Six Feet Down and More

Two weeks worth of nights ago, the hollowed out frame that Chester Hara had become was pronounced dead. The doctors had phoned Alisabeth around midnight. They hadn’t woken her; she had been up sitting in the dark and creaking house already, staring out at the mists outside. It had been expected that the illness eating the gravedigger from the inside out would consume him someday soon; she had anticipated the end of his prolonged disappearing for some time. She could have been at the hospital that night, coiled in the withered round of her father’s arm one last time, but she hadn’t been. She had said “thank you” and hung up the phone.

Now, two weeks of nights later, Alisabeth was sitting and staring again. Each inhalation of misty air was an anxiety; each exhale, a vain attempt to self soothe. The anticipation of his burial had been so much worse than the anticipation of his death. His death had been something Alice could stay home from; it was inevitable and remote and she hadn’t liked it, but it had been a relief. She wasn’t ashamed to be relieved that her father was dead. Any guilt she felt was minimal and quiet, sequestered tightly away into the furthest corners of her mind. She felt altogether apathetic about the whole matter. So why did the imminence of burying him—going out into the depths of that moonlit mist, amongst the oldest monuments the cemetery had in its care, out to the plot reserved for so long for its owner, and driving a shovel into the earth as she had done so many times—fill her chest cavity with such thick and black dread? Why hadn’t she been able to even think of it until this, the eve of the internment? Why couldn’t she have dug the grave as of yet? Why did the thought of it spawn such grotesque and silent nightmares in her tired mind?

Thin tendrils of fog twisted out from the headstones, out of the cemetery, across the lawn, the driveway, up to the wooden porch and the door. Alisabeth stared at them, his eyes, so unlike his father’s, wide and unblinking. They seemed to sign at him, gesture to where he sat inside, chastising and calling all the same. They reached up in pale and withered rounds, beckoning him close, to come and be embraced within their terrible midst: come, and do what must be done. His heart beat against the dread filling the cavity that housed it, palpitations flitting faster and faster. The moonlight played in horrible forms, shining through the vapours like ghosts, the shadow-negatives like fluttering vultures. The light was coming down in full, from the very vault of the sky. It was midnight: the birth of that day of death into moonlit darkness, swaddled in the pale gause of fog. Alice had to do it now. There was no other choice.

She didn’t even change out of her nightgown. She simply took to her feet, shoved them into her thick-soled work boots, threw her coat over her shoulders, and took up the keenest shovel on the porch. It glinted in the corner of her eye as she trudged out into moonlight, the glare at times diffused by fog, and in others as sharp as the pangs wracking Alisabeth’s entire body. What were those awful sensations? Fear? She had never once felt afraid to walk amongst the dead and buried, not even at night, not even through the spectral mists that arose during it. There was nothing to fear. And yet, it was inescapably true: terror now wracked her entire body.

Still, he set his unblinking gaze ahead of him. Still, he trekked amongst marble and concrete and granite, crosses and vases, stones and obelisks and on and on and on until the names engraved upon each grew fainter and more and more worn. Still, he came to the plot that would be his father’s. And still, he dug. Slick grasses gave way to hard dark earth, pierced and scraped away swiftly beneath Alice’s blade. He dug and dug in a half-conscious type of fury, until finally, the concrete lid of the burial vault surfaced beneath his dirtied boots. This was it: six feet under, stony and cruel as his father had ever been, the forever home of the husk-man that had haunted his entire life.

All at once, the effort of the small and yet unfinished hole fell upon the young gravedigger. She swayed, head bowed upon the hilt of the shovel, before she finally sunk down upon the exposed concrete lid. A gasping sob escaped her, her throat bobbing with the sound. There was both so much and nothing left to be done: such an overwhelming nothingness of a life to live. She had been just eight years old when she realized this life her father had given her, this solitary kingdom of lingering death, was a self-sacrifice he had already made her take. She had been just eight years old when she realized she had already had her life given away. And still he was her father: all she had had in this world.

The steel blade gritted against the concrete lid like her teeth gritted against her tears. But then it wasn’t simply gritting anymore; it was cracking. Breaking. All too suddenly, the surface beneath Alisabeth felt as hollow as it really was: an empty tomb. She tried to spring up and out of the grave, which would have been impossible even if the conglomerate of grey underfoot hadn’t shattered apart by the pressure of her boots. All she could do was take a breath before a darkness, far blacker and further and more abyssal than anything less than death itself, fell all around her.