The Outsider
Fiction Friday
She visits the Graveyard every day, slowly carrying her tiny frame over the hill and through the thicket of tall shrubs and oak trees, where — just over a tiny slope — the grassy fields break out into the knee-high, muss-covered stone wall.
It’s always at night, just after sundown, leaving only when the moon is nothing more than a spotlight in the inky untenanted sky, only when the stars have swept through the night, washing away her sorrow in their infinite spirals.
I keep watching her until she reaches the padlocked iron doors of the Graveyard. As she totters up the hill, her short hair swaying in the wind, the fog wraps around her like a long-lost friend.
The moon shines on her thin face — sharpened by life’s hardships — not as bright as day, not by any means, but enough to see the Graveyard, enough for that. Her nervous glance overlooks the abandoned funeral chapel, to reach for the view of the small tree growing out of the guttering at roof level — a symbol that hope can be found even in the darkest of places. Beneath the tree, stones and tombs and vaults and memorial plaques are disseminated on the cracked orange dirt.
She sees that, and she sees the pain that fills the place, and she sees the occasional dashes or scuttles of a rabbit or a weasel as it slips out of the undergrowth and…
