In Memoriam ✔️

2

          Breaching the gap in the fence, Kyle stood, brushing  himself off. As he did, he noticed Anita hefting up a large black  physician's bag. It bore an old, split handle design, and she sealed it  up at the center as she lifted it. For a moment he caught a glimpse of  the contents: vials, candles, and a hint of decay wafting up from the  interior. And movement? The bag seemed to writhe as if alive.

          "Didn't your momma ever teach you not to stare?"

          "Yes, Ma'am." Kyle glanced away scanning over the grounds  of the cemetery. Row after row of tombstones spread out before him. Here  in the northern corner they were older, smoothed and worn by age, if  not broken and savaged by teenage stupidity. His daughter's grave  wouldn't be far. His family had a plot set aside nearby. Generations of  Inghams had rotted in this soil. It was family tradition, after all.

          And now his daughter had been confined under that soil as  well. The thought sickened him, and that, mixed with the lingering image  of the leather thrashing of its own accord, and he decided that he  needed that third cigarette after all. Kyle flipped open the pack. The  cigarettes had shifted, slanting to fill the void. He carefully  straightened them, as if rearranging crayons in a Crayola box, then,  satisfied, slipped out the third from the left on the top.

          "Not feeling squeamish, are you?"

          "Neither of us is backing out, now," he said, lighting the cigarette and taking a good puff.

          "Fine." Anita hoisted herself straight as she could and shuffled forward. "Let's get a move on, then."

          He exhaled a long stream of smoke, watching after Anita as  she hobbled off among the graves. One more puff, one more brief moment  of calm, and then he followed after her. 

***

          After that night outside the fraudulent cesspool with the  neon Psychic sign, after Anita Shaw had held Kyle and calmed him  soothing him ever so slightly for perhaps the first time since Charlotte  had died, after that meeting Kyle had asked around about Anita. He'd  returned to previous haunts, though few with whom she had spoken  remained. Those that knew of her simply described her as a bitter  skeptic, telling Kyle that she sought to turn people away from the  occult, urging them to grieve and move on with their lives. What right  did she have to tell them how to grieve? Why grieve at all if you could  reach out beyond the curtain of death and still commune with those you  loved? What if there was still hope? These individuals cursed Anita,  though most did not know her name.

          At first, Kyle found himself agreeing with this lot. He  felt ashamed that he had allowed Anita to soothe his pain, even if only  for a moment. His daughter was still dead and he was still to blame. He  had looked away, he had lost sight of her, and in that moment he had  also lost her forever. He'd been driven mad by the indecency of it, not  just by the atrocity of her death, but also by the disorder of it.

          Father before daughter. Not the other way. The world had an order to follow, as he had told himself many times.

          As his anger mounted, it muddled forming a thick and  righteous slop of grief and madness, and of anger and denial, until he  found himself ready to burst. The seances and tarot readers, the fortune  tellers and the psychics, they brought no peace. Their predictions and  communions now rang hollow and Anita was to blame.

          The search took some effort, but eventually he had tracked  down an acquaintance from a seance he had attended shortly after his  divorce – a Wilton Hendricks. Wilton had lost his husband and had  attended hoping for one last conversation with his beloved. The medium  that led the affair, however, had offered only vague words, hollow and  easily interpreted in any direction desired. She had been a charlatan.  Everyone attending knew it, even if they did not want to believe it.  Anita had found Wilton that night, waiting outside the storefront for  any that needed her.