Seven Sundays

By Lucifer Stoke

"It got to be Sunday all the time. Seven Sundays in the week--to us, anyway." -- Mark Twain

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lucifer Stoke
• Release date: Jul 8, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005439156

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Seven Sundays

Lucifer Stoke

Copyright MMXXII Lucifer Stoke

I

Somewhere near the Tennessee-Virginia border I got lost in a depressing and foul-smelling industrial municipality, an ugly gray-and-brown blotch on an otherwise beautiful landscape. I don’t wish to disparage the town, so I won’t name it. I drove until there were no more buildings; I kept on driving until I passed the last street sign. The road went on, straight and unchanging, past an unvarying landscape of barren fields devoid of livestock; after a while even the white line ran out and it narrowed to one lane.

They’d been calling for rain, but it never fell. A thick, grayish fog hung heavy and hovered low to the ground, even though it was well past noon. I felt relieved when I saw the outskirts of a town up ahead through the haze, or maybe I should call the last outpost of civilization in the Southeast. It was little more than a huddle of crudely built, loosely scattered structures situated entirely on one side of the road — glorified mud-huts, but made of cinder blocks and corrugated tin. Only the flashy signage above a gas station/shitty fast-food restaurant indicated the decade.

But even this pitiful display of progress was enough to make the presence of Man, who leaves nothing untouched, seem conspicuously absent on the other side of the road. I slowed down, then stopped, right in the middle of the one-lane hillbilly highway, which had made a name for itself here as some shitty town’s Main Street. I rolled down the dirty window and peered into the fog. Only then did I see what must have been troubling me the whole time, the thing I believe I had intuitively perceived without seeing. Imagine those vaguely ominous shapes in my peripheral vision along the way, indistinct but unmistakably familiar, making morbid impressions on my psyche while I was focused on my driving: to this I attributed the unaccountable feeling of impending doom that I had felt all mourning.

It was a sprawling cemetery. (Only this, and nothing more.)   I was able to ignore it for so long because it lay hidden beneath the ground fog, and I had assumed it was more empty pasture. This was a cemetery like you’ve never seen. Not the sort of place that was planned, like Arlington, to be strikingly laid out in a manner that commands respect for the fallen, or impresses one with the tragic and often senseless loss of human life, or with religious feeling that mingles strangely with a grave sort of patriotism.

No, this was a chaotically disordered landfill of human remains; a backwoods necropolis; a slummy city that ever sleeps resting noiselessly on the countryside; a mortuary metropolis that absolutely dwarfed the town proper and extended as far as I could see in either direction, even dotting the not-too-distant hills with headstones and crosses, which I had noticed before, but I thought they were rocks. There were also a number of freestanding, suppository-shaped, whitish stones that emerged from the mist, which I could now see were large, badly-carved statues of the Apostles.

With an obscure awareness that I was being childish, I rolled up the window with undue haste to keep an invisible barrier between me and the dead; then I sped up and passed the gas station without stopping. I was going to ask where the hell I was; and, also, if I was in Hell. But now there was no need. I knew exactly where I was, and it was just as if I’d never left. I had suddenly remembered the only memorable thing about Shady Vale that I had deliberately forgotten, or buried, since I was a kid.

This place has more dead residents than living ones.

II

667 Morningstar Road was in fact a lone, dilapidated house at the end of a long, muddy driveway. I parked in an overgrown plot that, judging from the splintered trellises and the poison ivy arbor, used to be the vegetable garden. Davy and I used to live with Aunt Avarus from time to time, whenever mom went nuts and couldn’t handle us because dad left again. Mom and dad would come get us after they had worked it all out; then we’d play family for the next few weeks. Mom would be all cheery and dad would have renewed faith in Christ, which only seemed to make him more hateful and strict with me and Dave. Anyway, I remembered the garden, because that’s where Avarus made me dig up potatoes and bury her dead parrot.

Nothing had changed, unless decay is a change. I saw a sickly-looking chicken pecking around for bugs in the front yard; I guess it was new, unless chickens can live for thirty years. Just then I remembered the strange thing that Aunt Avarus had said when I buried that macabre bird of hers, an exotically beautiful parrot that was  rendered absurd if not disturbing by its shabby surroundings; the one she kept caged like a sweet-singing canary because it used to imitate the awful groans and cries of pain that her dead husband had made when he was still dying. I felt it all again, the way I felt back then; that Saturday morning in the garden, all muggy and gray. I thought of all the other kids at school who were still asleep, or watching cartoons, and here I was digging this little grave, sweating and itching and getting bitten by bugs I couldn’t even see, while Aunt Avarus stood close by, a widow in the weeds, stifling her sobs with a dust-rag as I struggled with the spade. Over the flying dirt I heard a small voice say, In Shady Vale the dead don’t never die. I looked up, though she had said it more to herself than to me. She observed my lack of sympathy, my sullen demeanor which teetered precariously on the edge of prepubescent truculence, and regarded me with that embittered, self-martyred, goddamn-you expression that only embittered, self-martyred, Christian women can make. Life is just gettin’ ready for death, she said, in a scolding, more authoritative tone, as if this were all for my instruction. The sooner you learn that, the better. Then she turned and went back into the house and let me get back to my digging. 

I stepped out of the car and looked around for other familiar landmarks that might make the flood of fond childhood memories come rushing back. A silence suggestive of late-winter pervaded the place, though