Come With Me

The Graveside

It was a dismal day. A soft mist of rain fell from a sad sky, dropping it's tears on the graves of the lost. Everything was coated in grey, from the lumpy and dilapidated headstones to the dying grass waving in a cool breeze. The only spot of color were the pale blue, limp flowers hanging from a black hooded figure. Looking like a mournful raven, the figure tightened her hands around the stems of the dying flowers as she stared down at the already dead. The grave read the same, as always, the engraving just beginning to wear from the weather. The cold, unfeeling words were the same, old and unchanging, but the rush of emotions she always felt ripped through her anew, cutting through the scars in her heart.

John Able

March 5th, 1964 - September 6th, 1995

Taken too soon

Loving son, husband, and father

The mist turned to soft rain and the woman pulled her coat closer around her. With shaking hands, she placed the blue flowers on the grave and turned her face to the sky, letting it's tears wash away her own.

"Lorraine!" a voice broke through the somber silence in the cemetery. "Lorraine, come on, you'll get soaked to the bone!"

The woman sighed and turned to the voice. "I'll be along in a moment, Alison. I just need another moment."

As thunder cracked overhead, Lorraine felt a hand in the crook of her arm. She turned to look at Alison's kindly face, currently replaced with an expression of worry, her Oriental eyes squinting through the rain.

"Lorraine, you need to come now. The bottom is about to drop out."

Lorrain slowly nodded and gave one last long look to her son's grave.

Alison led her back to the black sedan waiting on the cemetery's dirt road. She side stepped the runny mud and climbed into the car door that Alison held open for her. Hot air hit her like a summer day, warming her numb hands and trying to thaw the permafrost that made a home in her bones. Lorraine sat against the leather seats and stared out at the raindrops racing down the window. The driver's door opened and let in a sputtering Alison. Lorraine watched as she stripped off her rain coat, exposing Alison's unblemished, olive skin, long black hair, and strong hands. Lorrained stared at the hands folded in her own lap; pale, bony, with blue veins lining wrinkled skin marred with liver spots. She raised a shaking hand, frail, dammit all, to push grey hair behind her ear.

Silence reigned in the car as they pulled out of the cemetery and on to the twiseted road leading back towards town. Another roll of thunder cracked overhead and rain pelted the car. Alison muttered somthing under he breath and flicked on the brights, pushing the wispers as fast as they would go. "Quite a storm, huh?" Alison asked cheerily, beginning on one of her idel prattles that annoyed Lorraine so much, "Weatherman didn't say this was going to happen today I should've known though, my hair was frizzing this morning..."

Lorraine snorted. "Yeah, and my trick knee was swelling. It's better than any damn weatherman." Alison's eyes cut back to stare at Lorraine's edged voice in the rear-view mirror. Lorraine winced. Alison knew she didn't have a trick knee, or trick anything. A roll of guilt washed over Lorraine for being so curt and rude to her babysitter. Pardon, Hospice Nurse. Alison was sweet and always had a smile to share, but sometimes Lorraine resented having to have help at her own home when she used to be so capable. I raised a kid on my own, and did a damn good job. But sadness overwhelmed her at the thought of her son and she pushed it back down. Getting old didn't suit her. She breathed and tried to make herself remember that without Alison, she would have no one.

The rest of the car ride was silent. Lorraine pulled her guilt and loneliness around her like a coat, deflecting any sort of happy thought. Instead she wallowed in her sadness, a familiar mood. Alison turned into a sleepy residential area, full of old houses stacked against each other, some leaning precariously to the side and others decorated with tacky lawn art. All had peeling paint and a sense of well loved nostaliga from better days gone. Or maybe that's just my mood.

It wasn't long before Alison pulled into a gravel driveway of a white framework house with a broken stone birdbath, a sagging porch, and withered roses clinging to trellises leaned against the walls. The windows were darkened with antique tatted curtains that, even though lace, didn't let any light in or out. All in all, the house was secluded and reserved, melancholy and easily overlooked in favor of the neighbors and their fake deer standing under a tree. Everyime Lorraine returned to her home, she was struck with how much the house refleced the owner; old on the outside, hiding sorrow inside, but always seeming suspended in time.

Alison drove the car into the garage, turning the brights off and cutting off the engine with a final growl. Lorraine opened her own door before Alison could get to her and shuffled to the door that led into her kitchen.

"Lorraine?" Alison's voice caught her as she stepped over the threshold. "Do you need anything else? Or are you okay?"

Lorraine hpmhed. "I'll be fine. I'm not decrepit yet."

A frown touched Alison's voice as she said goodbye and reminded Lorraine to call her if she needed anything. Lorraine threw a wave over her shoulder and shut the garage door.

Her house greeted her with cold and loneliness, embracing her like an old friend. Musty air was stale and unbreathed, a distinctive smell of moth balls and poporri permeating through the walls. Lorraine made a face. Never thougtht my house would smell like and old person... but she caught her gaunt, wrinkled reflection in the window as she watched Alison drive away in the sedan. Looks like you've gotten old, dearie. Seventy-one isn't young.

Lorraine turned around and began fumbling around in the kitchen, not bothering to take off her soaked rain coat. She opened the fridge and got out leftover meatloaf from the dinner she had prepared for Alison and herself two days before. She heated it in the mircowave, shed her coat on the kitchen counter, and went to sit in her armchair in the living room. She turned on the TV and then muted it. Usually the TV was on to banish the loneliness with voice's laughing and talking from different channels, but everytime she visited the cemetery, she allowed herself a day of feeling bereaved. The TV light played across the living room floor and the people laughing on screen were dubbed with the sound of pouring rain hitting the window panes. Lukewarm meatloaf filled her, or as filled as she could get with two empty spaces inside her, their hollowness screaming in the silence beside her.

She sat in front of the TV, not really watching, until the sky turned dark. Lorraine bathed, put on her dressing gown, and slipped ito her too large bed. With the quilt pulled to her chin, her mind wandered into old memories, as elderly minds tend to do. From her family, once full and whole and surrounding her. Her husband, Harry, still young and spry, laughing as he carried her across the threshold of this very house, to watching her son John grow up without a father. Lorraine swallowed hard as she thought about Harry, never touched by old age like her, taken by cancer too soon. Taken too soon. The echoes of her son's engraving on his headstone brought tears to her eyes. They had both left her alone to suffer age and heartache.

She brushed tears from her face and turned over in bed. I shouldn't have been so rude to Alison, she thought. It's not her fault John died.

It's mine.