Red Snow by Will Dean

Author:Will Dean [Dean, Will]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781786074805
Publisher: Oneworld Publications

27

I have an ache to visit Mum and Dad so I head to the cemetery, the small one near the out-of-town DIY stores.

There are no other cars at the graveyard. The ground snow has thawed because it’s a good five degrees warmer here than it is in Gavrik. The Karlstad daffodils burst up a fortnight before ours do. Plastic watering cans hang from hooks and a brown compost bin sits with its lid open like some stout lonely creature waiting for its snack.

The plots are well-tended but it’s February so nothing looks good. I pass old graves, overgrown with weeds and long grass, and newer graves, all black sparkly marble and gold script. I skirt around the newest graves, the ones with gravel mounds still waiting to settle. I can’t look at them straight on. It’s too much. I can walk over ancient graves and old graves but it’s not right to step on a fresh mound, it’s just not.

Mum and Dad up ahead, side-by-side. A space next to Dad for yours truly. That’ll be it, the end of the line, the original trio. Mum’s relatives are buried someplace up north near Umea and Dad’s parents are in Stockholm.

I approach them.

Dad’s side is clear and level: dead yellow grass and a candleholder standing empty at an angle. June 25th, that awful day, the worst day of my entire life, is carved into granite forever. Mum’s side is a mound. One of the freshest here. The awful swollen shape of it. A hill of pink-grey gravel, coffin-shaped, obviously. It’s two metres long and eighty centimetres wide and it’s almost as if she’s pushing up from below.

It’s warm down there. I researched it. When I saw that weird propane-heater tank sitting on Gustav Grimberg’s plot I went back and looked it up. The top thirty centimetres or so freezes solid in winter, but underneath that things are always warm.

Dad’s stone looks almost new and Mum’s is gleaming. Hers has an inscription on it, a few words she gave to her lawyer years ago, the same words I spoke out loud at the funeral and that I will not read again now I’m facing them on her headstone. I can’t. I focus on Dad instead. I consider taking a flickering candle from some ancient nearby grave, some person who died in the fifties maybe, someone who won’t really miss it now, who’s settled right in, right down, a level grave.

This family, this oh-so-small nuclear family, one member still breathing, is a stark contrast to the Grimbergs. Although I suppose they’re only three now. But they’re not. Because they’re the whole town, an entire workforce, a deep lineage of industrial nobility. And we’re just three: Mum and Dad down there, and me up here.

There are flowers on the next grave: a pack of Q8 carnations still in their cellophane, wilted from the bitter cold, frost glazing their petals like crystallised sugar. I apologise to Mum and Dad in my head for not bringing them anything, but then I almost laugh because they wouldn’t care, they don’t care.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.