Apart in the Dark: Novellas by Ania Ahlborn

Author:Ania Ahlborn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gallery Books
Published: 2023-06-27T00:00:00+00:00

FOUR

THE FIRST TIME Brynn had ushered Maggie to the neighborhood cemetery, Maggie had been nine years old. She had pedaled ferociously behind her older sister in hopes of keeping up. When they arrived at the gates, Maggie only blinked at the massive wrought ironwork before riding through its wide-open leaves. The overhead arc was adorned with the name of the graveyard in coiling, intricate script: FRIENDSHIP PARK.

“Do you know why they call this place Friendship Park?” Brynn asked after they snaked along the gravel paths, eventually reaching a particularly shady corner of the lot. When Maggie didn’t respond, Brynn jumped off her bike and let it fall on its side with a crash. “Because all of these ghosts wanna be your friend. It’s lonely as heck being dead.”

It was warm in the sunshine, but Maggie’s bare arms sprouted goose bumps under the branches of a grouping of oaks. Brynn motioned for Maggie to follow, and Maggie did—leaving her bike next to her big sister’s, though she propped hers against a tree. Maggie liked her bike too much to let it lie on the ground like that.

Brynn’s steps came to a stop when she reached a peculiar set of plots. Her knee-high purple-and-black-striped socks and new boots—a pair of Dr. Martens she’d been pining over for months, finally purchased by their father as an early birthday gift—looked spooky next to the headstones. Each marker had a little fence around it, not more than a foot or two high. Some were made of wood: tiny picket fences for fairy gardens made up of plastic flowers and occasional sun-bleached toys. Most, however, were made of wrought iron like the main gate the girls had passed through only minutes before.

But there was one grave site that was different from the rest—not a headstone, but a tomb with the name and date worn away, the epitaph nothing more than a faint impression of what it had once been. The top was cracked and slightly caving in, seemingly as ancient as the trees that surrounded it. And there, atop the waist-height stone box that held death inside, was a doll. It didn’t look particularly antiquated; the doll’s frilly white dress and matching bonnet looked clean, in perfect shape. But that didn’t make the doll’s pallid and expressionless face any less creepy. Its eyes were wide-open, staring out at anyone who dared to meet its gaze.

“You know who’s the loneliest after they die?” Brynn asked, not swayed by her younger sister’s backward shimmy away from the vault before her. “Kids. Because most people who die are old and boring. Really old, like that cranky guy down the street who gives us dirty looks when we ride by his house.” The neighbor in question always seemed to be watering his lawn, bent over at a painful angle, one hand clamped down on the trigger of the hose nozzle, the other at the small of his back. And his looks were dirty. Glares, really. Anytime Maggie and Brynn rode by his place—which they did often—Maggie pedaled as hard as she could.

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