#063/100 Cemetery (II)

This was a dream I had on a Saturday afternoon. Edith and Arnold were my classmates in high school.

***

The playground glistens in late afternoon haze and my companions--Edith, the girl with a pumpkin-shaped head and Arnold the womanizer with rosy-colored cheeks in our high school days--grab me by the arms. My skin is dissolving while the playground wears a palette of grey: basketball stand tainted with grey and red paint dripping from the net; grey benches calling through a gust of wind; dirt rising from the soil in a grey fog, where silent lives of bushes drain out of their confinement. Flowing to me and my companions from years ago.

'Stay here and watch over the grave underneath the pine tree,' Edith says. 'The girl's parents want you to do it.'

'But I don't know that girl, do I?'

'It doesn't matter. You'd get paid for the work.'

I pull my arms away; Edith and Arnold burst into a wild laughter, their faces distorted in the fading glow of the sun against a grey sky. Soon darkness falls and erases their faces; there are only gaps and stale air where their throbbing bodies were just a moment ago. 

I walk down the playground. The concrete splits and starts turning into a swamp. I tread carefully--my job is to stay with the grave until midnight when it is time for me to catch the last train home. The trees are reaching out to stop me, to tease me with a low drone sound which I know, in my waking life, to be their late-night music parade. I must reach the end of the cemetery and take care of the tomb stone before the night ends, or the trees will leave their dwellings to bury me with their trunks and leaves.

At the end of a serpentine path I am brushing dark leaves off my face. I see moonlight on fluttering trees, then the sea, and a ferry at the pier. I have been transposed to a remote island; I have been rescued and I must now run to catch the ferry.