Waiting for Sunday

chapter 3 - a morning in mourning

Saturday morning is gray and blue as an arctic sea. Felix sits in his twin-size bed for a while without leaving it, blinking at the shadows of his blinds upon the wall, listening to the low drone of the air conditioning and the chirping of a bird beyond his window. His mind runs wild with thoughts of how much there is to do and be done, so much so that he remains beneath his stone gray comforter in near paralysis until he decides to reach for his phone.

A missed call from his mother sits there at the top of his notifications. Felix exhales, a tired hand at his brow and a weight in his chest, his thumb hovering over the call icon. His time sits heavy in his palms and he weighs the options: the white carpet, yellow-walled Catholic sanctuary that is his childhood home in Decatur, or himself, himself and the hilled sidewalks and a city still so green.

Felix tosses his phone away from him and rolls over, stretching to grab his eyepatch from where it rests always on the dresser next to his bed. The moment he secures it around the back of his head, he is awake and alive and himself. Felix rises as the sun does.

Not far from Lillie's apartment, between a hipster grocery store and an abandoned high school, there is a cemetery.

In the back of her head she knows it is a strange place to seek inspiration, but it is not a strange place to seek solace, and she hopes one will lead to the other. So Lillie dresses while still bleary-eyed and groggy, stumbling around her bedroom, pulling on a dark pair of dungarees and the most colorful pair of socks she owns (which are gray). She makes coffee to go and slips into her favorite shoes, patent leather Mary Janes with gold circular buckles, and sets out before most of the city has woken up.

The cemetery is quiet, the sounds only the soft ones made by the living: the flutter of insect wings, the skitter of tiny squirrel feet up tree trunks, summer bugs hissing in the tall grass. Yet it is loud with stories, of the names engraved into the aging stones, and of the people who walked the pathway under Lillie's feet before her: craggy brick, daisies growing up between the cracks. That's what she loves the most about it, being alone yet surrounded by people, living amongst those who have lived.

She comes here often, whenever the ink well at her fingertips feels at risk of drying up. The graveyard's path winds around the mossy rough headstones and dips in front of a retaining wall and circles around great big sprawling trees. It smells like morning dew, like honeysuckle.

She watches what looks like a baby bee buzz between the daisies, the natural world doing what it does naturally. It feels right, unlike the strange rock that appeared on her nightstand, or the more macabre bracelet she found in her jewelry drawer that morning, which she dropped seconds after picking it up when she recognized the feel of human skin.

Unnatural. If the conclusion she is drawing closer and closer towards proves right, that is what she is becoming.

Lillie rounds the corner then, stepping into the shade of a magnolia tree, and stops in her tracks. She's no longer alone.

A man crouches at the wide base of the tree, his hands smudged with soil, and there is something familiar about him. He wears a brown flannel and light-washed jeans, cuffed at the bottom to expose his ankle socks, which are actually colorful—printed with cats wearing astronaut helmets. Mahogany brown hair curls in big loose spirals, waving out from the whorl at the top of his head like rays of sun. Lillie notices a tie around the back of his head, and when he turns at the sound of her approach, she sees the eyepatch.

He looks at her for a moment, with a clear, bright face Lillie can see has never been able to hide much, even with the obscured eye. He says, "Oh."

Lillie nods at him in silent acknowledgment of his presence, all she intends to give. She turns to continue on her way up the path.