Quiet Places
by Jonathan Penton

When I was a child, I used to wander around graveyards at night.

I suppose that's not terribly unusual.

OK, you caught me. I still wander around graveyards at night.

The graveyard near my home has been filled for decades. It has only one religious section, that being Protestant. It has no mausoleum, but it does have cannons. This is the Deep South, so half the graveyard is dedicated to Confederate soldiers. They have rows and rows of tiny tombstones, unmarked and with no bodies underneath, in an attempt to at least number, and remember through numbering, the slain Confederate soldiers that may have lived in this area. The tiny tombstones are flanked by two life-sized model cannons, flowerbeds, an obelisk, and a gazebo. I'm not sure what the gazebo is there for, but again, this is the Deep South, and we have many gazebos.

Under the gazebo is a book of names and addresses. For some reason, many of the people who visit the cemetery write their names and addresses in the book, often with little comments, like, "This is a nice place," or, "Why do children die?"

As an adult, I find the idea of writing down your name and address in a book you find in the middle of a cemetery patently nuts, no matter how many people decide to do the same. As a child, I would have written down my name in a heartbeat, but at that time, my whole reason for visiting the cemetery was a bit nuts.

I can't read the book at night, of course --taking a flashlight into a nighttime cemetery crawl would be mucho tacky-- a fact which I guess reveals that I wander around the cemetery a lot in the daytime, as well. Hey, my son likes it too. We make it a family outing.

But I definitely get more pleasure out of my nighttime walks. The police come by every night and lock the place up around 9 pm. Usually, they skip a single entrance, only large enough for a pedestrian, in an inconvenient corner away from the street. I walk through the Confederate section, and mingle with the cold angels and granite slabs. Besides the Confederate obelisk, there's one mighty obelisk for a former Senator. I piss on it, which I suppose is a little childish, but got damn, it's a 12-foot-tall penis commemorating the death of a rich man who acquired political power and actively fought integration. Urine just keeps with the theme.

The rest of the cemetery I leave alone. It's heavily wooded, and cool year-round. It is not a beautiful place. Not even on the haziest nights does the granite look like marble, and the angels are mass-produced and more cherubic than majestic. But it is a cool place, and it is a cemetery.

When it rains at night, I try to break straight for the cemetery. When it rains, the place looks almost presentable. My glasses are first covered in raindrops, then steam up, leaving the place with a haze and ethereal atmosphere that it could never get without corrective lenses.

There is a set of stone steps, under a stone archway, near the front entrance of the cemetery. Although it is near the front entrance, it juts off at an angle. It is not a direct path leading in and out; it is simply an archway, leading from cemetery to more cemetery, with no clear purpose. Sometimes, I sit under that archway and wait. Nothing ever happens, much, but I wait there anyway.

When I was a child, I used to wander around cemeteries looking for monsters, or werewolves, or vampires. I wasn't hunting them. I was hoping to be hunted. Terrified of death, and unable to tolerate life, I wandered around, hoping to meet something that would make the decision for me. Either sudden death caused by something carnivorous, or some hellish half-life caused by a vampire, ghost, or ghoul. Anything was better than going on, day to day, trying to muster the energy to stay alive.

I don't know why I wander the cemetery today. Nostalgia, though it's a horrible cemetery, or force of habit. Romanticism, perhaps. Or maybe I feel a little warmer with so many cold things around me.

Jonathan Penton is the overworked editor and publisher of Unlikely Stories. Check out his literary works at this site.