5 Minute Fiction: Empty Graves
If you look at the ground in the desert long enough, you’ll find a body. Whether it’ll belong to the kind of animal with hands or the kind with paws is anybody’s guess.
This 5-minute short story is based on an empty grave I found in the Mohave Desert years ago.
It wasn’t just a cross: there are loads of those, and most of them are memorials instead of graves. This one was a cross with a mound of dirt just the right size to cover a person, laid carefully with stones to keep animals from digging it up.
It was in a remote area where five women had disappeared, and were rumored to have joined a cult whose deserted buildings were also located nearby. Their bodies were never found, and they were never heard from again. For that reason, the other biologists and I called the grave in to the sheriff, instead of walking on by, as we have for so many other odd and morbid discoveries that we’ve made while doing desert wildlife surveys.
The police came out and exhumed the grave. Dug it all the way down to bedrock and found nothing inside. This story is what came to me when I started to wonder why a person wouldn’t just put up a memorial cross, but fake an entire grave.
Trigger warning for violence.
Picture courtesy of Pixabay, dat 7
Empty Graves
When he got back from five days of swinging a pick in the mines, she told him their teenage daughter was dead.
Fever. Took her the day the weekly train left town headed east. No chance to send for medication.
The grave was already half-filled when he got home, and she didn’t come inside. Didn’t fix his dinner. Just kept shoveling until the dirt was mounded on top like a swollen belly. Even then, she kept working as the twilight stole all the sun’s heat from the ground. She went back and forth, carrying jagged stones in the hem of her apron. Stacking them on top of the grave until her hands bled. But no animal would be able to dig through them to harm her daughter. Not anymore.
By the time she was done, her feet were gray with cold and scraped raw, because she didn’t dare disrespect the only pair of shoes her husband had bought her by scuffing them.
He beat her, after. For not keeping the house clean of germs, for not saving their daughter, for burying her before he even got home. For failing, again. She let that blood mix with the red running from her palms and her feet, and she did not weep.
She knew she’d buried the past to set the future free. She knew the sound of the train whistle, fading into the distance.
She knew, even if he didn’t, that she had not failed.
