Novel Treatments / Modern Day Love - Grave 2 and 3
Grave 2
She tells me of dark angels with trustless wings, of fake desire and other things. She starts to whisper sometimes, and I have to strain, at first, before I realize. She is not speaking with her voice, and I am not listening with my ears. I feel what she says, and each word drops like tears upon my heart.
I have come here – my challenge among friends – to hear the dead speak. Some shout, some cry – she merely whispers. She never mentions his name – this blameless angel who descended to hell with her in tow. Even after 200 years it is somehow her fault.
I do not speak – I’m not here for conversation.
She tells of his love for her, and then grows quiet. There is a feeling here I hesitate to describe. She is forlorn; no doubt – but there is a rage underneath it all that I am wary of. It is as if you glance upon a beautiful angelic child only to find her holding a mangled bird she has smashed to its death.
She begins speaking again, much to my relief. Her silence is full – but not of self reflection – more of a retribution that I’m horrified to think would ever come to pass.
She tells of her life beyond him – the conversation is short and succinct. There’s not much there to tell.
She tells of her death. Here, I grow weary. She pauses. Asks if it is too much. I say yes, it is all too much. I hear her smile and she continues. I lay cheek pressed upon her grave. It seems at times I feel her hand in my hair. It disturbs me. Everything about her, now, disturbs me.
Her death was – as all the deaths here – horrible and dark. Most were buried here because either no one cared, or the ones that were supposed to were the ones that put them there. She was buried here because of shame.
She was damaged goods in a time when purity was everything. She was pregnant and unmarried. When she killed herself, there was no funeral. She, like the little girl I spoke to yesterday, was buried by people she didn’t even know.
There were no flowers. There were no prayers. There were no tears.
She never did mention his name.
Grave 3
It came at night, this time – my visit to the dead. I simply stood for a moment – glancing over the graves I’d yet to visit. So much death lingered here – hanging like the willow limbs draping nearly every grave. It was as if your very life ceased the moment you stepped onto this land, and you weren’t allowed to live again until you’d left this place far behind.
It was cold here, and dark – much like most of the hearts that had rotted away beneath this soil.
I eyed the graves with trepidation and a morbid curiosity I could never deny myself. I had decided I would work my way through the lives and deaths here with a singular purpose and organization. This was, thankfully, a small graveyard, but one that held more suffering and tears than one ten times its size.
I walked toward my chosen destination – not touching any other grave for fear I would be distracted and my plan disregarded. The air became colder the nearer I came. I began to rethink my plan, but trudged on.
This was a grave off to itself. At first, I had assumed it was merely surrounded by unmarked graves and forgotten dead. But the closer I got, the more I began to think he was put here on purpose – as if he could not be trusted even with the dead. Changing my mind, I turned. My plan would work just as well backwards.
I felt him first, on the back of my neck. I found I could not move. He asked me where I was going – his voice soft and feathery and seductive. I felt my skin catch fire and struggled to run. He simply laughed, and whispered, “What brings you here to us? What keeps you coming back? Why do you stay here, among the faithless and the evil and the weak?”
Each breath dropped like stones around me – slowly building a wall around us – me and my new found friend. I could hardly stop breathing, any more than I could stop listening.
The dark, sweet sound of his voice surrounded me – I could feel his dulcet tone inside my very stomach, and I felt weak – yet held firm by his presence. He was sex and mystery and evil, and I wanted him – this man I was terrified of. The rest of the graveyard faded away, and there was nothing here, but us.
He told me he knew why I was here – laughed at my insistent pleasure with another one here. He considered him crass, young, and foolish. I agreed – then felt like I’d betrayed this other one – the one that led me here to begin with.
I tried to firm myself against him – to shake myself from his hold. It was useless. I was locked into him like the tumbling cams in a padlock. Where, oh God, where was the key?
He laughed – a sound I didn’t think he was very used to. It was not sardonic, it was not cutting – it was simply real, amused laughter. “A padlock, indeed,” he breathed, long after the laughter had gone on long enough for me to be offended. Aren’t you a clever little rabbit, my pet?”
It was bad enough that I couldn’t even keep my thoughts to myself, but to have them held up to ridicule was quite another thing entirely. The thoughts I sent him this time were vicious enough to arouse another spate of howling – much to my grudging relief.
“Easy, now, pet,” he soothed. “No need to get your hackles up, missy.” That would have been more reassuring had he not been desperately suppressing snickering laughter. I mentally crossed my arms, stomped my foot, and raised my nose in the air. He was to tell me his story, or he was to go back to rotting – alone.
Well past rotting, as he so succinctly told me, he might as well give his little pet what she wanted. What that was had seemed to change drastically in the space of a few moments.
The laughter had released me for a moment from the width and breadth of him, but, as his story began, so, again, did my torment. His voice was like sandpaper scraping across my skin – grating and sensitizing me from the inside out.
I don’t know if you’ve ever spoken to the dead, but if you do, be prepared. They do not speak to you with their voice – they fill you up from inside your very body. You do not hear them, you feel them. It is both extraordinary and frightening. It is more of a freefall than skydiving could ever be.
He told me of his life. How he was not evil, as I had first thought, but was merely – careless. A bit skeptical at first, I realized as his stories when on that fit him quite perfectly. He was quite careless, indeed. He told me of how he’d become a man that – even in a time where killing was considered more of a nuisance to the passing public than any great horror – was called a murderer.
He told me of the death he’d brought to so many, and to the pain he’d given to so many others. He told me of the carelessness he’d felt with women and girls alike – how he’d led astray so many – uncaring of their life before or after him, and how he’d claimed no responsibility for either their misconceptions of his wants and needs, nor how they’d lived or died after him. Careless, indeed.
Then, the last thing he had for me, he said was the worst. It was spoken with a quiet that unsettled me far more than the coldness with which he’d been speaking. He had been careless, yet again, but this time it was with his own heart. He had started to care about a young girl he’d met in a saloon. She had just started working there, and at first he had scoffed at the people lined up for her. He, of course, had never had to pay.
Every night, he went there, and every night, he watched her. She had the face of an angel and eyes like shattered glass. His disdain turned to curiosity, and he spoke with her – demanding the smallest details of her life. She obliged, and he grew more and more smitten. She reminded him of a daughter he’d just been told about, or a sister he never knew he had, and he grew more agitated the closer to her he became.
He was there, that last night, idly playing poker and keeping an eye on the craps game in front of him. She was working that table, and he had been berating himself for his unconventionally distracted playing. Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed the man across from him dealing off the bottom of the deck. He called him a yellow belly. The man accused him of being soft and glanced meaningfully at her. Everyone who could hear laughed.
He had gone from the most feared man in this one horse town to a joke, and that, he gritted, was not about to last. He warned the man once, who laughed again – who, in fact, was still laughing when he pulled his gun and shot him. The man flew backwards – his eyes shocked and his lips still smiling – and came to rest on the craps table. Money and chips and dice flew everywhere.
Idly, he watched their descent. And then, it happened. When the dice lie still, he saw her. She was watching him with large, hurt eyes, and it took him a moment for the blood on her dress to sink in. Before he could get to her, she was gone.
“I had seen it a million times,” he’d whispered. “People died accidentally every day. It never mattered.” The rest of his life, he’d said, was of no concern to me. It would have to suffice that what he’d done after that time was what put him here – in a grave marked with a stone that had no name – placed as far away from others as they could put him.
I could not help but see him, then – a tall, dark man who killed and hurt anyone he wanted whenever he wanted. His one small moment of weakness was just that – a brief foray into emotion he would never take again. Don’t think I don’t feel,” he crooned. “I just don’t care.”
I knew that, just like I knew he belonged right where he was. He was seductive, cruel, and mesmerizing. The night was almost over, and I knew I would never venture this far again. He was too – too everything – and I had little time for something so complicated. I felt him step back from me, and bid me adieu.
It sounded old fashioned and gentlemanly, but that is something I knew he had never been. Nodding once, I left him, glancing back at his headstone. In the rising mist of the morning, I could have sworn I saw – just for a moment – a sad young girl with the face of an angel. She nodded to me once, and scrawled something in the air.
His name was Marcus. Turning, I left them – an angel and a devil – alone in the mist.
As I left the copse of trees, the sun had never seemed so bright, nor had I ever been so glad to see it.
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An excellent story. I read eagerly right through the end. I imagined the careless man and felt his carelessness in myself.
Can’t say i have any critiques – honestly, an excellent portrait a strange yet meaningful character.
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i love the unique style and story. your description is vivid: throughout the narrative everything conjured greens, blacks and whites in my head. (my point being that i had very clear imagery w/out having to ‘try.’ a noteworthy achievement on your part.)
i like the rhyming, but feel that you should continue through with it, even if only randomly and scattered, or drop it altogether. i kept looking for more of it, and feel that this actually distracted me from what is a very interesting story.
your characters are nicely developed, while remaining behind a thin veil… which is an excellent medium for the subject matter.
sorry to be so wordy here, but i really enjoyed this. i would like to read the rest.
That was good, really dark and slightly depressing, but I love the part about the angel and the devil. “There were no flowers. There were no prayers. There were no tears.” I like that line- as depressing as it is, it’s still so thought provoking. It was really good overall.
I really loved this. Your writing is superb. The first paragraph is sheer poetry. The story is profound and I am excited to have read it. It leaves me wanting more. I didn’t see one thing wrong with it. I hope you get this novel published. I don’t know where you are going with it, but the old west appears to be your destination. You’ve got a winner.
The language in this is incredibly poetic, especially the beginning. Reminds me of “Skallagrigg” and talking with anything but voice. The description of “dark angels with trustless wings” gave me a chill down the spine. It’s SO intense. The writing flows easily, and pulls on the heartstrings of the reader. Whilst being incredibly uplifted, I was very aware of the dark tone underneath, i.e. the descriptions or metaphors/similes of “tears” “dark” and “trustless”, in among angels and listening with the heart.
The piece rings incredibly true; especially hearing the dead speak. I wasn’t sure if you meant literally speak or hear their voices as snapshots from the past in a figurative way?
The splitting of the piece did not really work for me, as Grave 3 is much bigger than Grave 2. Is there another piece with “Grave 1?” I would be interested to read that as well. I realise that for grave 3 the dead speaking is literal. At least I think it was the dead, although this was another thing that was not entirely clear from the text. This did not disturb the romance of the piece for me, however, and the dialogue was a welcome relief from the intensity of the previous section. It brought normality back to the situation, though the surreal escape romance of the graves was excellently done.
I love your writing voice and the way the language flows; you have a technique I am very fond of; piling metaphor and simile and beautiful word onto each other, layring the piece. Don’t go over the top with this though, as it can confuse readers, but please keep writing like this; it is a joy to read.
“She tells me of dark angels with trustless wings, of fake desire and other things.”
The poetic beginning definitely pulled me in from the start. I’m a fan of this writing style.
I love how you give little hints to the supernatural side of the story.
“She tells of his love for her, and then grows quiet. “
The emotion you convey to the reader is also good as well.
The flow of this story is refreshing, and I didn’t catch any grammatical errors.
Keep up the good work!
Happy writing,
JD
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