Dark Avenues

by Brian J Smith

  He was halfway across the hillside when a sharp iciness streaked down the middle of his back. His skin prickling, he pivoted around, shaking the contents inside of his bag.

  Nothing.

  The three women had departed from the white tombstone and made the long trek back across the cemetery to their vehicle. Now that they were gone, the eerie stillness inside the cemetery seeped into his bones and left him feeling a little odd. He sighed, swiped his left hand across the film of sweat coating his forehead and blotted his palms on his left thigh.

  There were plenty of tombstones for him to choose from, but there had to be something unique about them that drew his attention. The others that sat off in the distance resembled gray-black smudges on a lush-green canvas.

  He stopped beside of a black granite tombstone and felt the cool evening breeze stroking the back of his neck. He wrapped his left hand around the strap of his bag and scanned the cemetery. Tree shadows bracketed the right side of the property, concealing a few headstones from the soft warm rays of the evening sun.

  He snatched a short breath and said to himself. “You can do this. You know you can.”

  It didn’t feel the same without her and it never would. She wasn’t trotting ahead of him, talking about her day while he carried their canvas bag (the one he was using now) and holding her hand. It was like sliding a glove on the wrong hand–it didn’t feel right.

  He approached a knee-high marble-gray tombstone sitting thirty yards away from the edge of the forest, read the name chiseled across the front and exhaled. It said:

  MARILYN GRAHAM

  JULY 12, 2002-MARCH 7, 2019

  RIP MY BEAUTIFUL ANGEL

  Almost three months ago, he thought to himself.

  He sighed, slid his bag free from his side, eased it onto the ground between his feet and knelt in front of it. He didn’t know the young lady personally but there was something about her that caught his attention. It broke his heart to see someone die at such an early age; it always reminded him that Life should never be taken for granted because we never know what’ll happen from one day to the next.

  He unzipped the bag and removed each item one at a time, setting them carefully on the top of the bag. A roll of tape, a packet of paper and a flat plastic tray with an array of colored chalk; the colors ranged from light to dark, from periwinkle blue to tombstone gray. He tore four strips of tape from the roll using his teeth and fixed the first sheet of paper onto the tombstone by applying all four strips of tape to all four corners of the page.

  “Alright, Marilyn Graham.” He said jokingly. “It’s your turn to go on The Perkins Wall Of Fame.”

  He gave a good-natured sniffle, selected a piece of dark-blue chalk from the tray and rubbed it sideways across the page. After a few minutes, he lowered his hand and blew off the excess dust to check his results.

  A sense of puzzlement overcame him. The headstone said MARILYN GRAHAM but the name on the paper said MCCORD.

  2

  WHEN he stared at the name on the page again, Kevin’s brows furrowed with confusion. He set the page labeled MCCORD on top of his bag, slipped out a fresh one and fixed it onto the tombstone. Thick smudges of gray dust coating his fingertips, he repeated the process.

  Instead, the name POLK surfaced across the page. He held the chalk loosely between his fingers and peeled back the left side of the paper to check the name on the tombstone again. The salutation chiseled across the sneaky ribbon located between her name and time line hadn’t shown up either.

  He removed the second piece of paper, placed it on top of the first and replaced it with a third. He shrugged, selected a piece of worn-down black chalk from the tray and repeated the process again. Once he was finished, he dropped the chalk back onto the tray and saw the name ROBERTS spread across the paper.

  He turned his head away from the tombstone in time to see a cream-colored Buick gliding past him toward the front gate, its hubcaps and grillwork glinting like mechanized teeth. He blinked, knowing it’d belonged to the three women who were standing at the white marble headstone and greeted them with a two-finger salute; the car gave a respectable honk and coasted out of sight.

  He sighed, forced a smile from the corner of his mouth and turned his attention back to Marilyn Graham’s headstone. He glanced down at the half-shaded grass weaving in the breeze in a failed attempt to grasp the concept of why the girl’s name hadn’t appeared on all of the pages. He braced his hips with both hands and tilted his head to one side when an idea struck him.

  He slid closer to the front of the headstone, slipped a fresh slip of paper out of the packet and held it up to the light. He shielded his eyes from the sun, peered down at the company name stamped across the lower left-hand corner, (KOONTZ PAPER CO., it said) set it down and placed on a fourth.

  After blowing off the excess dust again, the name TAYLOR bloomed across the page. He bowed his head, resting his chin on his chest and sighed. A bird cried out from somewhere inside of the trees as if it were laughing at him from afar, but he brushed it off and glanced back at the tombstone.

  He raised the chalk toward the paper when the cold sensation returned. His skin prickling, the hairs along the back of his neck grew stiff and his mouth shrank. The tree shadows grew thicker now, eclipsing the patch of sunlight bathing the tombstone.

  Tiny beads of sweat cascading down his face, he caught something in the corner of his left eye and glanced over to see what it was. A tall shadow of thick sloping shoulders and a heart-shaped head hovered behind him in a curious child-like manner. Thin strands of hair weaved around the back of her head, whipping at the air and clawing for the tops of her shoulders.

  He thought it might’ve been the caretaker, a gaunt thin-faced man with thinning brown hair named Saul, but even he knew Kevin had come by occasionally. He always came over to check on him but mainly it was to shoot the breeze while he collected all the dead flowers and picked up trash.

  “If you don’t cause any trouble,” Saul had said to him and Terri that day. “I don’t care how many of these things you do.”

  After Terri’s sudden departure, Saul had kept his promise.

  “Hey, Saul.” He smiled, lumbering to his feet. “Is Eileen giving you more—”

  He used the top of the tombstone to hoist himself up and pivoted around to greet Saul, his face creased by a wide friendly smile. No Saul; just the same tombstones he’d seen every Friday night for the past six years.

  If it wasn’t Saul, then who else could it be?

  A sense of uneasiness came flooding back at him, seeping into his bones and prickling his skin. As much as he didn’t want to admit it, Erica’s dinner invitation was starting to sound very enticing.

  He knelt down in front of the tombstone, rolled all four pages into a separate funnel, fitted each of them with a rubber band and set them inside the left compartment of his bag. He slid the tray along with the roll of tape and the half-open packet of paper back into the other compartment and zipped it shut. He rose to his feet and slung the strap of his bag up and over his head and across his chest.

  “Sorry, Mary.” He nodded to the headstone. “I’ll see you again later.”

  He walked back to his car, tossed the canvas bag onto the back seat and drove away. He was glad to have had the weekend off so he could clear his head and make room for tomorrow; there were plenty of things to be done around the house so maybe he wouldn’t gloat about it. Angel knew what it was like to lose a loved one, to have a piece of your life stripped away from you so unexpectedly.

  All he wanted to do was now was go home and put this crazy day as far behind him as humanly possible.

  He took a shortcut into town to avoid the jungle of Friday night traffic and stopped off to pick up his dinner at Dragon Express. On his way out, the two women sitting at a corner table beside the display window looked up from their plates and greeted him with a flirtatious smile and a real-time wave. He replied with a kindly smirk and a short nod that left them staring dumbly at
each other and went back to eating their food like nothing happened.

  With the smells of pork-fried rice and sweet-and-sour chicken wafting through the front seat, he drove three miles out of the city and turned left onto a cul-de-sac sitting on the crown of a tall grassy hill. The neighborhood was strangely quiet for it being a Friday night, but then he wasn’t the only one who was having an odd unpredictable day. He drove down to the end of the block and parked his car up on a slanted concrete drive beside of a brown-stucco bungalow, killed the engine and gathered his things.

  He unclipped his seat belt, climbed out, followed the cobblestone path running across his front lawn and clambered up the front porch steps. The sky had a watercolor haze. He glanced over the left side of the porch and gazed down the hill toward the city sprawled out below like a toy model and felt relieved that he and Terri had moved away from there years ago.

  There were a few windows lit up inside the houses strewn along the block. This neighborhood was mostly occupied by low-income families and golden-age retirees looking to hide from the humdrum of the city and—hopefully—live in peace before they’re slapped into a rest home or until their number was called. He had to admit, now that he’d moved out of the city, he was content with the isolation and silence that came with living here, although there were days where he wouldn’t mind some company.

  He unlocked the front door, stepped inside and flipped the switch on the wall, flooding his house with brass-colored light. He gave a relaxed sigh, hung his keys on the pegboard above the light switch and tapped the door shut with the side of his right foot. He set the bags on the couch, engaged the locks (although most of the crime occurred in the city, it still didn’t hurt to be safe) and kicked his shoes off and over beside of the couch.

  The light revealed a spacious blue-carpeted living room complete with elegant oak furniture and two beautiful touch-lamps with floral-print bowl shades sitting on sleek wooden coffee tables; framed photos dotted the living room’s bright beige walls. A small dining room sat on the far left under a brass three-headed chandelier; a small kitchen sat toward the end of the house with a white marble counter and a stainless-steel sink bathed in the alabaster glow of a lone fluorescent bulb. A small corridor stretched toward the three remaining rooms of the house, its walls also plastered with more gilded picture frames.

  He kicked off his shoes, set his dinner on the dining room table and sat down. He ate what he could—both egg-rolls, half of the rice and chicken—and then stuck the rest in the fridge. He took a shower, dried himself off and slipped into a pair of blue plaid pajama pants and a tight red tee-shirt.

  In the reflection in the bathroom mirror, he sighed at the net of worry lines bracketing the corners of his deep-set blue eyes and then raked a hand through the short mop of black hair above his tan oval face. He sauntered back into the living room, retrieved his canvas bag from the couch and carried it into the room between the master bedroom and bathroom.

  He’d go days without stepping into this room, but today’s little venture through Hamill Cemetery had been long overdue; there was something even more unique about this room than he could ever find in any other cemetery. He exhaled a plume of cold realization from his bones and padded across the room, his bare feet pressing into the plush blue carpet. The two windows on the far left and upper right-hand corner of the room were bathed in shafts of radiant twilight.

  A small worktable with two orange-cushioned stools sat on the far-left corner of the room stacked with wood and gold-plated picture frames of various sizes. The aforementioned picture frames speckled across the bright-peach walls displaying other headstone rubbings that spoke of an earlier time when his life had been much different and more enjoyable. Although it’d taken years to collect them, at least he could say that he hadn’t done it alone.

  The names that leaped out at him weren’t just reminders of the past, but pebbles tossed into the ponds of time that spread large ripples through the past and beyond. Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Paul Newman (whose death had torn him apart), Lena Horne, Frank Sinatra and other celebrities; there were also other names of other people would had made a profound impact in the lives of others such as a fry cook from Japan, a Scandinavian swimmer and a regular who’d been coming into Angel’s Pizza since the restaurant’s first conception. Somewhere amongst these frames, beyond these artistic smudges of chalk, were the names of an academic scholar, a painter, an athlete, a dancer or an aspiring film maker; another leaf on the branch on another family tree.

  He and Terri had traveled far and wide to obtain these names and the memories they shared in between would not be forgotten. He stared across the room and glanced at the frame sitting under the window on the upper right corner. In a ribbed golden frame, in a light charcoal dusting, the name inside said: TERRI L. PERKINS; her favorite color was gray.

  A GUIDING LIGHT AND A LOVING WOMAN had been chiseled across the front of the tombstone below Terri’s timeline (APRIL 9, 1982-MAY 12, 2019). She was more than to a lot of other people who’d been graced with her presence, but none of them held a candle to the love and light she’d given him over the past seven years.

  The light pouring through the window glinted off the far right corner of the frame, shrouding it in a mask of half-light and half-shadow. Although he’d known it word for word, he reread the passage etched across the front of the rubbing under her name because there were times where he’d gotten it wrong; it wasn’t easy picking the right words for your wife’s tombstone. He didn’t preserve her name to seek sympathy from others or for artistic reasons but only because his love for her was stronger than he could ever define.

  There was nothing he could do for her now, but he thought this was a good start. He would’ve given anything to trade places with her, but he knew she’d never want him to think like that no matter how sad or depressed he felt. He’d despised the loneliness that was derived from her death, but there was nothing he could do about it now; the tumblers were set in place and the chain wrapped around his heart was locked up good and tight.

  He unzipped the bag, set the four rolled-up posters onto the worktable and zipped the bag shut before placing it across the two stools. He would’ve gone to work on them any other time but with everything that happened he added it to the mental list of other chores that needed to be done. He killed the light on his way out, snatched a bottle of water from the crisper in the bottom of the fridge and strolled into the living room.

  He watched ten minutes of an Alfred Hitchcock movie on cable when a Kid Rock song blared from his cell phone. He kept his eyes on the television and tapped the green ACCEPT button on his cell phone without looking at it.

  “Hello.”

  Everyone at work referred to him as “the maestro of toppings” but Kevin knew him as Jacob Rogers. Mingled waves of loud conversation and rock music floated amongst the background, making it hard for them to hear each other.

  “What cha doing?”

  “I’m home watching television.”

  “I thought you’d want to come out tonight.” Jacob replied.

  “I would’ve.” He lied. “If I didn’t have a ton of stuff to do around the house tomorrow.”

  “I didn’t hear you. Hold on a sec.”

  He waited. The music in the background had died down to a low roar. He repeated his excuse and heard Jacob sigh on the other end of the phone.

  “I know.” Kevin nodded.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to come out? We can wait for you to get here.”

  “That’s okay.”

  “I can always get you later on.”

  “Sure, you will.” He said, then chuckled. “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah I’m sure.”

  “I’ll hold you to it.”

  “Take it easy, man.” He said, grinning. “If you need a ride later on tonight, let me know.”

  “Okay, man.”

  “Tell Ariel I said ‘hello’.”

  “I will.”

  Kevin killed the call, se
t his cell phone onto the coffee table and rolled his thumb and forefinger against the bottom of the third finger on his left hand. It hadn’t been the only time he’d done that when he knew better; he was glad that he hadn’t done it at work because then he’d have felt more foolish than he did now.

  He exhaled, glanced down at the thin white line hugging the third finger on his left hand and bit down on his bottom lip. It’d become a routine reflex for him to reach down and spin the phantom wedding band around his finger because it made perfect sense. Now it was just a reminder of the many things he’d lost along the way.

  He’d been making a lot of promises to his friends lately but he’d been taking a few of them back for personal reasons; broken promises were irreplaceable. He knew at some point he’d have to break off the chains of his self-inflicted isolation and take the time to smell the roses. He could do that whenever he wanted but not in the same way his friends had; he preferred pizza and a movie to ingesting large amounts of alcohol and grinding your pelvis against a complete stranger under the sounds of incoherent music (or at least that’s what they’re even calling music these days) spewing from a coin-operated jukebox. He’d chosen a sheltered life because without Terri didn’t think he had a life at all.

  He drained his water bottle and thought long and hard about the promises he made, he leaned back on the couch and watched television.

  3

  THE next morning, Kevin opened his eyes and glanced at the dust motes dancing amongst the shafts of sunlight pouring through his bedroom curtains. He rolled over, glanced at his alarm clock and felt neither surprised nor confused about having woke up at eight-fifteen. There was something, however, he wished he could have back even if it were for just one day.

  For the past seven years Terri had always greeted him by massaging his chest with her hand or by planting a soft kiss on his cheek, followed by her patent pearly-white smile. Mornings like that were just a thing of the past, tiny sleep-induced sensations that dissipated like soap bubbles seconds before he opened his eyes and long after the tears poured down his cheeks. As much as he expected to feel those same sensations, his internal alarm had kicked in minutes long before his bedside clock had.