The cemetery caretaker had a phrase for the expression certain visitors acquired after standing too long over a grave. He called it the graveyard look and claimed he could recognize it from half a field away. Ordinary mourners shifted their weight, wiped their eyes, checked the time, eventually remembered the living world waiting beyond the gates. Someone with the graveyard look became perfectly still, the face emptied of everything except attention.
He taught me to spot it during my first week on the job. The dead, he said, grew accustomed to familiar company. Visit often enough and they learned your shape. Stand still long enough and they occasionally mistook you for something that belonged there permanently. His remedy was simple: approach noisily. Scuff gravel. Cough. Say something ordinary about rain or traffic. Give whoever was being watched a reason to remember they still occupied a body.
I treated this as workplace folklore until the widow in section nine froze beside her husband’s stone one October afternoon. She had visited every Sunday for three years, always leaving chrysanthemums and talking quietly for twenty minutes before going home. That day she remained motionless for nearly an hour.
Even from the maintenance shed, something about her posture felt wrong.
I crossed the path dragging my boots through the gravel and called out that frost was expected overnight. She jerked hard enough to drop her handbag and drew several sharp breaths, as though surfacing from deep water. When I asked whether she was all right, she said she had been listening to her husband explain how lonely the cemetery became after closing.
She stopped visiting regularly after that.
Since then I have noticed other things. People wearing the graveyard look sometimes face the wrong headstone. Fresh flowers appear beside markers belonging to families who moved away decades ago. More than once I have heard my own name spoken from behind me while working alone.
The caretaker retired last winter. On his final day he gave me his keys and advised me never to count how many people remained on the grounds after sunset. I understood the warning only recently.
Some mornings, before leaving for work, I catch the graveyard look on my own face in the hallway mirror. The stillness arrives before I realize I have stopped moving, and my eyes seem focused on something several feet behind my reflection. I scuff my boots against the floorboards until the feeling breaks. Lately, though, the sound has been answered by another scrape from somewhere inside the mirror, slightly delayed and growing more confident each time.
©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys
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