OLWG# 425 prompt: A handful of dimes
Since she was a teenager ( she is now well into her 50′ s) Fanny Ingalls stops by the cemetery on her way home from the bus stop that is two blocks away from her family home.
When she was a kid she used to imagine what was going on in those coffins that dotted the hills and the terraces of Leaning Birches Cemetery. What she pictured were skeletons dressed in old fashioned clothes, they had hair and their bony hands, with patches of dry skin still clinging to their slightly arched fingers sat upon their empty rib cages like spiders resting in the center of their webs.
Fan isn’t sure where the thought first came from, but she also saw that the watches- the wrist watches, the pocket watches were still ticking away softly in the dark
click click click they whispered
click click click.
In her pocket, or if it was to warm to wear a jacket, she kept in her backpack in an old beaded coin purse that she bought on one of her family trips to Victoria, the beads were still bright red and most of the white beads that spelled out ” Canada ” were still there- in her souvenir purse Fan kept a handful of dimes.
On her way home from work she would stop at the Cemetery gates and look around on the ground. She ran her hands along the middle bar of the fence and sometimes- not all of the time I should say, she would find a dime.
Some of the dimes she found were very old and she supposed they might be collectible. Some of the dimes were brand new and others were just a few years old.
She would reach into her back pack ( or pocket ) and she would fish out her coin purse. Sometimes she would hold the dime up and look at it and other times she would just drop it into her purse.
Then she would push the gate open and she would start her walk on the way home.
Fan’s Grandpa once told her a story about the Ferryman ( who was a relative of theirs apparently ) and how the dead would pay him a gold coin to cross the River that divided the land of the living from the land of the dead.
Not everyone owned gold, she knew and that sounded like an awful lot of money. She always wondered what happened to those souls that couldn’t pay. Nothing good she guessed, and she also decided it was unfair.
That was why she only charged them a dime to bring them back.
Click Click Click.
