Confusion.
Madness.
Sorrow.
Duty.
These were but a few of the epitaphs etched into the cracked and crumbled headstones of the cemetery Lucy and Mark entered. The rusted wrought iron fence erected as the cemetery's border did little to repel the flat expense of farmland whose only features for miles were the browning crops and shedding trees. As isolated from society the cemetery was, Mark and Lucy walked with caution along the road, keeping a careful eye out for the occasional careless driver. The walk to the cemetery seemed as endless as the cemetery itself, whose rows and columns of ruined headstones stretched to the far foundations of the fences.
On this cloudy Autumn day, a perverted wind rubbed Lucy's bare forearms with invisible fingers and rattled her body with a shiver. “I really wish I had brought a jacket,” Lucy said while rubbing her arms. Though the walk got her warm blood flowing beneath her skin, the occasional chilly breeze negated the effort.
“We'll try not to stay too long,” Mark said. Like Lucy, he also wore a short-sleeve polo, but with his hands dug into his pockets, he seemed content with his body temperature.
“But it's the anniversary of your grandfather's death,” Lucy reminded him. “We shouldn't put my comfort before that.”
“It's all right.” Mark said. “I don't visit his grave as long as I used to, anyway.”
“But—”
“It's fine, Lucy,” Mark said with some firmness. “He's not going to rise from the grave and attack us because we were only here a few minutes.”
“...all right,” Lucy said, unable to hide her unease.
Beauty.
Legacy.
Wealth.
Laughter.
“Why do all of the headstones have a single word on them?” Lucy asked as she read the headstones still legible because their letters hadn't been rubbed away by erosion or removed with the failing structure.
“It's the tradition for this cemetery,” Mark explained. “Before someone's buried here, their friends and family decide on one word that describes them best.”
“That's unique,” Lucy commented. “When did this tradition start?”
“Nobody knows for sure. Some historians estimate during the 1800s, others as early as the late 1700s.”
Lucy's eyes drifted from the crooked and cracked headstones to the carcass of a small stone-brick church. The soiled planks of what was left of the roof caved in, threatening to crush the pews that were no doubt moldy and covered in dust, dirt, and the waste of animals that made a home of the aged building whose glass windows were all shattered. Attached to the church was a bell tower with, to Lucy's amazement, a rusted bell still present where it was hung on its yoke however many years ago. With the horrible condition of the entire building, Lucy would have suspected that a good gale would have toppled the entire thing over with the advent of the last hurricane.
“What happened to that church that it's been abandoned?” Lucy asked.
“It used to be a funeral home, but it wasn't used anymore when some were built in the city,” Mark explained. “Do you see that bell?”
“Yes,” Lucy said, and trained her eyes on the bell in an instant, for they didn't stray far from the church.
“That's known as the Cessation Bell. Whenever a funeral was held, it would be rung four times at the end of the service. Now, as I'm sure you can tell, that tradition isn't upheld anymore.”
With her eyes glued to the aged bell, the thick rope still tied around its clapper, Lucy imagined what the bell would sound like. She used the hollow rings she had heard throughout her life as a reference, but their notes weren't anything special: just a person swinging the clapper into either side of the sound rim. But as she imagined the sound as played for a funeral service, the ringing seemed...sadder. And slower somehow.
“There's also a legend about the bell. More of a superstition, actually,” Mark corrected himself. “It's said that anyone who hears the tolling of the Cessation Bell in their sleep will die in one year.”
“That's quite morbid for a superstition,” Lucy said to Mark. Though Mark's tone hadn't changed the slightest when he told her about the superstition, Lucy saw that his expression had. Sculpted onto his face was not indifference or content but a troubled expression directed at the lonesome bell. Lucy inspected the bell again to see if there was some feature on it she had missed but found nothing beyond the new rust stains and cracks revealed as they walked up the dirt road of the cemetery. Concerned about the meaning of his expression, Lucy asked, “You don't actually believe in that superstition, do you?”
A couple of seconds passed before Mark gave Lucy a look of mild daze—the kind a person gave when ripped from their daydream—educating Lucy on the existence of whatever string of thoughts had worried him. “No, of course not,” Mark said in his usual content tone. “Did you think I was the kind of person to believe in silly stuff like that?”
“No, but...” Lucy said, somewhat doubtful now about her previous suspicion. “The way you looked at the bell a minute ago was...concerning,” she said with concern herself.
Mark raised a brow, looked at the bell, then raised his other brow as he said, “Oh, I was just thinking myself about how morbid the superstition is.”
“That makes sense,” Lucy said.
“Besides, it's also part of the superstition that nobody who hears the bell remembers it.”
“Then where did the superstition come from?”
Mark shrugged a shoulder and said, “I don't know. It might just be a story made up to attract attention to the church.”
Friendship.
Loneliness.
Protective.
Intelligent.
As Lucy returned to reading the plethora of differing epitaphs, she caught Mark glimpsing back at the bell with that same worried expression. Since his glimpse was brief and Lucy saw no reason to doubt his explanation of the superstition, she didn't bring up the topic of his second worried expression.
Desiring to rip Mark from whatever train of thoughts he was riding and also possessing an inquiring mind about his grandfather, Lucy asked, “What's your grandfather's epitaph?”
“You'll have to wait and see for yourself,” Mark said with no hint of his previous worry.
“Do I at least get a hint?”
“Afraid not.”
Lucy groaned with a blend of slight frustration and disappointment. A light bulb then burned in her head from the minute realization she had, and she said, “You haven't told me about your grandfather. What was he like?”
“You wouldn't have liked him at first.”
“Why not?”
Mark drew in breath with his teeth sunk into his bottom lip. “Well...” he started, his eyes darting about. “The first time he would have seen us, he would have asked if we had...you know.”
“No, I don't know.” But as Lucy finished pronouncing her last word, she knew. “Oh.” A gentle warmth burned beneath her cheeks. “You're right, I probably wouldn't have liked him.”
Mark chuckled and said, “See? I told you so.”
“Does he ask that of everybody he sees?” Lucy asked with bitterness at the tip of her tongue.
“No, he would have only said that to tease us. He does that with everybody. You have no idea how many times I heard from my grandmom, 'That's terrible!' Like one time, he, Grandmom, me, and my parents went out to eat. We were sitting at our table chatting when a party of six or seven people of varying sizes”—Mark created the outlines of circles of varying sizes using his arms—“walked in. After they all sat at their table, my grandpa said how funny it would have been if they had walked in smallest to biggest.”
“That is terrible!”
“My grandmom said the same thing,” Mark said while laughing.
“That's because it is! Did he always say such terrible things?”
“Whenever the moment came up. If he found something to use against you, he used it. If you mispronounced a word, he'd pronounce it that way with you for the next couple of weeks. If he saw you feeding pigeons in the park and you asked him for help at another time, he'd ask you why you didn't ask your pigeons for help.” Based on Mark's laughter and his latter example especially, Lucy guessed that these were real teases Mark's grandfather had used. “Of course,” Mark said once his laughter quelled, “he didn't say any of that stuff to hurt a person. It's just the sense of humor he had, and he enjoyed making others laugh,” he said with a good quantity of nostalgia.
“I'm still not sure if I would have liked him at all,” Lucy said.
“Didn't think you would,” Mark said as he led Lucy into the sea of headstones.
Painting.
Ambitious.
Addiction.
Passion.
Lucy couldn't help but read each epitaph she passed along the row she and Mark followed. Her curiosity wouldn't allow her to miss one word, but each reading filled her with more and more sadness. These headstones didn't possess the gloss of a fresh grave marker, but they weren't worn at by the frozen lightning bolts of cracks or smeared with inactive black fumes. While they were close to the rear of the cemetery, there was space for three or four more rows, Lucy guessed. She looked out at the sea of headstones and wondered how many unique epitaphs there were only to find herself drowning in an ocean of sorrow.
Mark stopped to the left of a headstone and said, “This is it.”
Lucy had her own words in mind for Mark's grandfather, none of them too kind, but she thought, from the point of view of Mark's family, that their selected word made sense:
Dastardly.
“That's really what you and your family thought of him?” Lucy asked.
“We had a small list of words, but we thought this one fit him best.”
The air in Lucy's lungs escaped through her nostrils in a mournful sigh as her eyebrows grew heavier. She asked, “Wasn't there more to him?”
“What do you mean?”
“Wasn't there more to him as a person? Or any of these people?” Lucy said, agitated, and spread her arms wide and pointed her torso towards the graves. “It's not right that they're remembered by a vague word.” She glared at the headstone of Mark's grandfather with her nails squeezed into her wrinkled palms. “This stupid cemetery doesn't even have the decency to put their names on the headstones.”
“Of course there was more to my grandpa,” Mark said in a gentle tone. “And all of these other people.” He looked around the cemetery. “The single-word epitaph is just what the cemetery does.”
“It's still not right,” Lucy said with both bitterness and gloom. Her eyes drifted to the headstone to the right.
Sadness.
Lucy's mind summoned images of a silhouette huddled in the dark corner of their bedroom, arms wrapped around their knees, a blanket their shield from whatever cruelties the world had tossed at them. And in darkness this nameless person lived until their death, likely by their own intervention. This was the obvious connotation of the epitaph, but Lucy also thought that the real meaning was less obvious: like it was a poem the person wrote or a painting. Even so, there was no reason for a perfectly happy individual to create works of sadness unless they were reflecting some aspect of their life unto their craft, and Lucy couldn't help but suspect that the person whose bones lay beneath the headstone suffered a miserable end.
“My grandpa said the same thing the first time he visited this cemetery, you know,” Mark said.
Lucy looked curiously up at a blurry Mark and had to dab the tears pooled in the bottoms of her eyelids before he stood clear. “Did he?”
“That's what my grandmom told me, anyway. She said that the first time he visited the cemetery, he nearly kicked over every tombstone,” Mark said. “But she also said that as he gazed at the tombstones on their way out, he had the saddest look on his face she had ever seen.”
Lucy's brows shot up and she blinked in shock at hearing a comedic man who possessed an expression fitted for Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata.
“He told her that it was the first time in his life that he had seen how people can die and leave behind next to nothing to be remembered,” Mark said. “Possessions will decay, and memories will die with the holder. Grandmom told me that his visit to the cemetery was the day he regretted his life decisions.”
“Regretted them in what way?”
“She said that he wished he had done more to leave something of a mark on the world, so that he wasn't remembered by a single vague word on a slab of stone.”
“Couldn't he have started on something, then? Like a book or a business?” Lucy asked. “Or was he too old?”
Mark shook his head. “It wasn't his age—he didn't have the motivation. Grandmom said that after that day, he would spend afternoons and evenings sitting in his rocking chair on the porch, staring out at the street at the people walking by and the children playing. She thought he was wondering how all of those people would be remembered and what sort of mark they would leave on the world.”
“I'm sorry,” Lucy said, looking down at the dulled grass, ashamed.
“What for?”
“For getting upset about your grandfather the way I did.”
“Don't be,” Mark said sweetly. “If he had seen your reaction, he would have liked you.”
Lucy held her eyes over the headstone of Mark's grandfather, unfazed by the compliment.
“Though he wouldn't have like the fact that I'm telling you all of this about him: how pessimistic and downright depressed he sometimes could be.”
“Is that why he made such crude jokes?” Lucy looked up at Mark. “To hide his sadness from you and your family?”
“No, his jokes were genuine. Grandmom said that as long as she's known him, he sometimes just sulked around for no apparent reason, but it was something he didn't want anybody knowing about, because he didn't want us worrying about him.”
Lucy's eyes fell back onto the headstone as she wondered about the depression of Mark's grandfather and how much of his soul it consumed. Thinking about it—wearing his shoes, rocking on his chair—poked an doleful hole in her chest that must have doubled as a portal, for Lucy found herself garbed with the same blanket as the silhouette beneath the next grave over. And then she began to wonder if the silhouette also had humor they wore as a cloak to hide from their loved ones how they spent their solitary moments.
From the corner of her eye, Mark started away from the headstone and said, “Come on, let's go.”
Ripped from her forlorn fantasy and confused, Lucy asked Mark as he passed, “We're leaving so soon?”
“I told you we weren't going to stay long,” Mark said over his shoulder.
“Aren't you going to say something to your grandfather?”
Mark stopped and shook his head. “I tried that after he was buried, but I felt silly doing it, so I didn't bother after that. Besides,” Mark said with a slight smile, “he'd make fun of me for talking to a piece of rock in the middle of nowhere.”
“Oh, okay,” Lucy mumbled. She took a few steps, glanced back at the headstone, and then followed Mark back to the dirt road leading out of the cemetery.
While retracing the path of footprints they left moments before, Lucy noticed Mark's head tilt in the direction of the Cessation Bell. She traced a crescent in her path to catch a peek of Mark's expression without being conspicuous. As he turned his head at the passing church, his eyes came into Lucy's vision, and he focused his attention on her instead.
“What's the matter?” he asked.
“Oh,” Lucy said, caught off guard by his sudden change in attention. “I thought I saw something on your face, but I was wrong,” she lied, though not entirely.
Mark faced the gate-less exit of the cemetery, and Lucy wasn't able anymore to see the same worry he wore whenever gazing at the Cessation Bell.
When they came to the exit, they each checked left and right for any oncoming cars. There was one at the edge of the road to their right, but it drove on the side of the road opposite on which Mark and Lucy were to walk. They stepped onto the shoulder, Lucy beside the wrought iron fence and its peeling black paint and Mark closer to the lanes.
When they cleared the corner of the cemetery fence, as the howling of the car grew louder, Lucy, tired of the monotony of the flatlands, distracted herself by staring at the once-lush tufts of grass that were now dying with the onslaught of cool Autumn air.
As the croon of the car signaled its imminent arrival, she heard Mark shout, “Lucy, watch out!” At the same time, she also heard the shriek of car tires and wail of a car horn, and she whipped her head to find the still image of a dull red station wagon threatening them with the teeth that were its grill. Her organs became the subjects of strengthened gravity, but they had barely begun their drop in her torso before she felt something shove her in her collar bones. The world rotated in her eyes, and the station wagon was a blur that raced across her vision.
The shriek ceased, as did the wail, and Lucy found herself staring at the blurry blades of faded grass with the gray clouds of the sky above. Warmth pooled with pain at the rear of her head and tailbone from her landing, but they were minor, and she barely noticed them, anyway.
“Mark!” She yelled as she pulled her upper body up in a flash. In the spot where Mark had been beside her, there was nothing. In the corner of her vision, she found the dull red station wagon stopped on the pavement marker dividing the right land from the shoulder. “Mark!” Lucy yelled again as she picked herself up and flew out of the ditch in two leaps.
Just past the car, she could see Mark laying on the ground. She ran towards him, following the smoking black trails where the station wagon's tires bit into the asphalt. The driver of the car got out, a cellphone in his hand. Lucy heard him mumbling some sort of curse before and while she slammed his car door on him, because it acted as obstacle on her path towards Mark.
“Mark!” Lucy yelled as she skidded to her knees beside him.
Mark lay with his still limps twisted in unnatural ways. Tears were torn into the fabric of his clothing, and there was a trail of splattered blood from the station wagon's grill leading to Mark. Yet for all of the damage done to him, his eyes remained open.
The few times Lucy had visited the body of a deceased individual at a funeral, their eyes were closed, and they looked as if they were having the most peaceful slumber. So with Mark's eyelids wide open, Lucy thought he might be alive.
She placed her hand on his shoulder, one of the few places without blood, and shook it while saying with a choked voice, “Mark, wake up. Come on, you have to get up.”
No answer. Mark must be unconscious from the blood loss.
Lucy didn't know much about treating injuries, but she had learned from her high school health class that to stop bleeding, one had to apply pressure to the wound. She stripped off her polo, leaving her tank top as the only protection from the chilly air. But because of the circumstances, the air was refreshing to the touch of her flushed skin.
When Lucy went to apply pressure, she froze. She didn't know where to start. There was blood everywhere. So much blood. It seemed to spill from every part of his body, yet from nowhere at the same time. Her eyes flicked back and forth between the huge blot of red soaked into his shirt and the crown of hair where droplets of blood clung to the tips. She couldn't decide which wound was more important to treat with her available resources, so she pressed her shirt against Mark's sternum, hoping that that was the best decision.
“Come on, Mark,” Lucy sobbed. “You have to wake up now. Everything's all right. You're going to be all right.”
No answer from Mark once more. Not even a flick of the eyes or a whimper of the lips.
“Mark, please, you have to get up.”
Still no answer from Mark, and his face blurred as Lucy's eyes flooded with tears.
“Mark,” she said as she wiped away the tears on her shoulder. “Please speak to me. Please...say something. Anything.” Her hands shuddered from the lack of a response from Mark, and she loosened her hold on Mark's chest as her cold fingers dug into her now-bloodied shirt. “Please...stay with me.” Her shoulders slumped forward, and tears dripped from her eyes onto her hands as she let out a series of howling cries.
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