A Most Spectacular Rift

Chapter 3

Huncho passed the restaurant, and he felt embarrassed, embarrassed that he had to find a job and there were people in that restaurant who were gorging with large maws pocketwise and mouthwise. So he walked quicker to escape the lights from the window and the lanterns that hung on the wall.

Shy as he was, Huncho mustered up the last vestiges of courage he wasn't disposed of from the heartbreaking knowledge that the people you've spent most of your life with couldn't spend more with you. He approached the cemetery from a distance, not many people here, but on the other side, the restaurant was temporarily closed which made this stretch of land feel cold and miserable.

The cobblestone ground underneath was interlocked with grass still that hadn't tasted water in parched months. It was bumpy and uneven, spliced together by large cracks that were still rifting apart by weather. The other side of the road looked better. It was not a shop, not anything, it was just empty, with its sidewalk and fence, the pickets glossy with a sinuous touch, arched woven design laced in between the fence rods, the posts furnished with a lion or a gargoyle, whichever it was.

The fence didn't have a latch, it was just a random blockade. In other parts, the cobblestone street would lead ashen to the next street, more thoroughfares for chariots, larger roundabouts (there was only one in Sunnets), and more shops, places to venture, to see, though Huncho really never liked to shop; he didn't think it was a waste of time completely, but he didn't get the point of it, and he also didn't have the money to spend on it.

Slowly, Huncho cuffed his hands into his pockets, and the large cemetery gate dawned closer. It was still midday, a bit more after noon, and since it was summer, dusk would only arrive much much later, but there was a chill in the wind as if it were carried like a leaf, and it rushed into Huncho's veins as his legs quivered. There was something scary about the cemetery, that would freeze the arteries that ramified to your heart. Something errant, odd, an ubiquitous offness, though it was not tangible, it was in the mind, configured by it, conjured by it.

His hopes abseiled. As his hands neared the gate that was open, for it was business time. Several graves lined the ground, which was fairly well cared for, the grass in neat tufts. The dearth of lanterns obfuscated the surrounding, as timorous Huncho walked slower than ever, his legs truly trembling. If not for the reason he held so dear to the penetralias of his heart, and now so pusillanimously to the recesses of his fears, he wouldn't have taken another step, then another and instead of faces and clothes and shops, it was graves and names and things hiding underneath him, buried, waiting to be dug up... maybe.

Callow with job seeking, Huncho felt a swirling, no, swashbuckling unease in his stomach like sinking through a mire.

He stared at the farraginous sorts of names and graves but all words under the same vernacular.

Some had dead joss sticks protruding from a bowl, porcelain or wooden (social classes), were deep in ash. Mortuary tablets were next to the graves, in rites Huncho couldn't comprehend.

There were also pots, which meant something, but Huncho didn't know this culture. Some of these bodies may have been cremated, others preserved in paper, maybe even silk. But they were all bodies and to remind someone that they could be dead, like this someday, was scary. That was the offness.

Huncho gulped. Any of these tombs would cost at least fifty day's worth of work, and the expensive ones, he couldn't even imagine. And that's why he needed to work here, because if he could, then the people he knew for a long time but with their lives abruptly terminated could be buried properly, a nice thing to do for a friend. Maybe their body after life could be preserved or something, however religion went these days.

But he was going to bury his friends, and properly.

The trees nearby were branchless, which made Hucnho feel clammy, as if his arms were skinless. He glanced around reservedly, until his eyes spotted the outhouse in the back where the undertaker would be most likely. Huncho picked up his speed, from a trudge to a quick prance, cold sweat dripping from his brows, the grass underneath giving way as he sundered his feet on top with a crunch, roiled mud on hot summer days... which did not add up. He avoided the graves, even with the dim light, because though the trees were leafless, their branches were thick as a battering ram, and would act as a poor man's miasma of light.

Huncho heard his breath pound his chest. In times of no speech, an utter silence, the only thing to be heard and to be focused, was the breath. You almost forgot about it, until there was nothing else to notice. So the breath whispered in your ears, played a hymn, played a paean, then played a lullaby, to wane you to calmness, stave off some of that weight amidst the shoulders. Perhaps.

Huncho reached the door, his eyes pointing at the brass handle, which was scored in light in one half, and on the other, was shrouded in black. Embossed with fine little lines, Huncho wrapped his fingers around it and knocked twice, thrice.

There was a man who opened the door a tap, then talked in a rackety, sallow voice that retreated as much as it attacked; his eyes seemed crossed when light glanced across it, two wolf brown ovals amidst a ravine of caliginous black.

Huncho stuttered, recollected his breath, and let his mouth sup words out in the most taciturn of peons. "Hello, I'm Huncho, and I'm looking for a - "

The door slammed close with a whamp, and Huncho jumped back, startled. His hands vibrated and his heart, oh it was bouncing all over his chest. The hissy voice replied again, now that the wooden door, striped in shadow, and hinged awkwardly, covered the man's face, he croaked. "Get out kid! I'm not accepting jobs!"

"But... Joel said -" (Huncho whispered so quietly that the winds buried it)

"Get out! Maybe you're at the wrong place! I don't even know a Joel! Leave an old man to a cabin downtown and he'll get thrice knocks an hour! There's another cemetery, you know ... Leave!"

Huncho had remembered Enzo telling him to go to Han's cemetery. He breathed so heavily.

"Are you ... not ... Han's cemetery?" He trembled. There was a silent breath on the other side, anything shorter, it'd be shallow rasps, and it came in tides, before it huffed.

"No, though I am a much better mortician." No voice returned after that, until it did. "Get away. Shoot." Deeply the sound retreated back to its owner, reverberating on the door. Huncho didn't wait for the rasp to revive and take his breath away.

He slowly crept back, the angular size of the outhouse distortedly smaller, for when he was under it, the roof looked like it was a mountain, looming above like the sky, corrugated ceramic tiled upon it like its own diagonal paddy field of light brown, instead abounding with dust and mold, the aftermath of undrained rain, save for a little spigot that loped on the left side of a sort of cantilever, with a gilded rooster on top.

Huncho straggled away, glancing at the house as if it were going to move any second. Shadow crept down once more filling a void of barrenness with utter black aqueductly.

The wind whistled in his ears and that voice, so cadaverous, and came from the gut rather than heart, it pounded stridently in his ears. The get out was still scary, and shaking Huncho's legs. It had rattled his skull when spoken that loud that any reply could not reciprocate emulatively.

They're still dead, you know.