Gargoyle in the Boughs 091344

I have never been one to be sentimental, indeed, my closer friends often say it is very difficult and near impossible to excite me for too long, much less keep me interested in the forgotten memories of the past. All that, I’d say, was true. Alone after paying my fare, I walked up to the arch gate that separated our world from that of the dead. We often associate the graveyards to only a few emotions: sentiment, dread, and misery. The Chinese Cemetery was no different, its paint cracked and the roads worn by the many feet that had gone by since it had been made. Who wanted to maintain a necropolis?
Entering it had me pass under an arch, the cracked letters there welcoming you into the abode of the departed. I walked the street, shadows playing by my feet as the thickening clouds blotted the sun. The night spooked people because they could not see; the day spooks people for the exact opposite reason. Gazing left, the ground dipped away into a form of crevice that stopped only at a low wall. Grass swayed with the wind whispering down the morose path one would have to leave to get there. Weeds and tree roots made a labyrinth of the memorial grounds, making it difficult for even I, who made a sport of hiking. A light drizzle matted my hair as the rains began to fall and my footsteps were the squelching of moistened earth.
Coffins here were not even six feet underground.
The poor were laid to rest out in the cleft so that a family need only pay for one patch of ground. Aluminum girders supported three to four caskets placed one on top of another. Weeds grew in masses, the dampened greens hugging those same pipes in a death’s grip from the soft earth like the hands of the dead groping for their sons and daughters above the dirt boundary. There was little to protect the caskets, I noticed. The fiber glass containers, already muddied by the weather throughout their stay had assailed it in its long history. Some were visibly webbed with cracks and my fingers traced one long gash to find that water could and did seep in. The patter of the drizzle continued to fall, each droplet pinging loudly off the hollow containers, the glittering beads like sweat perspiring for the sake of the body kept within. One glared right out at me, two larger drops of water glimmering like the eyes of the long dead.
Leaving the coffins, I fled the weather. Though the sun still bore down on me, so did the rain, unhealthy for even the cremated dead I visited next. Pebble stone steps, much of the original design were craters instead of stones, led one up to the lonely hexagonal building. Each in their separate urns, they were placed in the temples side by side. With the paint within the structure bloated and blistered as badly as it’s outside and with the bared cement showing cracks deep enough to insert my thumb in, I’d decided that it wasn’t too much of a difference from those dead in the crevice. Melted wax frozen in mid-drip hang from the sixth or seventh row beyond even my reach with evidence of scratches on those lower one sections where even a child could touch, candle scavengers scraped off those burnt and melted candles. White stone entombed those ashes in the doubtful safety of their small compartmental sections while the epitaphs grew steadily less and less legible. There was the gray of exposed cement webbed intricately with cracks worn and dulled by generations-worth of time, the blue-to-green paint coming off the walls as though being flayed, and of course the gold that looked like flakes ready to come off with their falsehoods. To the side, one would notice a poorly garbed man, a scavenger or a watchman. Sometimes they were just one man. It didn’t help to have company in these parts. Alone, I stalked the hexagonal structure, one would be surrounded by the singular uniqueness of each block with gates protecting some while text blurred resembled the dried, clotted blood seeping out into reality as if the ashes were still trying to say something.
For the more fortunate, the veritable necropolis awaited. From the streets, the first of the small houses could be seen. Within them lay the slumbering dead tiled or sealed away with granite laden slabs like tombs of old. Some were held in darkened structures, old candles leaning perilously close to falling over, held by the very will of the dead. Some were held in the open, gray stone resembling an altar built beside these mausoleums and trees. Between these houses, I was again exposed to the weather. Gnarled, ancient trees stood vigil, their yellowing canopies providing shelter from the sun already hidden behind storm clouds, or if one were unluckily beside the road, only a small shrub would accompany the stone relief. As I walked the path between stone houses, the trees offered only fat insects and rain. Often, people would eat and feast in those stone homes as though eating with the dead but there were always ants and larger insects. Not close to the days of the dead in the calendar, those few visitors more often than not left the dead in their own wet misery like dogs left in their own excrement.
It was a bleak but common journey through the lands of the departed, the graves testament to human sensitivity for the past. Feet splashing as the uneven ground made for more puddles; I turned to look at the cursed tree that had made such a deep rent in the earth, thick roots retaking the land rightfully belonging to nature. Cement slabs were thrown facing upwards by the intrusion, but that damage was too far severe. A gaping hole met my eye as I passed the small yard of the dead to return to the street. Growing out of an emptied grave was a single sapling, a massive gnarled root boring right in through the grave. I bit my lip then.
I knew the grave in the next section of these parts. I was there once every year. Never had I yet noticed it. Maybe someone who knew the person whose remains fed the sapling, feeding off the last vestiges of memory, had forgotten. One look within told me it was too late. One look inside and I turned around and headed back down towards the entrance. The patter of the slight drizzle continued to fall.
I can’t help it. Having seen the emptied grave, there was no turning back. There was a saying especially in Chinese that if one photographed a grave, that person brought its spirit back home with him/her. I usually didn’t give it the benefit of the doubt, but that broken tomb made me turn to a more forgiving means of capturing that memory. I left the place of the dead with my mobile in hand, the first rhymes to the poem flowing from my mind.
The patter of the rain smoothly became like the padding of feet behind me.


No one was there.