Marble Tombstone - D. R. Bolger (guided reading books .txt) 📗

I approached her grave with consternation, as if a tormented hand would protrude up out of the broken soil, yet there was just the stiff silence of the obscured sky.

Light raindrops fell gently on my skin, but as the slight sensation touched me, I felt it bite and tear at my heart.

I crept around the disturbed soil and I was soon standing right next to the headstone.  It was of elegant dark marble with white lettering engraved on the front in flowery calligraphy.

The air whirled around and through me, freezing my insides.  I could hear my rapid heart-beat screaming in my ears.

Fear overwhelmed me as my finger reached out to touch the marble.  The frost stung my fingertip and sent a tremble along my arm down to my toes.

I could not help but remember the morning, the pungent taste had lingered with me all day.

Mummy looked so cold.  Her face was covered lavishly with makeup and she wore her finest dress, misty blue silk that accentuated her sapphire eyes.  They always reminded me of the ocean, calm, beautiful and yet powerful.  That was how I saw Mummy, like a vast ocean of so many depths.  Her eyes were hidden from me now, veiled by pearl-white eyelids that would never again lift.

She had merely a shawl draped around her arms as she lay outside in the windy morning, raised on a dark-stained coffin.

“Poor boy, so young to lose his mother…”

“He’s so quiet, he doesn’t even make a whimper…”

“He’s as pale as the dead…”

Incessantly, the whispers surrounded me.  So many concerned faces, so many suffocating hugs and dampening kisses on my forehead, but no comfort from Mummy.

She just laid there, an empty vessel of a beautiful woman who would not return to me.

Wake up, Mummy, wake up.  

I willed her to come back to life, to wake up after a long sleep and embrace me with her smiles, hugs and vivacity.  Yet there was no response.  Her movements were solely of the ruffling of her hair and garment as the wind tried to take her away from me already.

I was now enveloped by darkness, the rain – heavier, had drenched me during my reminiscing.

“Why don’t you come back?  Why have you left me?  I need you Mummy!  I need you!”

I flung myself down on my hands and knees, unable to carry the weight ploughed on my shoulders as I had become a victim to the agony and despair, tearing its way out of me. Tears flowed down my cheeks in a steady stream.

Rainfall started pelting down, turning the dirt in my hands to mud, the sky was crying my tears.

“Jamey…” 

I could hear a muffled cry behind me, competing with the ‘slosh’ of rain plummeting into flooded soil.

My skin was getting so cold, my feet and hands were losing feeling, yet I was oblivious to that, all I could feel was abandonment.  She had disappeared in a car crash, on her way to pick me up after school.  She died because of me.

I scrunched the mud in my hands as it escaped through the cracks, desperate to return to the ground, so it could tarnish Mummy’s grave.

“Jamey, why did you run off!” 

My father, a man I’ve never known, yelled out of frustration.  I was savagely reminded of how he just stood there during the service, emotionless.  He did not care!  He did not love her!  He was nothing more than a stranger, a stranger who wished to take me away from my mummy.  My eyes remained fixed on the mud through the cracks of my fingers.

He hesitated. 

“I’m sorry, I know why, to be with your mother.” 

He crouched down in the mud next to me. 

“I don’t know what I can say that will make you trust me, but of course I don’t when you don’t even know me.  It was never my intention to abandon you when you were just born.  There were things that happened that people of our age were too ill-experienced to deal with.  Too young, too naïve and as a result some things between your mother and I were left unresolved.”  He shook his head and sighed.  “I was never there for you when you were younger and I can’t provide some lame excuse that makes everything okay.  Truth is, I was scared, young and so stupid.  I don’t know what to do, but I promise I won’t leave you again.”

I turned to look at him and saw all the sorrow on his face.  He was filled with such regret and fear.  Our eyes locked as I studied him, his clothes were now also drenched, but he did not react to it.  His eyes seemed to plead into mine, to just give him a chance, let him right all the wrongs he had done to me, by being there for me this time round.

“Please, come with me.” 

He waited there a couple minutes and when I did not respond he sighed and walked through the haze of raindrops and out of sight.

My clothes had become heavy with the rain, it was a struggle just to stand. 

I admired the delicate flowers that lay before me: roses, daffodils, carnations, daisies, no one knew that Mummy’s favourites were lilies. All those flowers that had been left by the tombstone were just lying there, wilted and weary from the battering it had from the rain.  They were still beautiful, however I could see their lifeless beauty fading fast, rotting into the earth, as was my mother.

The sky was bleak, the few stars seen through the clouds were but specks of ash upon a morbid horizon. 

I was so close to Mummy, separated merely by six feet of earth.

I leant down and kissed the elegant marble, repressing a shudder from bitter contact and whispered. “Stay with me…”

I looked at the marble head stone one last time, ran up to my father and slipped my hand inside his.

Text: Danielle Bolger
Publication Date: 07-16-2013

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