Putting classified ads in the newspaper was both easier and more difficult than I expected. Easy to walk into the office, fill out the paper given to me, and hand over the appropriate amount of money. Difficult to ignore the looks the clerk woman gave me as I hobbled in on my own and at what I requested.
But I suppose they had a rule against asking too many questions, lest they insult the people who essentially pay their wages. So she took my ad request and money and told me it’d run for the following week. Hopefully one week was all I’d need. Short as the ad was, it took what coins I had left.
Outside the bystander office, my pink and white bike was thankfully still where I left it tied with frayed rope to a lamp post. One of the training wheels was stuck on a crack in the curb and I struggled to yank it loose.
The sun was still rising as I peddled and peddled down Main St, taking the long way to avoid Mulkey Road. It’d already been 5 weeks since, but I just couldn’t bring myself to go anywhere near the road sign, much less take a stroll down. Even if it added 10 extra minutes to my pumping legs commute.
The back road past Main St was still in a somber mood. Doors stay closed and windows locked. Gates were chained and flower boxes sat empty to collect rainwater. Not a hint or hue of color to be seen as I biked past the houses. Somehow even the painted wood dulled in the time passed.
My silent home sat near the end of the road. The smallest, but with the most land. Enough for my father’s workshop in clear view of the neighborhood. A workshop that was bigger than the actual house: a simple one bedroom home with a small kitchen and living room combo. My father always insisted the bedroom belonged to me, even if I usually ended up sleeping on the pull out couch with him.
A pull out couch that was still out and messed up. I hadn’t found any reason to make it up or put it away. And despite the fact that all I’d done that morning was go downtown, I was exhausted. The residual heat inside was already dwindling, chill rubbing into my bones.
Creaky springs from years too long of a life under faded cushions. Wrapping myself up in the red knit blanket, scratching at my chipped blue nail polish, and shutting my eyes.
It was a few days before I got a bite. A few days of nothing but sleeping and heating up cans of soup on the stove, not going anywhere else except shuffling back and forth between the couch and kitchen. A trail of scattered dust wove from the couch cushions to the front of the stove.
Somehow the phone hadn’t been cut off yet, and the loud ring jostled me from a nightmare of red stained concrete. “Hello?”
“I’m calling about the ad in the paper? For the- the t-tombstone?”
I bolted up, getting tangled in my blankets in the process. “Yes! Yes. That’s me. I mean- you’re interested?”
“I am. How- how much is the asking price?”
“Oh, um.” Damn it. I hadn’t even thought about that. No amount of money would keep me in the house indefinitely, and I had just enough food left until the end of the month when the late payments would finally collapse on me. “Eight hundred?”
“E-even though it’s used?”
“Well, it is a very nice tombstone. Black granite and doves engraved in the corners. No chips, scratches, or anything like that.” I took very good care of it.
The buyer was a young person, which I was grateful for. Young burying the old was the best way to go and I don’t think I could’ve choked down taking eight hundred dollars from some poor parent or grandparent who lost their child. No matter how much I needed it.
Around 30 years old and shaking feverishly as soon as she stepped out of the car. The buyer drove an old red Camaro with a dented bumper and one missing rearview mirror. A long riding trailer was hooked to its hitch.
Average height with plain clothes. Long blonde hair pulled into a twisted braid that I thankfully saw through the living room window. I briefly braided my own crinkling hair and stared at myself in the mirror.
It would do well enough.
The buyer saw the tombstone waiting in the front yard and stumbled on the walkway. I sucked in a breath and waited, but she quickly collected herself. I had given simple but important instructions that I watched her follow from the safety of my home.
The money was placed in an envelope that she took from a crossbody bag and dropped delicately on the front stoop. The tombstone was already on a pad of felt that she took hold of and easily dragged it across the unruly grass and onto the trailer.
She was sweating by the time it was safely on, but I could see hints of muscle working away under her shirt sleeves. She latched up the small gate on the back of the trailer, hopped in the car, and with one last fleeting glance at my home, sped away with the tombstone.
I waited until she was just down the road before exiting. My bike was ready, the rusty wire basket’s contents hidden under a dish towel. The chain squealed when I initially pushed it out of the grass and onto the road, but once I got it turning it cracked enough to not fall apart.
The funeral parlor, the only one within 50 miles, wasn’t too far into town. Thanks to the minimal speed limits, I was able to catch up to the buyer fairly quickly. Even with my ankle getting knocked by the revolving petal every other wheel spin, the tombstone on the trailer slowed down her Camaro enough.
The buyer stopped outside the funeral parlor and walked inside. I waited across the road, hidden by large, ornamental bushes. I watched as the undertaker and his assistant came out with the buyer withering away behind them. The assistant took the buyer’s car and the undertaker and buyer got into the waiting hearse around the side.
They all left in a shortened processional and I dutifully joined. I peddled and peddled, my knees growing weary the farther the hearse went. Canned beans and salsa on stale bread was proving to be a poor diet to do so much exercise on. I had been too cowardly to confront the buyer in person and ask the location of the funeral and this was my punishment.
Finally, a reprieve. The hearse turned off the main road onto a gravel path leading towards. It slowed to a crawl, the tires crunching over the small rocks as it headed through a large iron gate.
I hopped off my bike, my bones cracking from the soreness built up, but kept pushing on after it with my bike in tow. It was a cemetery, not a graveyard thankfully, dug into the side of a hill downspout from the forest surrounding town. The gravel path curved down and to the left to the bottom of the hill where a small group of people had already gathered.
The hearse stopped and so did I. Hidden in the shadows of the forest, I watched the buyer get out of the car and solemnly walk to the group of mourners who accepted her with open, teary arms. They climbed the hill to a marked plot while the undertaker began to extract the casket from the hearse.
The mourners were a small handful of people. A few women had hand fans that cracked as they were thrust open. A man in a bowler hat stood over the casket with a reserved face, save the clear discontent upon seeing the tombstone.
Only the buyer showed any real emotion. Remorse for the small affair. Sorrow for her loss. Gratitude for the warm bodies, however reclused they were, surrounding her. Somber for the distasteful weather the funeral had to be held in. Disdain at the mismatched tombstone to the body that now was being nudged into the soil.
I listened to the typical words: short prayers and generic stories, some that weren’t even true but who was going to fact check? Compliments and farewell wishes. Nothing bad was said. Nothing a true testament to his true character, whatever it was. No one ever spoke ill about the dead until the grave was out of sight and alcohol was in their system.
No flowers were thrown on the casket before it was covered up. No further tears were shed. All attendants shuffled away and down the hill, thankfully not in my direction. Back towards the gate.
The undertaker and his assistant shook the buyer’s hand before taking the hearse away. She turned her head to the sky, staring into the bleak overcast. It was almost melancholy, the picturesque scene before me on the hill.
The buyer carefully stepped down the hill, the freshly cut grass still attacking her legs.
I took her place
I could see it. The tombstone was at the head of the freshly filled grave. Beautiful flowers already adorned the soil and I knelt to brush some aside to read the inscription.
Edward Dalca
Beloved father
I thought about what the undertaker had told the buyer. It would be a few days before he could change the words. It was eerie and a bit haunting to think that the people who had just grieved a complete stranger had done so to my father’s name.
I took my little trowel from my bike’s basket and started to dig.
Somewhere nearby, I could hear a scream that was cut off by a gasp for breath. I guess the buyer either hadn’t gotten far or was coming back to say another goodbye farewell see you later.
Hurried footsteps behind me, sharp nails digging into my shoulders and she yanked back. Screaming in my face, obscenities that would make the paperboy blush. None of which I think I heard. I was too focused on the grave behind her.
He’d been buried shallow, the buyer’s great uncle. That and with even my sad excuse for a shovel, I had gotten to the body before the buyer found me.
I leapt forward and shoved her; she was too busy yelling at the corpse to notice my sudden movement.
My trowel cut into everything. Dirt, rocks, bones, flesh. Mixing fresh and old blood into the deathly soil, fertilizing it like a macabre gardening project. On the edge of the cemetery while the screams of the buyer were quickly snuffed out by chokes and desperate pleas for relief.
My necklace came free during all this. My name, Nyssa Dalca, was spelled out in shiny white beads amongst polished smooth stones. Granite and limestone. The same many of the tombstones surrounding us were made from.
Finally, the sounds died down and the buyer stayed put in the shallow grave. I wiped off my trowel against the exposed casket and the buyer’s shirt and swept the upheaved dirt on top. Patting down the grave flat like burying a box containing your first deceased childhood pet. That, as a child you don’t realize, doesn’t like its claws being painted blue.
Standing up, I pulled my blonde hair into a twisted braid; picking up a stick from the forest floor to stab right through the unfamiliar strands, keeping it in place. I was still a bit hungry from my meager breakfast, and according to the undertaker’s assistant, there was a dinner being held at the diner nearby.
Selling my father’s tombstone hurt initially, but his journal and final letter to me was clear it needed to be done. I write this, my first account, to compare to his. He made a living for a good 76 years and, in his letter, assured me I could do the same.
Leaving me so young wasn’t part of the plan, and I have no idea what I’m going to do next, but at least with these muscles I can get started in his workshop. Another tombstone will need to be made.