All Souls Day

She sat quietly among the dead, her feet crossed at the ankles, waiting patiently.

On another night, the cemetery would have seemed gloomy and overrun, maybe even dangerous between the main road and bus route, but this night there were candles and people and the comforting sounds of subdued laughter.

She watched her sons, grown now with their own children, pull the stubborn weed effortlessly from their father's grave. It had been more than ten years and the time for tears had long passed. Now the boys-turned-men shared a bottle of dark rum, the amber liquid warm in the candlelight.

They told her to stay home, but she had come every year, had bent uncomfortably at the knees grasping the unwelcome plants to give her husband the attention he had always been used to. She conceded this time and obediently sat on the low wall around the grave watching her sons clean and paint it white.

She looked up over the markers and across the field, her eyes resting on the small church they used to attend hand-in-hand. Her gaze drifted to the big tree where the main road parted, one street straight and gridlocked, the other curling upward around the cemetery's lonely hills.

It was different with him gone. Yes, the children came with their own in tow, filling her house with laughter, eating at the same kitchen table they had grown up around. She cooked, she watched TV, she visited friends, she went to the market, but she slept alone and when they left, the house was empty.

The viewing had been at the house in the cleared living room. Her youngest granddaughter had reached toward the casket, arms raised on tiptoe, begging to be lifted up to peer inside curiously. The child didn't understand death yet; neither did she--then.

The tingling began on the fingertips of her right hand traveling upward. A throbbing headache moved across her brow and exploded in shocking white pain; the numbness fell from scalp to toes. She didn't try to speak when the dim light faded; she waited for her sons to come.

In the distance a horn blared and traffic moved.

Yessssssss, she finally slurred, the sibilant 's' dying with final exhale.