My dead Orpheus. The awakening

Chapter five

I was just a child when my grandmother died. She was my father's mother, and I loved her, even though she would cross herself every time she looked into my eyes. She used to say that purple was the color of death and that I had painted it on my body.

Quite the character.

When she died, we buried her at Oakland Cemetery, one of the largest cemeteries in Atlanta. It was the first time I had ever seen a place like that, and I remember the morbid fascination with which I gazed at the weathered marble headstones and the statues of angels and women looking up to the sky.

It was also the first time I felt my skin tingle from being so close to so many souls still bound to their earthly remains, waiting for time to smother them and let them fade into nothingness, as if they had never existed.

I was ten years old, and I had never had such close contact with death. As I stared at the tarnished inscriptions on the gravestones, I realized that not everyone had been as lucky as me. There was a little girl, Heather, buried just a few steps away from my grandmother, whose life had been cut short before she could even celebrate her ninth birthday.

Suddenly, it seemed foolish to be too sad about Grandma. She had lived a long life, had been happy, and had been loved. Heather Aldridge, on the other hand, never got that chance.
Even though she had died about ten years earlier, her grave made my fingertips tingle more than any other. I thought about her so intensely that I dreamed of her that night, despite not even knowing what she looked like. My imagination drew her shorter than me by a whole handspan, with brown hair falling over her shoulders, tied into two braids with rebellious strands sticking out like irritated porcupines.

The next day, as I walked through the streets of Riverside on my way to school, I was followed by a strange little girl with bright blue eyes and red hair like Pippi Longstocking.

She said her name was Heather Aldridge and that I had brought her back into the world.

At first, I didn't believe her. How could a dead person come back to life? And because of me, of all people!

Within a few days, I concluded that Heather was the most annoying child to ever walk the earth. Wherever I went, she was always on my heels. No one was looking for her, no one was worried about her, and no one ever came to take her back home. That was my biggest concern.

One evening, however, I made a discovery. Thanks to some urgent stomach problems, my father left the computer unattended to rush to the bathroom, giving me enough time to type into Google the name my little stalker claimed as hers.

Her eyes, sharp and alive as I remembered from that afternoon, stared back at me from the fingerprint-smudged screen. The photo accompanied a newspaper article about a tragic accident that had occurred ten years earlier. The little girl had choked on a large olive she had snatched from the kitchen table while her parents were distracted. They hadn't been able to save her, and she had died within minutes.

From that day on, Heather no longer seemed like the nuisance she had been until that point. No ten-year-old girl would ever want to be seen with an annoying little eight-year-old, but I made an exception for her. Every night, after my parents had fallen asleep, I would quietly slip like a cat to open the door and let her in so she could sleep with me. And every morning, we would sneak out while my parents were at work.

One morning, though, I woke up alone. Hopeful, I even waited for her after school... but she never came.

I never saw her again.

I even went back to Oakland Cemetery. I took two buses and skipped school—my parents wouldn't have even noticed, since I did everything on my own back then—but her grave was exactly the same as the last time I had seen it... except for one detail.