literature

A Grave Digger's Kisses

Deviation Actions

Published: Jul 23, 2014

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Literature Text

I fell in love with a gravedigger. His hands were rough and calloused; no matter how many times he cleaned them, grains of soil remained rattling in his palm. It should have been a warning – dirt nestled in his love-line, but something about the way he held me, how he always seemed surprised that I was warm, that I was alive, was endearing. He once said that in winter, when his fingers were like ice, he couldn’t feel the difference between the coffin and the bed. But he refused gloves, scoffed at them; said feeling the earth part under his feet was the only way he knew up from down.

And his eyes were like shovels, constantly burrowing through me, dragging up fossils, the skeletons dancing in my closet. He lived with the dead, only understood the chattering of skulls, would unearth forgotten secrets, examine them as if he were a mortician, a pathologist. Then those eyes would silently begin again, reburying them in perfectly square holes, in perfectly straight lines. He built a cemetery out of my faults, whistling through the rows of headstones, eyes always six feet underground as if visiting old friends.

It was always awkward when family asked what he did. He was a gravedigger I said, while he picked at the dirt under his fingernails, perplexed at the irony of dealing with the dead for a living. While blood roared and howled through him, heart very much alive, it was hard to know when he stopped being the last post on the road out of life, the last contact with the dead, and when he reverted back to being just another man loving just another woman. Sometimes, his job haunted him, the ghosts of strangers lurking over his shoulder, hidden in his shadow. He saw too much of the end to remember to enjoy the journey, had read the last page first. He once asked me whether he would have to dig his own grave before he died or if he already was, if he had already hammered every nail into his own coffin. There were nights when the crows called, when he would stare blankly at the ceiling, I wondered whether he thought it was the lid, or the earth being piled on top. I wondered whether I was the final nail as my hand grasped his, shovel eyes burying into my perfectly square teeth in their perfectly straight lines. And it would be so cold that neither of us could tell if we were up or down, above or below the horizon, the eternal divide between the living and the dead.

When the bed became a coffin, when the earth parted on all sides, the skeletons would rise from their graves, secrets and flaws dancing above us, we would say things that would make us turn, and he would dig himself to China with his bare hands. But he knew how life ended, was the last sentinel, couldn’t escape those cemeteries and the perfectly straight rows of headstones. And he knew I could leave, it was in his love-line. Surfacing from six feet under, a dead ringer, I vaguely wondered if I would become another corpse in the cupboard, another nail in the coffin, another headstone in a long list of failures. But I wanted a man who had watering can eyes, gardener’s hands, who dealt with the living and understood the soul.

14/7/14 Are dead like his dreams.

This is a redo of a very old and unrelated piece that had the same title - which got me thinking. I tried to allude to various turns of phrase, mainly to do with death. I hope you can spot them!
(kiss of death, skeletons in the closet, do a job for a living, digging your own grave, the last nail in the coffin, turn in your grave, six feet under, dead ringer)
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