Amateur Hour

By the time Lisa rolled onto the crumbling asphalt behind the church, it was mid afternoon. The light, at 4 p.m., was already beginning to pale, but there were a couple of hours left, before evening claimed the rest of it. She stretched, yawned, and rubbed her burning eyes. It had been a long trip, but Orlando was finally behind her.

“For good,” she muttered to herself, then smiled wryly. It was a new habit, this talking to herself, but she embraced it, because she couldn’t seem to stop doing it. She was going to have to get a cat, a dog – some critter to pretend to be addressing. That was a task for another day.

The car door creaked and caught, when she opened it, and a small pile of Georgia clay from every puddle she had driven through, sifted down onto the asphalt. Lisa didn’t notice, for the damp chill in the October air. It was still summer, a few hundred miles to the south, but here it was autumn. The clouds were all but gone, but there was a breeze, and the sun provided little warmth.

She didn’t groan, as she unfolded herself from behind the wheel, but she did wince. Who knew that fifty would feel so old, she wondered. It was a daily revelation.

Still, she was alive, reasonably well, and had made the journey intact. That was saying a lot, when just getting out of Orlando was a game of Russian roulette.

She shook off these thoughts, and pulled her focus back to the things that needed to be done. First things, first.
The hatch of her SUV opened with a pneumatic wheeze, and there it was, still on top of all of her boxes, bags and miscellaneous loose items.

Lisa pulled the sign out of the back, along with a five pound rubber mallet, and made her way to the weedy sidewalk that separated the lot from the front of the church. On the way, she passed no fewer than thirty of her new neighbors, the last of whom had gone to dust, some fifty years ago.

It suddenly occurred to her that, in buying the church, she had also bought a lot of bones… The thought made her shudder, and the day seemed much colder.

She shook that thought off, too. She tried to shake it off. She couldn’t shake it off. It was no joke. Lisa paused and looked around. How had she been so bent on obtaining the prize – the church, rectory, and adjacent buildings – that she had failed to notice or consider the occupants of the cemetery?

How? The cemetery wasn’t out back. It wasn’t off to one side. It was everywhere. There were even graves on the front lawn, for God’s sweet sake! A combination of panic and remorse engulfed her. “Deep breaths,” she whispered, trying to quell the nausea.

She pulled in several, and her old demon, panic, eased its hold. When it finally passed, leaving her shaking, she dared to look around, and really see the sad, overgrown graves.

There were headstones of almost every type. Some were marble, some were a horrible kind of crude concrete, and the most recent ones were granite. Who knew how many were unmarked, having never had monuments at all, or that had had monuments that had crumbled into the earth?

Placing her sign on the front lawn wasn’t the victory lap she had anticipated. In fact, it had become a grim bit of business that she was happy to be done with. “Coming Soon! The Sanctuary – Books, Beverages, and More!” it read. How vain it sounded. How crass.

She felt a need to atone for sins she had yet to commit, as she looked around yet again. The neglect was palpable, and with it came many nagging doubts. And, at the bottom, almost imperceptible, a question.

Why had this place been abandoned? It had been here, since before the Civil War; the headstones attested to that. To be sure, it was a bit out of the way, but not so far from town that no one could reach it, for services.

The wind whipped her greying hair against her face, and her lips were starting to feel chapped. She knew she shouldn’t, but she licked them, anyway and cleared her throat. She raised her voice, to address her new neighbors.
Wiping away tears, she said, “It’s okay. I’m here now. I’ll take care of you.”