Title: Necropolis
Vignette
Rating: G
Notes: For the Reflections competition at school; the theme was 'My Favorite Place.' Kill me now.

This is the end of the world, here, or close enough to make no difference. The rain falls quietly, quiet as snow. Everything is quiet here, it seems. There are trees, there is stone, there are butterflies and hummingbirds flitting near the dead flowers, but it's all soft, it's all muted, it's all quiet.

It's quiet, here, as quiet as the grave -- or should that be graves? They dot the mossy grass, stretching out in a tapestry a mile or so long. It feels more like forever.

This place is old, very old, two hundred or three hundred or maybe more years old. They've long stopped planting bodies like bulbs here, the newest marker mossy and cracked.

Maybe it's because of the new land, the neat and sterile cemetary that the city made. But I like to think that the graveyard is like a garden after years and years of overplanting, except instead of dying, it lives, it thrives, and the life is too much for cold, dead things.

This is my place, my place. Outside on blacktops and sidewalks I am short, anxious, a rainbow of insecurities, but I know where I stand, here. I stand on the bones of people long-dead, long-gone, their voices echoing in a forest of gravestones, little stone trees with no branches but roots that reach the sky. I stand on the past, the future, and I listen to the rain fall quietly.