The day was appropriately gloomy for a funeral. Raven perched on her ladder and sheared dead ivy from her windowsill, occasionally glancing at the procession of mourners mirrored in the glass. It wasn’t an unusual sight for a cemetery, of course, but she liked to watch over these things. There was a comforting sense of routine to it.
Hours passed. She’d finished with the ivy and had ambled over to the fences. They needed some work. As she replaced a handful of nails, she pocketed the old ones, saving them for later. Her pockets were already filled with dead sprigs of ivy. Whistling gently, she paused to grab her rake, ready to move on to the next task, until she realized that one of the mourners from earlier hadn’t left. A young woman—or younger than Raven at least, maybe in her early thirties—knelt in the upturned dirt in front of the fresh grave. The dead had been buried for hours, yet still she remained. Raven frowned, picked up her cane, and went tap-tapping over to the spot.
“You knew him, I gather?” Raven croaked, and didn’t flinch when the woman practically jumped away from her.
“Lord,” the woman gasped, “You just appeared there. For a second I thought you were the Reaper.” She turned back towards the grave, an edge of bitterness sharpening her expression. “Coming to take me too.”
“Just the groundskeeper,” Raven replied. Her cane sank into the mud, where a worm wriggled. It was an oddly warm December and they hadn’t found their way deep enough into the earth just yet. She turned it over and set it back down in the soil. “You’ve been here a while.”
“I suppose I have.” The woman didn’t look away from the stone. “How can you stand it?”
“Hm?”
“Being here, always. Constantly surrounded by death.”
“Well, I wouldn’t see it that way. There’s quite a lot of life here too, you know.” She glanced down at the woman’s muddied dress, at the faint shake of her shoulders against the encroaching evening’s cold, or maybe from the grief. It was getting dark. “I was just about to take my break. Want to join me for a coffee?”
The woman hesitated, but only slightly. Coffee might not help alleviate the chill of death, but it certainly couldn’t hurt.
“Please.”
Raven nodded, then tapped her cane and began the amble back to her home. As the woman stood up to follow, Raven asked, “What’s your name, then?”
“Lenore,” said she. “Yours?”
“Raven.”
“That’s fitting, isn’t it?”
Raven shrugged. “It is what it is. Though I suppose I would’ve found my way here one way or another.”
Her home was a little two-story cottage on the edge of the cemetery, the second floor of which was mostly storage. Contrary to popular belief, most groundskeepers did not, in fact, live in their cemeteries, but Raven did. She liked it there. Saved her a commute, in any case. The outside of the place was decorated in all sorts of odds and ends. Trinkets of unusual shapes and sizes, nailed to the wall or hanging clinking from the eaves. Glimmering metal, shimmering glass.
“Is this your home?” Lenore asked. “It’s covered in… Where did you get all this?”
“I scavenge,” Raven said. On days off you’d often find her in a scrapyard, collecting metal and shiny things to bring home and weld together. “I find dead things and make art from them.”
“Dead things,” Lenore repeated. At first she looked disturbed, but her expression shifted as she got a closer look at the art itself. She gingerly touched a piece that hung from the roof—a glittering, jagged thing, made from what looked to be a car’s rear-view mirror. “Lord, for a moment I thought you meant you used animal bones.”
“My buddy Crowley does. Finds roadkill and uses it to make windchimes.”
Lenore made a face. “That’s grotesque.”
“Is it?” Raven brushed her fingers against a piece made from sanded-down plexiglass, the remnants of a windshield. “I don’t find it much different from what I do.”
“But—These aren’t really dead things. This is made from a car. A car can’t die.”
“But it can stop being a car,” Raven said. “A dead car becomes scrap metal, becomes art. The same way a dead tree becomes paper, becomes a story.”
She turned her gaze back to Lenore. “The same way we become bones, become dirt, become fertilizer for the flowers. We stop being what we used to be and become something new. But we never stop becoming something. We never become nothing.”
“I don’t know if I agree,” Lenore said, gazing back out over the cemetery. “It certainly feels like I have nothing.”
“Well, in a moment you’ll have coffee. Come sit down. I’ll get you some.”
Lenore sat down on an ancient metal bench among the trinkets and folded her hands in her lap. Raven disappeared through a side door, but returned in a few minutes holding two steaming mugs of coffee.
“Didn’t know how you liked it, and didn’t have enough hands to carry out the sugar or cream, so I just put a whole bunch of it in yours.”
Lenore eyed Raven’s coffee, which was distinctly blacker. “You think I’m soft.”
“No,” Raven said, unruffled. “I think anyone in your position would need something sweet after today.”
The mugs weren’t part of a matching set. Rather, they looked wildly different from each other. Lenore’s was shaped like a pumpkin. Raven’s looked distinctly gothic in style. Both still had old thrift store price tags on the bottom.
“…Thank you,” Lenore said quietly, then took a sip. She hesitated before speaking up again. “You’ve said a lot about death. My friend, Henry—He’s gone now. You aren’t religious, are you, Raven? You don’t believe I’ll see him again?”
Quoth the Raven: “Eh, probably not.”
She paused to set down her coffee on a little side table as Lenore stared down at her own. She pulled the old nails from her pocket, then set to work fastening them with twine to some kind of statue that sat there. It looked a little like a deer, but was rough enough in construction that it looked a little more like carrion.
“Probably not,” Lenore repeated numbly.
“Probably not. But that doesn’t mean I think you won’t be together, anyway.”
“I don’t understand.”
“We’re all part of this world. We take from it, we give to it, we become it. There’ll be flowers on his grave in the spring.”
She took the sprigs of dead ivy from her pocket and settled them down in the bed of nails. Softening it.
“But I’ll never be able to talk to him again.”
“No.”
Lenore stared down at her coffee and said nothing. She hadn’t cried at the funeral. She’d managed to keep her cool this entire time, and yet the weight of it all was finally starting to buckle her. Or maybe she was just tired. One way or another, a tear dripped down her cheek. Then another.
“So what’s the point, then?”
“Hm?”
“The point.” Lenore didn’t mean to snap, but she did, anyway. Raven’s cryptic philosophies were leagues better than the weak I’m sorry for your losses she’d been receiving all day, but that didn’t mean they weren’t frustrating. “We’re all part of this world, but I’ll never hear my best friend’s voice again. What sort of consolation prize are flowers? What sort of weak apology from Mother Nature is that?”
“Well.” Raven pulled away from her project and leaned both hands on her cane in front of her. “I don’t know if I can answer that for you. We all have to find our own point. One size won’t fit all.” She gestured at the glass, the metal, the cemetery. “I’ve found mine. I have my job. What do you like to do, Lenore?”
Lenore was caught off guard by the question. “…I write.”
“So write him something,” Raven said. “That’s a way of talking to him, isn’t it?”
She stood up, then tapped her way over to the edge of her home, the edge of the cemetery. “I can’t tell you what the point of living is. But the point of death, I think, is to remind us to live.” She turned back to Lenore, then offered a tired smile. “I’d never tell you not to mourn him. Just don’t forget to live, while you’re at it. I’m sure he’d want you to remember that.”
The tears hadn’t stopped. Lenore brought up a sleeve to wipe her face with, then stared at the wetness there. “You were right. I really am soft.”
“No.” Raven shook her head. “You’re just alive.”
Already a story was forming on the edges of Lenore’s fingertips. It had been hard to think of anything through the hazy pain of the day, but now she could feel something coming to her. It didn’t lessen the pain—not even slightly—but maybe it reshaped it, somehow. Made it into something she could wield. Maybe Raven was right, when she talked about everything becoming something else.
“…Well. You make a damn good coffee,” she said, letting her fingers take in the lingering warmth of the mug.
Raven chuckled. “Borrowed the sugar from the neighbours. I think it makes it taste better.”
“That makes no sense,” Lenore said, but she couldn’t help but smile a little at the eccentricity of it all. “But I’ll take your word for it.”
Raven smiled back. “I hope you do.”
A sound made Raven turn back to the stretch of graves in front of her. In the distance, a flock of crows had taken off. They settled in the branches of a large tree and began to sing—well, caw, but there was no real difference between the two things when you really thought about it.
K.B. Stockwood is an editor and writer living in Toronto, Ontario. She recently graduated from the University of Toronto, where she studied English and Women & Gender Studies. She hopes to continue working with stories for the rest of her life.
