The Groundskeeper

Sky curled with clouds like the hacked-up grey entrails of a rabbit run over by a lawnmower.

You say I have a morbid imagination. But you do not know me.

I have no imagination.

Only two eyes and the hands they guide. The hands that dig and the hands that hide.

Slow sodden guts of sky shot through with red flecks of morning. I feel like I could reach up and tear into it, that visceral abattoir sky. Reach up and bring a hunk down, put it in my mouth. Chew, chew, tasting of old leather and salt. Tasting of myself.

I’ve been the groundskeeper of Garden Grey for seventeen years now. I water and trim the corpse-fed grass. I stroke and polish the grey and pink headstones. I eat the flowers that are placed beneath those stones. The plastic flowers I gather in a garbage can and dump in a small crater that lies in a clearing behind my one-room shack. There must be thousands of flowers there, a riot of lifeless color, a rotting stew of plastic petals and dust.

When the seasons change I change as well, raking leaves and plowing paths clear of snow, pouring salt on ice.

One winter I saw a deer plodding amongst the stones in the crisp whiteness and I chased after it until foam filled my mouth and tears blinded me.

Only the dead do not escape me.

Only the dead do not elude me.

Only the dead do not reject me.

Only the dead sing to me--sing to me, here in Garden Grey.

Here in Garden Grey the dead do not sleep but the dead dream.

I can feel their dreams rising upward through the wormy loam. Barefoot nights under the milky moon the dreams of the dead tickle the soles of my feet. I dance. I lick the names from the headstones leaving only the engraved dates behind. Birthdates. Deathdates. Meaningless numbers stabbed in stone.

Moonlight climbs the thorns on the iron vines. Moonlight embraces each blade of grass. Moonlight is cold.

I press my face into grass, smell the dead down deep. There is something else, a sweet aroma of memories and unfulfilled dreams swarming between the motes of earth. The moonlight dissolves my ratty clothes. I dig with numb fingers into the dirt. I open my mouth to inhale worms, bonespirits, dust.

In the morning . . .

In the morning the blue light stitches the cemetery back together again. The day shuffles forward like a tame Frankenstein monster. The birds cry.

I limp naked through the matchstick trees, once more my self, the lonely groundskeeper of Garden Grey.

Finis.

Sept/Oct 2008