Literary Crumbs: Poems & Short Stories to Savor by D. Ryan Lafferty

By D. Ryan Lafferty

It’s always quiet here in the yard; peaceful slumber, well, that’s the idea isn’t it? I can understand why the townsfolk are creeped out by this place. The gray slabs and rain worn marble look like something out of a Universal Classic horror movie. As if at any moment now, Bela Lugosi himself would float around the corner of that mausoleum over there, his penetrating stare hypnotising the innocent to taste in an instant their mortality. But, that’s not real. The scariest thing here is my lower back pain and the stiffness in my knees when I’m marking out the next dig site, bending low to set up the front-end loader. Of course we don’t dig them by hand anymore, that would take all day. The concrete vaults under the surface still flood from time to time, and once you get past being alone, it’s not so bad. It’s honest work really, and well, somebody’s got to do it after all. 

In this line of work, one thing I’ve got in spades is time; time to work, time to watch the world, and time to think. I can’t help but read the inscriptions on the headstones, or markers, as we call them in the business. “Beloved father and husband,” “Sweet and loving mother.” Even the pseudo poetic epithets chiseled in honor of the dearly departed, “Forever in our memory” or “Gone but never forgotten,” A nice sentiment there to comfort the living in their time of loss, for who else is all of this for? Forever never seems to last all that long and the only regular visitors are the golden orb of the sun in the morning and his silvery counterpart at dusk. Each dancing in the sky as another day passes, in a timeless cycle. A morning in May finds me grooming the tulips and trimming the verge, or shoveling the paths once again in the deafening stillness and eerie darkness of a late December afternoon. 37 years working here has only shown me how little the world truly changes. The technology takes on new names, the fads rise and fall like so many civilizations, vanishing into the sands of time. At dawn, the morning mists are as eternal as the heavens themselves.  

The residents here give no complaints, the truth of their lives long forgotten, a relief to be honest. Now they can rest away from the gossip and scandal, away from the judgement of high society and rumors of their peers. No one to look down their noses or dig up their mistakes. The ever-present guilt that haunted every waking moment of their lives, lives no more. It is all breaking down, fading into the past. Now, only I tend to what remains of their remains; a weed trimmer in one hand, a trash bag in the next. I take great pride in my work and provide for my customers’ every need. 

Here, finally, they all get along, no fussing or fighting. No bickering, no politics to poison the heart and soul. Only peace and restful quiet. Something that always seemed just out of reach in life. A holy serenity only disturbed by the crude coarseness of those still living. Their carhorns raging outside of the walls, the curses and gunfire at night. The addicts and the vagrants who stumble in like the living dead. They curl up in the musty walls of the mausoleums for a night or two, reeking like feral beasts, stoned out of their minds and caterwalling into the night. The horrorshow here has absolutely nothing to do with the dead. They can’t hurt anyone anymore. Now, they lay helpless under crumbling memorials, vulnerable to teenage vandals who creep in on a Friday night leaving bottles for me to clean up before Sunday. All so the mourners won’t be bothered with the ugly trappings of this world as they pay their last respects to loved ones who are certainly now in a far better place.

Dr. D. Ryan Lafferty is a local Bordentown poet, writer, and the author-illustrator of children’s books. To see more of his work, visit http://www.DartanionPress.com