The girl in the graveyard is your best friend, so you bring her home. The night presses down on you both, a bruise on the horizon, its hue a rogue smear reflected in the passenger window..like fruit gone soft and forgotten. The body in the seat struggles with the seatbelt, fingers twitching first, then two, clawing at the strap. The radio hums with static, and her body shifts, the creak of her seat the only sound. You focus on her face...the sharp angle of her jaw, the nose still crooked from the baseball that hit her when she was twelve, just off-center. Her skin is like a plastic bag wet from the rain, sagging, pulled thin. The stench of musk and sulfur hangs in the air. You try to look away but can't. She's so beautiful, even like this. The headlights slice through the dirt road in front of you, the yellow light pale and sickly, like jaundice. Your hands ache from the cold, your lips cracked with the dry sting of winter air. And beside you, she’s dead..and yet you’re bringing her home.
Four days ago, you walked into a hardware store and left with a shovel..heavy enough to lift a life from the earth. Four days you spent digging in your backyard, dirt caking under your nails, holes spreading through the garden beds like the mouths of hungry beasts. You’d dug until you could sift through the soil with your eyes closed, your hands bound, as if you could feel the earth’s secrets in your fingertips. Four nights you lay awake, staring at the pockmarked ceiling, wondering what it would be like to burn alive. And now, the shovel thuds dully in the trunk, your hands gripping the wheel, your knuckles white like you’re choking the life from something.
The body shifts as dawn starts to bleach the sky, turning her skin a strange salmon-grey. Her left eye slips free, rolling from its socket, but she presses it back in with the heel of her hand. She smiles...her head jerking, loose, like a marionette’s strings have frayed.
“Sorry, baby,” her voice is strained, cracking, “I wasn’t expecting company. I’m sure you understand.”
In the sickle-shaped slice of the citrus moonlight, Precious Patrick smiles at you, gums pale as sea shells.