Yellow with A Hint of Stone

A Story by Ramona Davis

It was a cold but sunny winter morning when two young people entered the gate and walked into the Nassau cemetery. They walked slowly, the reason being either the snow which was making the scene look like a dream, or the tempo of their own choosing. Whatever it might’ve been, they looked quite graceful, almost as if the snow was the canvas, and they were the wonderous motive. They were the only people at the cemetery, which was understandable, given the fact that it was still quite early. Their faces however, revealed no sign of weariness. In fact, it seemed as if for them, this was the only right time to visit a place like this. The girl sometimes smiled as they passed the graves of strangers, sometimes looked in awe at the inscriptions. The boy however, looked straight ahead with an occasional glance at the sky. The underground business didn’t seem to interest him. Those glances however, that he shot up high in the sky, were full of longing and gloom. Sometimes the girl noticed this and looked up herself, almost automatically, even with a small hope. Then they both looked down, looked at each other and smiled at their own silliness. They made a few steps, passed a few more names, and finally stopped at the bottom of the grave with a glorious yellow tombstone. The color of it, for numerous times, made even the strangers stop and read the name on it. They all wanted to meet the person who chose yellow to be her face after she couldn’t show her real one anymore. And so, the boy and girl stood there, not exchanging neither glances nor smiles anymore. The girl put the flowers down on the grave and started to arrange them for the longest time. She put the last white rose where she thought it should go and went to sit next to her brother. There, on a little wall in front of the grave, they both took out their packs of cigarettes and each their own pack of matches. The smoke was almost solid in the below zero January morning. The boy decided it was time to share some words.
“You know I never liked what Father put on there. Mother would absolutely hate it, don’t you think? To live is to live nobly. I swear, I don’t know where he got it from. I can’t name a single thing that was noble about her, yet she lived, Jane, she really did. She was the greatest person for just living. I tell you, I don’t know what was in his mind to put that or her damn tombstone.”
“Oh, honestly Tom, do you have to swear here, too. You know she never really liked when you did anyway. Besides, you talk to her like I didn’t even know her, all this explaining about how she lived. I mean, I knew her very well, just like you, you know.” “Oh come on, Janey, don’t get all upset now. I just said that people deserve some righteous words about them after they die. I mean, some words that are actually truthful to who they were.”
“I don’t think people deserve a single thing after they die. I mean, they’re dead is all I’m trying to say. They finally don’t have to give a damn about who thinks what of them, or who loves them and who doesn’t. Although people naturally say only good things once
somebody dies. It doesn’t last long though. It’s like there’s a rule that you mustn’t say anything even remotely bad about a certain someone that passed for a minimum of four weeks. After that time passes, you can say whatever the hell you want, the God isn’t listening anymore. I mean, don’t you see how stupid that is? And I hope you don’t think I brought these flowers for her. I brought them because they look nice, and not because I’m going to feel good somewhere deep down if my mother’s grave looks nice or something. I just liked holding flowers and now I like looking at them. Maybe I’ll even bring them home with me. Yes, I think I will.”
After she finished, she frowned for the longest time. Her cigarette was long out, and the grip of her two fingers started to loosen. Tom, however, lit another cigarette, and now with worry observed his sister’s troubled face. He waited for her to start yet another astringent speech, but she didn’t. He opened his mouth to say something but then quickly closed them. He chose to go down a different path.
“Hey, remember how after she died, you ate pickles for a month. You said you were on a straight pickle diet and cursed everyone who tried to give you something else to eat. Every day before an exclusive only-pickle meal you repeated the words “The green is good for me, it doesn’t have any yellow.” Do you remember that?”
“Of course I remember, Tom. Even though it was almost 20 years ago, I remember. How Daddy came home with ten jars of pickles every day. And they were the good kind, the ones he bought. A man knew his pickles.” She gave the ground a little smile and threw her dead cigarette. She took out another one and lit it. Blew the smoke fast, occupied with reflecting. Tom started to hum a melody, awfully resembling the It never entered my mind tune. At the sound of it, Jane suddenly looked at him. “I love that song. Makes me forget about pickles.”
The sun was starting to move closer to the center of the sky when Jane’s and Tom’s eyes started to get weary from their mother’s yellow stone. Their cigarette packs were almost empty along with their minds, weakly swirling around memory lane. The scenery started to change too, with people coming and going, remembering and bringing it all back home with them. The flowers were the only thing they could leave behind.
Jane watched it all slowly repeat, pair after pair of eyes arriving dry and going away teary.
“Do you ever wonder why?” Jane asked.
“I thought Father taught us a long time ago not to wonder why about anything.”
“Well, I never could do that, and I never could listen to what Daddy says anyway.”
“I know, even after all those pickles he brought you. The man was a fright, dead worried about you his whole life and you never did listen.”
“Spare me the truth, Tom, please. This isn’t the place or time.”
“Why do you ask anyway?”
“Well, I know I can’t possibly know why, and I wasn’t even asking for an explanation, not for the past eight years anyway. The thing is I can’t stop thinking about her recently. She even comes in my dreams and she’s always just staring at me. Except, when I look at myself in the mirror, it’s her I see instead of me. I mean, she, that is me, just stands there, in front of the mirror, for hours it feels like. And then when I wake up I have these thoughts that don’t sound like my own see, if we presume that a person knows itself to some degree. At first, I didn’t know whose thoughts they possibly might be but then I remembered her again. And I never felt so scared of remembering her in my life.” The sound of his sister’s voice breaking made Tom flinch, but he couldn’t bare to look at her. Instead, he returned to his old looking-ahead-or-up cemetery habit. Jane paused for a second, then started again, her face expressionless, with not a thing moving except for her lips:
“I get this feeling that covers me whole and captivates my heart. It’s this horrible blend of success or failure or whatever your life is at the moment, and it screams that the things you were doing, that they’re all going to be sealed you know, like those packages sent overseas. Only, unlike the packages, once your plans and ideals become sealed, there isn’t a thing in the world that could open them up. They become irretrievable, unchangeable. And then with time, your skin starts to turn to paper, your mouth gets forever closed, your eyelashes stick together. The ears hear words still, but those words are as empty as the one’s of a liar. No, they’re emptier than that. They’re the ones you hear in interviews when people try to explain themselves in front of the camera. They mean nothing. And you try to get out of this constant turning and tossing around because it tricks you to believing it’s change, when actually you’re just inverting everything you already know. It’s just so horrible it makes me sick. I swear there’s nothing worse than to feel a thing like that. It makes me want to be empty or to not be at all, just so I don’t have to lose anything that way. I mean, to lose means to stop, you know? When in front of you lies every possible and impossible direction, and you just can’t find your legs to start. That’s what it really means to lose, Tom. And to lose in that manner just makes me want to rip my heart out of my chest and pin it to a wall, so it’s always there, you know? Right where you left it. You can change walls if you want, but at the end of the day you know that you’re going to find it, and it’s going to be in the right place. You see, under that mush this all feels horribly unimportant. It’s like a little world, a sick reality where nothing has any value. Of all things that people gather and put some phony value in, it’s those that are most natural, most obviously and remarkably theirs that they forget about. And then I think what if she just got trapped in that world, you know? I don’t like thinking about it, Tom. I hate this feeling and I hate the fact that I feel closer to it every time it pours over me. It scares me so much I just might die.”
All this time, Tom’s gaze remained unfocused, yet it seemed devoted to something distant. His palms were sweaty and his whole body was shaking. The sun, now in the center of the sky, was beating both his and her eyes, but still not as strong as the yellow in front of them. Jane sat completely still, her eyes wide with terror from describing her biggest, yet still new fear for the first time. Barely capable of keeping his voice from trembling, Tom
said: “Let’s go home, please. This yellow’s driving me nuts. Jane, come on.”
Jane slowly stood up and took her brother’s hand. Tears started to fill her eyes, and she whispered: “I wasn’t ever going to take the flowers with me, you know.”