Putting My Feet In the Dirt #3 Prompt Crispy and Crunchy

Florrie Herold dressed in her finest mourning dress strolls through the botanical gardens miles away from where she actually lives.

She enjoys her journey to the gardens, she never waves at the people she knows but she does bow her head a bit and  gently smiles the way all well mannered ladies do.

When she arrives at the gardens she always stops at the gate and with her eyes closed she takes a deep breath. She slowly opens her eyes and with her heart hammering in her chest and her cheeks flushed with just a trace of pink she steps through the gates and heads for her favorite part of the Garden.

Florrie tries to not rush to the Garden where the flowers- the delicate flowers- are grown and cared for by gardeners with rough and calloused hands. She tries to not smile to broadly, she hopes that her eyes are not shining  because when they shine Florrie’s eyes start to burn and when they do there is nothing lady like about them at all.

At last she arrives to where the flowers live and  when she does she hardly knows which way to turn first. But she finally does- after savoring seconds of delicious expectation and passion and she makes her way from one plant to the next.

She stops here and there and sometimes she reaches out and almost touches the blooms but at the last second she draws her hand away, she steps back and then like a cloud floating across the face of the Sun she reaches out and snaps a petal, sometimes a leaf from her carefully selected victim.

She holds the petal, sometimes the leaf up to her slightly disfigured victim and when she is sure she has it’s undivided attention, her lip curls, she opens her mouth and she puts the blossom into her mouth and chews it so very slowly.

Sometimes she spits it out and sometimes she swallows it but she never fails to draw her finger along the the flower’s stems and she she says, ” I’ll be back later. I promise. ”

Sometimes though, Florrie Herold, ever the lady dressed in her best Mourning dress simply rips the petals from the flowers and drops them carelessly, even thoughtlessly to the ground.

Putting My Feet in the Dirt: Exits and Endings

 

When

I was a teenager

I had a summer job at a Funeral Home.

I spent the summer cleaning out the old care taker’s cottage

with Aldo and Hartley, the Home’s Grave Diggers/ Groundskeepers.

 

The Cottage, which hadn’t been used for over twenty years was going

to become a storage space for things like display coffins and tombstones

that had been broken by vandals or the weather and time and they needed somewhere

to go when their replacements showed up. Putting them in the trash was not an option.

 

My job was to clean and dust a the smaller of the cottage’s, two bedrooms and after I

had  dusted and swept it,  I was supposed to wrap

what  Aldo and Hartley left in the hallway with plastic and stack it neat rows with room

between the stacks to walk.

 

The first thing I saw when I walked into the cottage  was a little white child’s coffin

sitting lengthwise on two sawhorses, it had  delicate silver handles and the casket

smelled like  vanilla.

 

Just as I was about to pick it up, Aldo called from the living room to put it nearest the

door on a table, so that that it would be easy to get too.

The baby coffins, he said weren’t kept in the display room in ‘ The Big House ‘.

 

So I brought the baby coffin in and when I went back out into the hallway

I saw the lectern leaning against the far wall with a hymn book open top of it.

 

 

The wooden lectern and the gray book were both  covered with dust and mold.

 

I got a rag and started to wipe  the lectern down to get it ready to store and then I got

curious and opened the book up. The pages were stuck together and crumbling. Some

of the pages had dead bugs pressed near the binding.

 

I took the book to the window-  which was opened because the glass was going to be

taken out and the empty frame walled up.

 

I reached out the window  and shook the book

and freed the corpses of the insects and dead mold spores and when I was done I

opened it back up and tried read the lyrics, but most of the words were gone.

Instead I hummed the notes and as I worked my way through one of the songs

 

Hartley stopped in the doorway and said, ” do I know that song? ”

 

” I don’t know, do you? ”

 

“Here let me see that.”

 

I handed him the hymnal and he shook his head. He riffed through the pages” Huh. All

the  words are gone. I found it and the lectern in the living room, maybe it belonged to

the caretaker.”  Hartley said.

Then Hartley asked me ” Hey. Do you like scary stories? ”

 

” Who doesn’t? ” I mean. What a question to ask a kid who took a job in cemetery when

all of her friends got jobs in shopping malls.

 

” Well. Bastian Carter was the Caretaker – this was his place before the Home got

gobbled up by the company that owns it now- and they were a modern outfit with

security teams and the like. Needless to say, Bastian was out of a job, but before they

could let him go, he disappeared and he stayed disappeared until the Godfrey Family

tomb on Sunset Rise got broken into and  when we went in to check the damage we

found him in one of the empty wall crypts.

 

He had crawled into one of the spaces for the coffins and offed himself. ”

 

” The hell you say. ”

 

” It’s a fact. He slashed his wrists.”

 

I said that was a sad way to go.

 

” Well. You know. Some people think Bastian didn’t go anywhere. Some of the Staff

think he’s still around and let me tell you. Funeral staff are a jaded lot. They don’t scare

easy.”

 

Aldo called for Hartley and after he left me in the little room I opened the book back up

and written across one of the pages was, ” You have a very pretty voice. ”

 

I closed the book, wiped it down and wrapped it in plastic and set it back on top of the

lectern.

I told myself that note could have been written years ago, it was a weird coincidence

that’s all.

 

On the other hand, I haven’t sang a note since that day  because I just don’t know who

might be listening.