Heavier Wings

Graveyards had nothing to do with it. It was rain. Rain and petrichor. The smell of damp loam, and the green, growing scent that rose off anything green and growing in any graveyard. She had been in a graveyard on the other side of the world the other day, where the petrichor smelled like bamboo, as pungent as if she were pressing her nose against it, and the rain was sharp and warm. Here everything was misty and silver-tipped, like the world emerging from a storm. There’s Spanish moss, crawling like a dark cloud over several of the graves.

That did more to call them than the graveyard. Graveyards are nothing but vehicles for human superstition. She liked graveyards, but she liked the sullen darkness of them, or the grayness of them, the quiet, all of those things humans liked but only for so long before a part of them- the living part, she often thought- cried out for an end to solitude. She kept her ears strained for the sounds, the ones humans never heard, the wailing that following the waking, like a child’s cry after it is banished from the womb. The nails scratching against the inside of the coffin, savage, then cautious when wood chips and polish chips gathered beneath the nails, then savage again when air began to get thin. Not that air was a priority, but the bodies had the physical imprint of life, the memory of breathing, and that was almost the same thing as the need for it, apparently.

She might have helped them, but she liked the waiting time, to prepare something to say. It was not necessary. Most days she had nothing to say to those that rose. She only had to do her job, and that did not require kindness. She just had to do… what needed to be done. She watched tulips bobbing on the wind, the colours of embers in a fireplace, and some the colour of brambleberry jelly, dark and rich and sweet.

The scratching stopped for a while. She was getting used to that too. They start and stop, start and stop, as if they were wakng and could not keep their eyes open, drifting in and out of sleep. The graves are silent, then a riot, all at once. She stayed quiet. She let her pale, bare back take the brunt of the sunlight, until she felt she might blister from the heat. She looked at the red lichen growing on top of the tombstone, between her toes. She curled her toes over the edge of the tombstone, though she had never fallen, and wasn’t worried about doing it now. She watched passersby, tourists and the dailies, the ones who visited their loved ones each afternoon or night or pocket of the day they had carved out for the memory of the deceased. They reminded her of the colours of a greenhouse, once one had gotten past the algae-tinted water and the banana leaves and golden barrel cacti and it was all berry-red blossoms on vines, and purple flower slike upside down umbrellas curving around the stalks of birds of paradise. Quite pretty, but a little garish together, so different. At least they took in the graveyard, the despairing angels atop tombs, the subtle and solemn engravings on the plates set into the ground, before they raised their digital cameras.

She was not in the photography, even the camera that pointed at the grave next to her, or the mausoleum behind her. She was not a grave one saw, or a statue one ogled.

Evening began to fall, a dark blue curtain that rippled with black like ink in the ocean. Rainwater ran off the trees, ran off her wings, cleaned some of the mud from the barbs of her feathers.

The scratching came again. She heard the vicious tear of teeth, which meant that whoever was in the grave was getting very desperate. Their bones were hitching together, their shoulders rolling back and colliding against one another.

She closedher eyes. She could feel the soil above the grave begin to part, as if the fingers parting it were not so much clawing for freedom, as carting through her hair, making her scalp tingle. She reached outside her own flesh to the fingers in the dirt and willed the grave’s occupant, up. She wondered if the person climbing toward her was even aware of her thoughts, of her mental reach. She had not been aware of any intrusions in her mind when she’d climbed out of her own grave, but that might have been for lack of trying, on both their ends.

She held out her hand, over the grave. She pushed aside the night air as if it were a blanket, listening, stretching, sniffing the air, the petrichor, changing with the disturbed loam.

She opened her eyes again, looking right at the occupant of the grave. Former occupant. She had expected a girl. Girls, especially ones that died as young as this boy had died- nine, or ten- appeared more often than young boys did. Younger and younger women were getting restless in their graves, not long as they were buried.

The boy’s face was soft still, like rising dough, not yet sharpened into distinguishable features. He wore the suit he’d been buried in, covered in grave dirt. His spine was rigid, and he held himself carefully sideways, as if some injury from when he’d lived hurt him still. That happened sometimes, like phantom limb syndrome. Phantom life syndrome. He huddled against the headstone, but pressed a hand to it, as though he’d stopped in the middle of pushing it away. Or pushing away from her.

Insitnctively, she turned her ear toward him. Her good ear. Injuries were not fixed in death. She heard his loud breaths in her left ear as if he’d stepped closer.

The boy pushed himself to his knees, bu didn’t stand. There was something strange about his chest, an indent, as if, while being formed, someone had left him to dry over a metal beam, and his body had bent around it. There was a dark mark on his cheek too, not a bruise, like a caved in skull. He looked at her wings carefully. There was a cross on a chain around his neck. Perhaps he believed creatures with wings were angels. “Where is my mama?” he asked.

She didn’t answer. She inspected the boy’s nails. They were cracked, dirt crowded under them.

“I want to go home,” he said, voice muffled by tears.

“This is home, now.” Her voice- she so rarely used it, she forgot how it sounded- was dry, like the husk of an insect. The abandoned carapace of a beetle. “You must forget any other. This is it.” The words were not as useless as she’d once thought they were. People accepted this and took to it all with alacrity. Those that didn’t found themselves a place to haunt, a place to roam, things to touch or cling to, pools of water or mirrors to inhabit. They were not haunting. Only haunted by the memories of what it was like to inhale. To touch and feel heat. To cling or clutch or break or bend.

She wanted to send him back into the coffin. She wanted to close his eyelids and preserve him, trap him like a memory trapped in perfume. Take something from him and bottle it. She wanted to hide him in the dirt. She felt as if the dirt wanted him. The others were restless, and yet he was the first one, the first to wake.

She reached out, her fingers hovering over his hair. She could push it back, see if he felt what she had when he’d climbed out of his grave. She imagined hat fair hair, cut at the barber’s, then concealed beneath a hat until it had grown out of it, tilted as he ducked and looked at his hands, which were long enough to splay across an octave on a piano. Not large enough yet to touch someone else, the way he didn’t understand yet.

The boy looked up. His lip had stopped quivering. If he’d been about to cry before, he wasn’t about to do it now. There was mud on the hems of his pants, in his shirt sleeves. She’d hardly ever seen children crawl out of their own grave.

She dropped her legs on either side of the tombstone, opening her arms, as if she had grown a part of the statue, flat and waiting for a reception. But the boy did not need prompting. He came forward, pressing his cheek against her collar, then curling his hands together under her breastbone. She touched him with her hands, her hands that put him in his grave and summoned him again.

The boy had many memories, but they were already fading. Peace was such a savage thing, that swallowed memories of fights, and therefore memories of the times before, the times after, the silences, the tension, and the relief, the fondness. It swallowed memory after memory, in time. She held onto him, trying to keep peace from him while he figured out how to wrap his arms around her without rustling her wings.

Art by Lucie MacAulay

Text by Lucie MacAulay