of it that always led to its end, I would venture to the grave my sister and I travelled to those years ago. I’d speak to my mother as I did that Halloween, tell her of the past, ask her of the future.

 As the years flowed on, I brought her my wife and mychildren. I’d tell them the stories Anna used to tell me, as if I’d learned them from firsthand experience, as if I were therewhen she breathed.  

Of all the feelings that become overused and exhausted through life, the feeling I feel when visiting her has never degenerated.  There is something truly real that happens whentrying to connect with the dead, something tragic yet beautiful, something exclusively human and ridiculous.  I don’t think they hear what we’re saying, but something happens. Something ticks inside of us when we pay those respects, when we lay those flowers Casey Meyer’s corpse so desperately craves, when we place the beer cans into the dirtour fallen fathers’ thirst for.  In a strange, ironic way;conversing, respecting, and visiting the dead is the truest ofthings we humans can do.  Dying is just destiny, that’s all.

I am all that is left of my original family. My father died well before his final breath – the same day my mother died, in truth. My sister lost a long battle with lung cancer some years ago and was buried next to our mother.  But I’m still here, waiting, procrastinating until the time comes that I join old William Hart, Casey Myer, my father, my mother, my sister. It’s only a matter of time before I’m with them. Not in that clichéd sense, that vision you get when people say ‘together’when in relevance to the dead, that vision of us all together in brightness and white clothing.  Not like that. In the earth, in nothingness, oblivion.  I will feel or sense nothing. But perhaps my children will when they visit me, like I did with my mother, and how I do now with my sister next to her. Perhaps they’ll speak to my deaf ears and weep because I cannot respond.  This I won’t know. All I know is that one day, like me, like all of us; they will die too.  But if they’re remembered, if their loved ones speak to them long after theirgone and buried in the ground; maybe the memories being remembered is enough.