A brief moment at the intersection beside a cemetery in a small town
A brief moment at the intersection beside a cemetery in a small town
A red light stopped me at an intersection in the middle of a small town that I was driving through. To my right was a small cemetery, enclosed by a decorative wrought iron fence. The cemetery looked to be the size of about one square block and filled to capacity with tombstones. It was neat and tidy, with freshly cut green grass, roses planted around the edges and poking through the fence to greet the street, and the tombstones, clean and in order. I saw a woman, slouched over, eating her lunch on a bench on the rock-pebbled footpath that cut through the tombstones. I saw a butterfly fluttering from flower to flower. A mockingbird sat on the fence, facing the woman. Another flew up on the other side of her. I’m not sure why, but something about this scene was beckoning me to take it all in. I quickly looked all around, anticipating the light turning green. Across from the cemetery was a barber shop, with the old, white-haired barber sitting out front, reading a newspaper, leaning back on a single, folding chair too small for his frame, looking precariously like it would collapse any second. A couple walked past my window just then, the lady’s arm was wrapped around the man’s, and they were holding a bulging brown paper bag. I looked over to my left and the driver in the car beside me was looking at me; his window was down and that made him feel uncomfortably close. I awkwardly gasped as his stare caught me off guard but the light turned green so I looked away and accelerated. The man reading the paper didn’t move as I drove past him. I bet he knew half of the people in that cemetery, or at least their families. He could likely write a book with all the stories he’d heard over the years, standing bent over, listening while hair dripped to the ground as he snipped dangerously close to so many ears with perfectly sharp scissors. I wondered if his old bones had a plot waiting for him across the street. I wondered if the lady on the bench knew someone in the ground or if the cemetery is her preferred place to sit, eat and be surrounded by bodies but not have to talk. Or listen. I wondered if she feeds the birds crumbs from her lunch, and that’s what they were doing, sitting on the fence, watching her. Does she come everyday? I wondered if the man I caught looking at me, saw that I was looking at the others. And was he wondering something about me?