The gate creaked as I shut it behind me. I pocketed my skeleton-key, smirking at the fittingness. I felt erudite and contemplative. I stepped along the path that would lead me up the hill upon which, not far below the summit, lay the new plot where, only hours earlier, a dozen mourners had paid their last respects.
Beacon-like, the full moon shone before me, descending horizonward behind the leaves of the cedars and oaks. Like the singled soul of he who had so recently passed, this great, skied presence journeyed smoothly and steadily, dimming only just before its demise and vanishing only when completely obscured by the vast, preponderant weight of natured necessity and worldly throng.
The late autumn night was curiously silent and still, as if frozen into place by the coldness of the unforseen Northern airs that hung blocklike about me. I walked slowly, reading every headstone that met my eyes. How sad it seemed that entire lifetimes had been so casually distilled into such simple lines of merely semiotic letters and numbers. Nothing I wished to know could be gleaned from these stones. I grimaced at the arbitrariness, even callousness, with which we earthily embosom the bodies of those who for so long have loved us, and nurtured us in the face of this ever-paining planet.
The headstones thickened as I ascended the hill. I shuddered at their granite silence and felt a tear at my eye. There were more of them and more of them on every side of me, mocking me, overwhelming me with their vagueness, their muteness, their utterly unalterable incompleteness. Then I reached the new plot, and I could stand it no longer. I fell to my knees, hands to the cold soil... * * *
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