Graveyard

The world is quiet here.

I needed to slip away, and the world has given me peace, at least for an hour or two. I feel dizzyingly small as I set out, accustomed to the two dimensional world I live in, on papers, on whiteboards, on screens. Suddenly, bracing myself in 3D is exhausting. I brought my camera to help me explain that. There's a haunting calm, and I pull onto a path I haven't taken before, and from the looks of it, neither has anyone else in quite awhile. Every now and then, a bottle, or plastic, or paper, sprouts from the ground, growing among the leaves, all but forgotten, caught in a balance of death and life.

There is something in a tree ahead, just higher than I could reach. I slide to a stop, and try to land gracefully as I jump off the bike too high for me. I walk closer, until it and I are, literally, face to face. It doesn't process at first, the toothy sharp white grin. When it does, I fall backwards, and I feel my stomach clench, threatening nausea. I trip, over and over, and my mind whirls back to Lord of the Flies. The Lord of the Flies, the pig's skull, the devil, the devil. For some reason, no other studied symbolism or meaning comes to mind, just the repeated scream, the devil is staring back at me. Someone has hung the skull of a dead animal, maybe a deer, on this tree. The branch of the tree has been broken off, leaving a sharp point, onto which the skull has been impaled. Flies buzz around it, apparently oblivious, or maybe just not deterred by the lack of flesh.

The silence feels different now, the silence a graveyard, and I feel small and insignificant.

There is scattered trash, old alliances, rotting wood, stripped metal torn from old cars. A metal bathtub sits at the top of a hill, collecting algae and rainwater, and a cabinet rots at the bottom. Each comes with a story. We live in the graveyard of the memories before us.

In the pond, the geese flee the mockings of the shore. From my side of the pond, I hear the running water, the familiar honks of geese, and today, a smaller, insecure chorus of peeping. There are babies today.

The trail itself is a grave, built over the railroad that once ran there. Off the path, there are the past control switches, tall poles wrapped with wire. The numbers nailed to the bottom of the pole are of thin metal, and crumble and bend at my touch. The dead tree stands as a relic against the living.