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Man, Woman, Body, Stone

CRH

Mark was digging the toe of his sneaker into the dirt. He became conscious that he'd killed several blades of grass in doing so. He hadn't meant to and apologized in his head to no one in particular. To himself perhaps? He often wondered how many organisms he had killed in his life: bacteria washed off his hands, bugs that he'd stepped on by accident or plants he'd failed to water. He'd eaten meat almost every day of his life and how many individual beasts had died in the course of that? How many trees had been cut down for the newspaper ads that he'd never asked for or the extra pages he'd accidentally printed - you know, he thought to himself, like when I print an email and the second page only has a signature and a web address? The page that ends up in the trash. It was obvious that waste was all around, but so easy to forget that a lot of it came with death, just not always human death.


“It's funny,” he said, turning to Sheila, “almost everything in the world - our clothes, our food - comes from something living, but the way we mark our deaths is with something that never lived at all.”


Sheila looked at Mark blankly. She vacillated between hating and loving his musings on life. At this moment, standing in front of Jerry’s tombstone, she hated it. She didn't feel like speaking, much less about life’s little ironies as they seemed to Mark. It had been a year since Jerry died, but standing in this exact spot where he'd been buried opened up some of the old wound that she'd felt then. And she needed this. It had mostly closed over, but she needed to open it, salt it and close it back. It stung like hell, but she had to face the residue that lingered under the skin.


There had been so much pain then, that moving on with life, returning to work and staying sane meant putting some of the tragedy on the back burner. Now was the perfect time to face it. Now was the time to reflect on her last conversation with Jerry.


They'd parted ways on bad terms. That's how she'd been viewing it all year anyhow. She had been telling Jerry and Mark about her rough day at work (her boss had been giving her a hard time about the way she dressed), which had made her simultaneously insecure and angry. Jerry had told her that she needed to stand up for herself more. “He's just going to say whatever he wants until you draw a line. It's not that I don't feel bad for you, but he’s not going to change, so it's really up to you to fix.” Even that evening, she agreed with Jerry’s view, that she just needed to stand her ground, but she was exhausted and wanted a little sympathy to her situation. Enough so that she'd ended up telling Jerry he was being an asshole. He took it okay, calmly, but she remained angry until the evening ended, resolving to stay away from him for a little while – until she'd resolved this shit at work anyway and had different news about the situation to impart.


But then two days later, during the madness of the morning commute, Jerry took an elbow in the shoulder on the subway platform and wobbled forward enough for an incoming train to graze his head. The funeral was horrible for everyone. He'd been twenty-nine and young deaths were difficult for everyone to swallow, and Sheila in particular clung to her regrets about that final night very tightly. She'd known Jerry for ten years, and though he was Mark’s friend first, she'd come to know him very well. She hadn't wanted to end on the terms they had, but she tried to accept that it was incidental, as incidental as his death itself had been. It wasn't something to focus on. It was relatively meaningless. She just felt like she owed him an apology, no matter how small or otherwise unnecessary, but wouldn't have the opportunity, and so this guilt would fester. Perhaps forever, but if at all possible, she had to release it: rip open the scab and feel the weight of his death. And then walk away, bleeding, but without an infection.


“Do you know what I mean?” Mark asked. “It's a rock. That's how we memorialize our dead. It's not wood - we don't kill a tree to get it. Nothing is sacrificed. I suppose that's how it becomes something permanent. If it comes from life, it has to return to death - I guess that's just the way it is, but a rock’s a rock. It'll last.”


He paused, “but not forever. Jesus. Everything crumbles. It's a little disheartening when you think about it.”


(January 7, 2017)

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