My mother had just died. Birth mother, for clarity. We weren’t particularly close, which is why I wasn’t informed until only two days out from her funeral. But I flew out anyway, mostly to be there for my older brother, who prepared the event.
It was a cold, dry morning when she was buried in Peach Blossom Cemetery, ten minutes outside of town. It was a decently sized spot, with plenty of greenery year-round. More people attended than I figured, seeing as she had some severe mental health issues that isolated herself. One of my oldest friends actually worked at the cemetery – just on the admin side, nothing gothic or gruesome – and he let me stay at his place in town for the week. This is what gave me the immediate knowledge of the strange happenings to come.
I wish I’d cried when she was lowered. I know it’s not rational, but I feel like none of this would have happened if I’d cried then. Instead, I listened to the readings from the Bible and found myself trapped in thoughts of Honoring one’s Mother and Father, forgive those who trespass against us – or more intrusively, thoughts of Abraham and his son. Then she was gone.
Three days after, I was making breakfast when my friend got the call. I remember him listening intently to the muffled voice, his brow furrowed, consciously not looking at me. Why couldn’t he look at me? What couldn’t he tell me, as he packed up and left? Had they made a mistake? I imagined her digging her way out of the grave, gasping for air, caked in icy, fresh soil. Driven by feral survival instinct, or terror, or rage, or sorrow. But then I remembered touching her frozen hand in the casket. The still veins, like barren roads. Her sunken face, aged beyond what I recognized from the time I spent with her as a kid.
I threw out the eggs. I waited for someone to message me and release the tension in my chest.
My friend knew the strained relationship I had with my mother, and I think that’s why he decided I could handle the truth that night. He just made me promise not to say a word to my brother.
She had surfaced. That was the word he used: Surfaced.
Before I could fall back on the horrifying image of dirt beneath broken, bleeding fingernails, he told me there was no sign of her struggling, nor was there any sign of excavation. The casket had broken in, and she had been exhumed. He went silent, letting the question hang, making it clear that he didn’t have an answer for me: How?
She was buried again, no Bible verses, no mourners. Just hasty, quiet confusion. I wasn’t there, obviously, but that felt like a more fitting goodbye to me. For me. Turning away and hurrying on, like I’d done while she was alive. I drank with my brother and let him cry into my shoulder. I told him nothing of the unexplainable events.
But he found out when half a dozen bodies dotted the cemetery the next morning, torso up like drowning victims – my mother included.
This couldn’t remain under wraps. The town demanded answers, looking for whoever was responsible for such a heinous crime, in spite of the professionals’ insistence on the impossibility of such an act. They assured us that things like this can happen from time to time, with built up gasses underground and soil movement. They’d discovered that it was slowly happening all across Peach Blossom Cemetery. To every body, in every state of decomposition.
My brother swore by the geological anomaly angle. Throw in some shifting roots and underground networks of mycelium. It was just horrible luck that it had happened when our poor Mom had passed. His words, not mine. I nodded in response, lost in images of her pale face emerging from the dirt, begging me to look at her, begging for something I didn’t have in me to give. Forgiveness? My brother held me. But it did no good. It had already begun.
Peach Blossoms didn’t have the manpower to deal with the bodies suddenly on their hands. Especially the ones further in the decomposition process – ones which dispelled the theory that decomposition gasses and bloating could somehow be contributing to the surfacing. They called in nearby burial sites to help with the workload, as well as surveyors and specialists to try and get to the bottom of it all.
At least there was no guesswork involved in the bodies’ identities, as they sprouted out essentially where they had been last left. People held renewed vigils for their loved ones being transferred, shedding new tears as those decrepit forms were revealed, repackaged and sent off.
I didn’t go home. It somehow didn’t feel fair to witness this horror then run off and let them handle it on their own. If it started with me and my mother, I was going to see it through. Though I didn’t want to rely on my friend for longer than needed, so I booked a motel room in town and stashed away there. Bright space with a large window. I watched as the researchers arrived, praying they dispelled the illusions I’d built up. The relationship between a Mother and her child is powerful, and something like this makes sense when that relationship is as broken as ours. That surge of emotion and power that helps a mother lift a car? Very much that idea, but bereft all that hope, energy, and life – left with nothing but unquenchable sorrow.
They didn’t find evidence pointing to any natural causes that would explain the event. We could handle that, as the bodies were out of our hands now, being taken care of elsewhere. But when those elsewhere cemeteries spat out the bodies? Not only them, but some bodies of their own – undisturbed for hundreds of years. That caused a panic. Was there something in our air, our water, our bodies? And if so, had we just spread it? Blame fell on our little town, and our little Peach Blossom Cemetery.
In the days following, the bodies were brought back to their homes and prepared for cremation. Some religious groups went into a fervor, demanding more to be done to find out what was happening in these burial spaces, but most people were just looking to be done with all this. My friend quit his job. This was beyond him. Him and my brother drink together Friday nights.
Against my brother’s advice, I demanded to attend the cremation of my Mother. He wants me to go home. I’ve stopped answering calls from my job, my friends back in the city, so I’m uncertain what there is to go home to. My brother doesn’t want to point out how secluded I’ve been, how little I’ve been eating. He doesn’t want to tell me how much I remind him of her. But I swore to him I’d make it right at the cremation. Then everything would be better.
I watched her new casket slide into the furnace. I waited for the warmth to course through her.
I was 16, making breakfast, when my Dad told me that my birth mother had tried to kill me when I was a baby. The devastation was so deep that I couldn’t interact with her like I used to, in spite of all her regret and sorrow and pain and confusion. She was a flawed human being with chemicals gone wrong, and while I could intellectually accept that, I couldn’t give her what she wanted: Warmth. Forgiveness. Love.
So as the fire took the casket and her body, I put every bit of my being into reaching out. Please, just rest. Sleep. I want you to be at peace, but I can’t give you what you need. I cried. Shaking, choking sobs that brought me to my knees.
When it was clear I wasn’t capable of leaving the crematorium on my own, my brother came. He told me that I was okay. He told me that it was over.
More graves around the world have begun rejecting their goods. Bodies are being discovered where no one knew they were buried. Shores that were once disturbed by trash are filling up with corpses.
My mother’s ashes were buried and mixed with the soil of the garden at my brother’s place. I don’t need to check to see if they’ve filtered back to the top. Because I left the window of my motel room open, and the entire room is softened by a thick coating of yellow, grey, pink dust: The exhaust of dozens of frantic cremations.