So now I am moving among these monuments, trembling phosphorescence in the pale stones beneath lost grey sky. The path descends across the cemetery, and now the few distant visitors and groundskeepers drop out of sight. The path cuts into the ground, and becomes something like a stone-lined trench as I follow it around the base of a low hill. I am thinking of dead men, and the stories that they leave behind for us to repeat. It was to this task that I had proposed to dedicate my life, and now the fiat of someone I’ll never know or see has quashed that purpose.

I catch sight of a woman laying flowers on a grave. The lane I walk is baffled by a stone retaining wall on my right, and as I pass I keep gazing at this woman. The grave is marked with an upright stone, and she, the stone, and the colossal beech that overhangs it, are stark against a cream sky. No I didn’t actually see any flowers; she had been bent over the grave and straightened her back gracefully as I came. Only now does she notice me, turns her entire body toward me. An impenetrable veil is draped across her hat’s extremely wide brim, and gathers into the grey lace of her chin-high collar, and hat and veil together look like two saucers stacked mouth to mouth. A voluminous sooty cone from the waist down, her dress is cinched tight around her, blooming out from waist to taper back into her long neck, a grey fabric with a darker shell of transparent gauze web, dotted with tiny black flowers like evenly-spaced flies. She stands with her arms at her sides, staring at me with her invisible face. I think of charred wood burning black in the grate, creaking and whispering with cryptic fire deep beneath the scorch, when I look at her black and grey shape against the lividity overhead. I must be at or below the level of the occupant of that grave.

As though a string tugged it, my head keeps swivelling back to the woman, who seems to turn in place to follow me with a gaze emanating from the entire front of her body. Further on down the lane as I look back a little light shines across the veil and I glimpse the contour of a tapering face—there it is the green flash I’ve heard about that happens just at sunset in this part of the world, trickling around this tapering face through the veil. I seem to see or imagine two intense round grave stares like a pair of black pits or pools fixed and sucking at my image greedy as quicksand. I hurry to get out of her sight—I don’t enjoy this feeling, being watched, and this looking and hurrying, all too affected by someone else, and here I am mangy with poverty uncertainty and lostness.