There has never been a time that I went to the graveyard not seeing her. That young girl that always roamed around with a smile plastered onto her face. Whenever I go, I always try to talk to her to ask her name or how old she is, but when I do she glares at me as if I’ve disrupted her doing something important! Day and night she inspects the graves for something; what she inspects them for I do not know. I know because I’ve seen her in the night creeping around the graves under the moonlight with a lighted stick inspecting every one of them nonstop as if one of them were suddenly going to change.
On very rare occasions do I see other people in that graveyard and when I do, I make sure to ask them about the girl. They all claim to not have seen her! Are they blind? How can they not see her? My brain gets frazzled just thinking about it. I think about this strange occurrence every day; it consumes all other thoughts. These thoughts haunt me in my dreams so much that some nights I cannot sleep and have to check if she is still there. This has gone on for a year now and I do the same routine every day: wake up, go to my field and tend to my crops, sell the ready crops; go watch the girl (I gave up speaking to her) for approximately four hours, then go back to my house and sleep. Honestly, I am so tired of doing this routine when nothing changes but I can’t help it! I wish something more exciting could happen.
A couple of days ago something bizarre happened. It was night; there was a blood-red moon shining high in the sky right above the yard and it illuminated the graves with a red tint. As I watched the girl, she stopped what she was doing and looked up at the sky for the first time in what seemed an eternity. Then, she fell on her back onto the soil, still staring at the moon. That’s when the strangest thing happened: the names on the grave lit up and I could swear the ground became like quicksand because she started getting sucked into it! I of course stood there outside the gravesite, too scared to even step foot into the area, overwhelmed by fear that I might start sinking into it as well. One by one I saw the graves slowly sink into the soil, reappearing around two hours later. Only when they came back up, they looked hundreds of years old: they had thick layers of moss on them with broken pieces of stone on the floor. And the girl? Well she never reappeared.
From then on, I checked the graveyards every week to see if anything had happened to them. I did notice something after a month of checking: each week a very small bit of moss fell off the graves and revealed clean stone. I found this very intriguing so I decided to visit it more: I started with a few times a week, which quickly turned into a few hours every day; soon, I was checking so often that I often missed lots of sleep and my farming business began to die. But I was far too engrossed in this that I didn’t care about anything else but looking at the graves. When people passed by, I couldn’t even look up from the graves, dreading that I might miss something important. I must have had lots of adrenaline because I went for days without food and just kept walking up and down: I only ate when people walked up to me to give me food because they saw how skinny I was; even then I didn’t dare look up from the ground.
This was my new life, my new found aspiration: to wait until the moon shone with such brilliance again; to wait until I found the answer to the mystery of the graves.
Dec 2022, Year 9