It was inevitable. She wasn’t invincible.
Death comes for us all.
The collect-call came from Germany. When I saw the strange number on my phone, I knew. It was her time to go.
I’d been to Frankfurt many times throughout my life. To the small two room clay home she shared with my grandfather, and later in her long life to the flat that she’d shared with a choleric nun.
Try as she might, grandma only ever taught me a few German words. I still remember her precise pronunciation.
She died, as we all do, alone and eventually cold.
I hopped on the plane at daybreak.
Frankfurt was different without grandma. It seemed a darker place. More grays where the color used to permeate, extra despair.
When I had visited as a child it was different. The grass was greener, voices louder, and the frown lines on forlorn faces less pronounced.
Grandma used to take me to the graveyard, the friedhof, she’d say. I always liked the way she pronounced it.
Grandma had a baby sister once, in the womb. Baby sister died and grandma lived, and according to Grandma…that was just the way of the world.
Baby sister was buried at the cemetery.
When I asked grandma about baby sister her smile would fade and deep creases lined her face. Grandma did the sign of the cross, though I don’t think she’d been to church in a decade or more.
Many baby sisters, baby brothers, babies of hopes and dreams, babies of poverty, and babies born of fortune, were buried here in this friedhof.
It seemed a lonely place, with colorless grass and dried dirt sporting headstones that were older than our lives combined.
After the funeral I came back here.
I don’t know why…it was one of the places I had been so often before. It was a place that I remembered grandma the most. Despairing, but alive.
I went to the grave of Baby sister. Baby sister didn’t have a name. The Germans could be so cold.
It was small, comprised of crumbling limestone. The indentations were cracked away and the perimeter covered by moss.
I pulled the double malt whiskey out of my bag and leaned against the rock.
The sky threatened rain but it soon folded the bluff and lent itself to a grayish-black parade of clouds.
A few more swigs. I held on to baby sister. I twisted my body to the right and cradled her tight. A bit of stone crumpled under my weight and fell into the soft grass.
I sighed, and laid my head onto the ground.
Things were spinning now. There was a carousel, grandma was there…and Baby sister was too. But Baby sister was large, too large. She scared the children away from the ride. Grandma clasped her hands and shouted to the sky; Teufel, TEUFEL! I moaned in my sleep.
I awoke suddenly, hours later, to what I assumed were ants biting my flesh. I shouldn’t have come out here. No, I shouldn’t have brought the whiskey. The horrible dreams, I had to shake it off.
I stood up to leave but everything was dark.
I blinked my eyes a few times, hard, trying to focus them.
The cemetery was as I remembered it but there were…things…moving in the peripherals.
Red eyes glowing from within the trees.
I was suddenly afraid, and cold.
I heard faint cries, the wails of babies who had taken their first breath…or perhaps their last.
I felt a tickle at my feet and spun around on my heels, shaking. There was something peeking out from behind the headstone. A baby’s foot. Cooing and laughing coming from all directions.
I dropped the whiskey bottle to the ground and grabbed at the foot. It was detached, crudely sewn up at the knee. The disembodied leg kicked at me and I dropped it, stumbling back.
I tripped over another grave, marked by a tall kneeling angel with hands knotted in prayer.
No, no, no, no, no. This, this wasn’t right.
Then the babes approached. They came out of the trees; they rose from beneath the earth.
Some in-tact. Others just limbs.
Writhing and crawling.
The cacophony of sound grew louder. Notes of laughter, terror, sounds of sickness and pain.
One was approaching, a newborn with razor-sharp teeth and a gushing wound to the abdomen, I kicked at it and stood up, only to slip again on the blood-soaked grass.
I hit my head hard and feel beneath the supplicating angel, but the statue had changed. It now had devilish horns and blood leaking out from its contorted smile.
They were on me now, the babies. The hell-hounds.
They giggled in my ears and screeched. Some were missing eyes, plucked out and sewn shut.
Their little bodies were imbued with the strength of the beast.
Blood was filling up near the statue as it began to rise, bits of rock and concrete falling away.
I laid there, stunned, as they swarmed me, using their tiny fingernails to dig deep into my flesh.
All at once I knew what teufel meant.
It meant Devil.