Dolly stuffs her reddening hands in the pockets of her black winter coat. Her mother told her to wear a scarf; she is glad she did. On this chilly January dusk Dolly is on a walk. This is a common past time of hers.
She tried to commit suicide last fall. Her therapist suggested these walks. Dolly at first despised the walks; but soon grew to love them. She likes to see the water flowing in the ditches after a rain; she likes to jump over the potholes littering the road; she likes to count the beer bottles she can spot among the weeds; You see, Dolly is a stop and smell the roses kind of 17 year old. Once she started appreciating the landscape of her boring town, she began to love the walks.
Dolly has a specific route she walks everyday after school. The road from her house leads to the graveyard on the hill; she exits left out of the graveyard, walks a long, straight country road, then loops back to her house. The graveyard is the highlight of her walk. She looks over the top of the gravestones and it looks like a vast garden. She likes the porcelain statuettes placed carefully by loved ones around the graves. Dolly spots a knocked over baby angel at a gravestone- what else is she to do but pick it up. She carefully places it upright. She picks up a necklace that ha been pleased on the grave- Jesus on the cross- typical. Dolly laughs, for one of Jesus's arms is missing, but she stifles the laugh after realizing how grotesque it is to laugh in a graveyard; especially at Jesus. Dolly prays an apology to the higher power and sets one arm Jesus back on the headstone.
"Floyd Charles Van Hon the third," she reads off the gray rock. Born in 1978, died in 1994. He was sixteen when his life ended. The same age as dolly last year when she swallowed a bottle of pills, unknowingly running towards the fate that Floyd Charles Van Horn the third faced. Maybe Floyd Charles Van Horn the third committed suicide. Why would Floyd Charles Van Horn the third do that? "Maybe he didn't kill himself," she thinks, "or maybe he did." She sighs, and takes a farewell look at our one limbed lord and savior, and continues on her walk.
YOU ARE READING
Floyd Charles Van Horn III
ParanormalThe struggle of leaving things in the past and moving on told by one alive and three dead people. •this story an get a little graphic; it's a story using death as a platform, after all.•
