Two

It was eerie how beautiful the grass looked. Climbing with the inclination of gradient lawn and surfaced in vibrant neon, it seemed to create a barrier between mortality and cessation. The green pierced into the gray that hovered dead and lifeless like the bodies under this soil, taunting and daring the nebula to shroud its luscious color. 

         He continued to trudge along perusing the unknown names under memorialized words of reminiscent loves and divine benedictions for the afterlife. But each syllable was forgotten as soon as it was read, as if there was only enough space to contain one at a time. With his head turned away from his line of sight, Dan didn’t see the abrupt change in terrain and he walked headfirst into a wall. A new pain instantly pummeled him, feeling like leaded quicksilver. Needles pricked from the inside of his skull as something warm covered his face and trickled down his cheeks. His hand went to his head to touch the source of discomfort and nausea overpowered him as a finger slipped into a cavernous rift in his forehead. Dan saw his hand covered in blood and dizzily dropped to a knee. Swaying from side to side, he tried to comfort his tumultuous stomach but couldn’t keep from splattering his revulsion onto the ground. When the heaving subsided, he smeared a mix of spit, vomit, and blood from his lips with the span of his forearm and realized for the first time that he was wearing his pajamas. But despite the odd attire, he could not convince himself that this was all imagined.  “I can’t be dreaming - I can taste my own blood,” he said as he spit pink onto the ground.  “ And puke. Blech!” In a daze as twisted as his face from the bitter metallic taste, he glanced up. “What the hell did I run into?” 

           Dan then felt a quick line of panic ice through his veins as he saw that it was not a wall he struck, but a huge, half-oval slab floating up from within the fog, suspended in mid-air. His chest quickly tightened, instantly squeezing out his breath as he stumbled backward. Loosing his footing, he fell to the ground, grimacing as his brain registered the shock waves from his spine. Moments later, the gloomy smoke enveloping the base of the stone began to filter away. He was able to clearly see that there was ground beneath, clumped up around the marker, while the remaining fog still hid the upper facade from him. It was obviously washed downhill some time ago from a heavy rainfall.  “The headstone must’ve gotten caught in a landslide. The damn thing slide right down the hill until the dirt jammed it up.” He sighed deep with relief, standing up on legs still loose from the fright and had to steady himself against the same headstone that bashed him. Looking closely at the pathway, he was only then able to see the detour worn down around the marker. He gripped his aching head with his good hand while the discomfort from the injured other seemed to simultaneously compete for nerve space. His brain felt as if it were being identically dissected with dull scalpels while he was still conscious.

          “A tombstone? How the hell did I run into that?”

          “Well, I don’t know, but you did, Brain-dead! Wasn’t paying any attention to where you were going, were you? You ran right into it. Your own fault, it isn’t like it was reaching out…” he stopped the thought; because it did seem like it reached out for him- almost like it was supposed to open his mind.

          “Yeah, but did it have to open it literally?” he angrily asked back, irritated with all the injuries that were occurring to him. Then he faintly heard his father’s words spring forward from a dark place in his mind, a place he locked away a very long time ago.

          “Lift your head, son – better to know where you are going than to care where you are.”

          He muttered “a*****e” and shook his father from his mind, but not before he lifted his head to look into the heavens to ensure his father was looking back into his eyes when he said it. That was the last thing he needed. When the man died, no one was as thankful to know he was gone. His father had made his childhood unbearable, taking years of therapy to replace the depression. His father’s memory caused pain far worse than any thing that has happened here tonight. Pushing his father back into mental oblivion, he began thinking of his Butterfly to get him reoriented to the task at hand. “Which is what?” he asked the silence. “ What am I doing here?”

          And then they came again. Slow gurgled sounds came from everywhere at once, low and deep, and reverberating from the ground up as if the earth was about to take a turn and vomit. Every bone and tendon in his body quivered at once, and Dan nearly fell over from the contortion. The fog began to separate from itself; seemingly splitting in half, exposing the rest of the surface on the stone that had opened his skull. The smoky film dissipated slowly, fading away in skeleton-fingered trails, leaving the stone completely exposed now.  No words of inspiration, no dates, and no names. Just a blank slab of marbled rock shaped like the chewed end of a stogie. Dan scanned the night, right to left, and then behind, for demons, monsters, ghosts, or whatever evil was mastering this charade, to emerge. He fearfully waited with shortening breaths for charging banshees to come screaming out from behind the burnt charcoal colored veil.

Thwump. Thwump. Thwump. Thwump.

“What the…”

          His eyes squinted as he tried to increase the volume, but he no longer could hear it. It had sounded like wings flapping so he looked to the sky for signs of motion. The moon was full but smoked out by near black clouds, giving the circle a deep purplish hazing that was seductively eerie, like the façade of a vampire. But nothing flew and nothing breathed.

          When he returned his gaze to the stone, he was filled with an unnerving wonder and disbelief. It had altered while he was thinking. There was a word now, scribbled as claw marks from a beast, dug in with scattered strokes as if the writer went over each line again and again. Shallow breaths pushed the word from his lips as he whispered the word “Butterfly”. The name glared back at him, boring into him, and slowly began to separate his mind from sanity as it sank in.

          “Oh my God, no…” He closed his eyes to withdraw this truth, to erase the lettering. But when he opened them again, he saw another word had been inscribed, and he read himself into dementia. The new word was carved lighter but still legible in the faint gleam under the violet moon: “Tonight”.

          Dan screamed out loud for the first time that evening, a scream without echoes. Just a flattened growl of desperation that disappeared as quickly as it left his lips. He fell again and retched once more.