#12 Steven Butler – Mourner

The sun shouldn’t shine on the first of the month. It just isn’t right that the day is bright and warm when I visit Patricia. The sky should be cold and gray with a hard heavy rain.

Sometimes when the weather is just too nice, I think about skipping that day, telling myself that I’d make it up tomorrow. But I can’t do that, because tomorrow would become next week, and next week would become next month, until it becomes a perennial sometime soon. So no matter how beautiful it is, I go to the cemetery and walk down the rows of markers until I find hers.

I leave my flowers on the marker, maybe brush away a few dead leaves and then I go. I don’t say anything because she’s not there. Not in any sense. This is just a piece of stone over a plot of empty ground. Pat’s body was left on a field half a world away, no chance of recovery. I got a folded flag and an empty casket to stand in for her.

When I leave the grounds, that’s the moment I really dread. Right across from the cemetery entrance, there’s a nice little park. What stupid idiot thought that was a good idea? Because on those sunny days, I drive out onto the street and see the children playing on swings and screwing around on the slides. And I just sit there waiting to drive, cursing the stupid shit that I used to be for ever thinking “There’d be time.”

Category: 2011, Drama