Sleep Again

There had not been a storm like this in recent memory, and my recent memory stretched back generations. It was as near disaster as a storm could be without ending cities full of lives. It was a wind-spiked rainstorm, a lightning-seeking-earth storm, a storm that wet the ground so thoroughly that every once green avenue had a chance of forever remaining a river. For a week after it ended, rain dripped from trees and eaves and moss onto the ground, and onto the graves.

As though the storm were a bump in the night, they woke.

The sky was pewter for days after, as if the storm had taken all its energy and it couldn’t recall total light. Dark nights turned into dim mornings, fatigued into murky afternoons, and became dark nights again. I heard them on a gloomy morning. It had been so long since I had heard anything from them that I leapt off one of the headstones, onto the ground, hands up, knees bent. I didn’t have the thought to know what I needed to do, if anything needed to be done. I was too surprised to do anything; I knew only that I had to be ready to do anything.

But nothing rose. There was no knocking on coffin lids. No fingers thrusting up through the dirt. Only wakeful sounds from the dead. Sighing and a deep vacuous noise where some of them recalled breathing even while their bodies forgot. It was sonorous and languid, and it only lasted a few hours.

When the ill-lit afternoon arrived, the graves were silent again.

There was nothing to do. Heat returned to the city. The memory of the storm gave way to a nearly blue sky. The lichen on the headstones dried enough to crackle under me. I felt ancient in a strange way, like someone who had recently become too old to remember their childhood. I couldn’t remember my childhood, or my adulthood. Tourists and local runners and devoted rememberers tooled through the graveyard. There were colours among them that the graveyard would never have known otherwise. They were all hummingbird colours. A fantastical narrative trotted into mind, of my own hummingbird-hued life before I’d come here. Perhaps I had walked past these graves before. And past the one that used to perch where I did now, without seeing, like the tourists.

Tourists and rememberers visited graves, took photographs of charming cherubs and haunting angels, and named aesthetically crusted with moss. They spoke quietly, and sometimes laughed while looking abashed. They did not look at me. They did not stop by my grave.

Mine was not a grave to stop by.

None of ours’ were. We were not meant to be remembered. Only to inherit, and, eventually, to pass on.

Evening crept subtly in, tugging along sun and rain. The sunshower looked joyful and improbable. Birds sang apocalyptically until the rain became too heavy and they dove beneath the brambles for shelter. I waited as the rain chased away everything but the small animals. I shook water from my wings when the feathers felt heavy with droplets.

A hiss of restlessness washed through the graveyard. What were the sounds of the dead becoming restless? Fingers searching along coffin lid seams? Fingers bones finding ribs and noticing the bareness? Scull turning against decrepit pillows?

I had the impression of hair against a pillowcase. Not in a coffin. In a room, dulled by the rain on the outside of it, and sleepiness. I put my hand to my ribs and tried to remember, but the morning I tried to handle the memory, the more it thinned, like paper that had been in the sun too long.

Something hissed, like a length of fabric against a floor. Or loam churning against loam.

I nearly unbalanced myself as I rose, fluttering my wings, looking from headstone to headstone. The light was fading. Naphtha colours bled into wren-black on the horizon. In the dusk, the graveyard was a confusing landscape of black shadows against blacker crests and dips. My fingers moved on the headstone. My body seemed to know change before my mind did.

But I couldn’t see it. I closed my eyes and faded to nothing but listening. The sunshower slowing to restless fingertip movement. Leaves disturbing leaves. Timid creatures arguing appetite with safety. Owls- always owls- blearily preparing to hunt. Distantly as to sound like a monotone surf, cars on the roadway.

I let the sounds turn me.

She was only a few feet away, awake and wide-eyed, when I opened my eyes. I had been braced for a rotten face, for gore or empty sockets or missing appendages or bone. Not for her.

She was young, but old enough to know it, and resent it. She had been young. The pulled on the sleeves of her grave dress, though it destroyed their whiteness, made them as grimy as her fingernails. She was wearing half of her grave on her hands, and more on her feet. Her legs swayed as her knees juddered. Her body had forgotten walking, and remembering was exhausting it. She could not look at me for long. Her eyes were fragile and strange, with eyelashes the colour of dust. She looked like something unearthed- not like a corpse, but like a buried teacup or glass bottle.

She looked at the eyes on my wings. I looked back. There had been no lessons, no instructions; instinct lifted my hand and pointed it to her. Made me say, in a voice she could not not listen to, “Return to sleep. It is the night. It is time to rest.”

She pushed mud off one foot with the other. Clumps rolled away, leaving dark streaks. Grass stuck to her toes. She glanced at the empty path, then the plunging sun. She did not know it wasn’t time to rise. If she slept again soon, then when she did rise, with the others, as they did once every year, this night would seem like nothing but a short lucid dream in an otherwise dreamless sleep. She said, “I don’t want to go back to sleep.”

I said, “It’s your job to sleep. There’s nothing for you here.”

This was obvious. Not because her family might have died, or because even if they hadn’t, they would likely struggle with her sudden return more than they had her death. There was nothing for any of them here until one of them came to replace me.

“There’s nothing here for you, though, is there?” she said.

“I don’t know.” I saw that while she had been watching me, and I her, she had been puzzling her sleep, and my presence. She had enjoyed the puzzle of it. I saw the girl she had been when she was alive. “Sleep again, and forget this.” I thought, in a moment I was ashamed of immediately, that I would have been delighted if it were her. If she were anything but another soul wanting a warm body, or a pool of water to soak into, or a mirror to appear in, or an ear to whisper in. If she could perch here where I had been.

Her hands cupped her elbows. Her chest rose and fell without breath. She remembered cold, air. She remembered too much.

I did not know what to do, so I allowed my hands to reach for her, my feet to guide us to her grave. She closed her eyes. Her expression was strained and streaky. Weak, her knees shook as she walked. She nearly buckled over a rise in the ground, sinking just slowly enough to catch herself and rise again. The sunshower had nearly stopped. Two drops fell on her shoulder and forehead. In the soil, the dead hissed and sighed again, full of nebulous desire.

We stopped at her grave. She was older than I thought. Her death was earlier as well. There would be no family to frighten if she returned to them. She frowned at the dates on her headstones, as if she had not realized until now that she felt robbed, or that she ought to care. It seemed unfair to tell her that I was never going to experience the things she had not.

She stood on the grave’s edge and looked up at me. The light pooled in her collarbone. I saw there was dirt smeared on her cheeks where I had thought she was just gaunt. Everywhere she was the colour of dirt.

I held her elbow as she sat on the edge. She hesitated, sagging suddenly as if her strings had been cut. She put a hand to her breastbone. Perhaps she had just felt the absence of any beating. She shook her head. Her hair swung like a lace curtain around her. Then she leaned back, into my hands, against my crouching knees.

For all the memories I did not have, I knew this: I had not been here long enough. There might be no one to take over for me until I had forgotten the possibility of it. It would not be her. I had nothing to promise her. I could never do anything for any of them. And they could do nothing for me.

She turned her head against my leg and whispered through her hair, “I want to live forever.”

I sighed. Her eyes shut. I felt her full weight on me.

I said, “This isn’t living.”

Art by Jenna Barton

Text by Lucie MacAulay