TAKING CARE OF THE FLOWERS ( A Ghost Story)

        

       They were at the cemetery to tend and visit their departed beloveds’ graves. All Saints’ Day was still three days away, so the cemetery still wasn’t crowded. While at the graves, they were sort of waiting for someone to approach them—but he was nowhere to be seen.

       Flashback to four years ago,  2011, while they were in the same graves, around eight in the morning, a day before Halloween, and two days before Undas, a shabby boy of around 11 years old, approached them and made small talk with them. He said he lived inside the cemetery, pointing to a nearby shoddy shanty which was built around an abandoned tomb.

       They gave him what they were eating and he stayed and chatted with them. He told them he was happy they  were nice to him. They gave him some money—he wasn’t asking for any—before they left and he promised to take care of the flowers  they left atop the graves and not let some scoundrels steal it.

       When they came back the next year, he approached them again and regaled them with his horrifyingly depressing stories—a distressed neighbor hanging himself from a tree in front of their young acquaintance’s home (it was a strange tree, with probably the biggest branch cleared of leaves, protruding like a middle finger from a giant green monster signalling lonely people to come over, “Come here, hang your self here and rest.”); his father beating him, his always drug-addled relatives and his dream of going to school again.

       “Do you believe in ghosts?” they asked him.

       “No,” he answered. “If ghosts were real, we’d be the first to see them. We are surrounded by the dead.”

       The next year,  they weren’t able to visit the cemetery but they were there after another year and their young  acquaintance approached them again. He looked very happy to see them and for the first time, he looked neat and peaceful, he had a shirt on that was so white it almost shimmered. “You weren’t here last year,” he told them, sounding like he missed them.

       “Are you back at school?” they asked, thinking that the white shirt was a school uniform.

       “Not yet,” he said, beaming. “But I will be on a journey two days after Halloween."

       “Where are you going?” they asked.

       “I really don’t know,” he said, still smiling. “But they say it’s a lovely place.”

       When they left, their young acquaintance said, “I’ll take care of your flowers. Please come back next year.”

       And they did come back, but they failed to see their young acquaintance.

       The shanty was still there, and there was some people inside. And the tree? It was still there, the biggest branch still protruding like a giant middle finger, daring the depressed to give up and cross to the otherworld.

       But they hope that their young acquaintance was safe and in a better place, not in a metaphorical or allegorical better place, which a lot people said was where the dead go, but in real better place, where he’s studying and wearing nice, neat clothes and where the fathers didn’t beat children.

       Death was never a better place.

       Maybe there oughta be a law that castrates men who think of sending children into this world when they don’t have means of giving them a decent life, one of them thought.

       They walked near the shanty on their way out of the cemetery, and they peeked inside. They saw that the tomb inside wasn’t really abandoned as there was a picture on top of it and a lighted candle beside it.

       They stared at the picture and saw a familiar face—their young acquaintance.

      “When did he die?” they asked, with their heads about to swim, the elderly woman inside the shanty.

       “Ten yeas ago,” she answered, matter-of-factly. “He was chasing some kids who were stealing flowers from a grave when he fell from a tomb and hit his head.”