Pitiless

3. Black at the Graveyard

3. Black at the Graveyard

Black was quiet as he drove the car to the cemetery where his wife’s gravesite was.  He stopped along the way and bought a dozen white lilies.  Lilies were Carly’s favorite flower and Black had always bought them for her on anniversaries and Valentine’s Day.  They’d become “their” flower.  He glanced down at the blooms with the petals unfolding around the filaments, weighed down with the stamens.  Where the petals gathered together, deeper inside the bloom, the creamy white petals were stained a lime green, like an artist had gently rubbed chalk for a splash of color.  Black breathed in the scent and he was carried back to candlelit evenings and hugs and kisses.  After all of this time of being alone, Black had begun to have bouts of feeling lonely for the first time since Carly passed.  Not lonely for her, specifically, just felt that hollow space in his life that was supposed to be filled by someone in your life:  a partner, a lover, a wife.  Of course the first couple of years after she’d been killed, he’d been distracted because he had to focus on moving beyond the plunge he’d taking into the bourbon swimming pool.  Once he’d stopped drinking, it took great will power over a year or two to truly deal with his addiction and learn to stand being alone and without Carly outside of alcohol.

Then, Black reckoned that he’d just gotten used to the routine of his life, carefully guarded to keep him on the straight narrow.  Or so he thought.  Now he wondered if the routine just kept him safely out of circulation and away from the possibility of meeting another woman.  The loss of Carly had so frightened him and seared his heart with a white-hot pain that the possibility of loss had overwhelmed his sense of desire to meet someone, much less fall in love again.  But lately he found his eyes lingering on women of a certain look. And, honestly, he’d been surprised not by the fact that he was taking notice of women, but by the women of whom he took notice.  They were different from Carly had been.  They were women with dark hair, full hips, and bee-stung lips.  These women were leaner, taller, and a bit fuller in the breasts as compared to Carly.  This, of course, set him off to wondering why his tastes had changed and if that really mattered or not.  He was past feeling guilty about being attracted to a woman, Carly had been dead for several years now.  Black was just a bit confused by the fact that a woman different from Carly attracted him. 

Black pulled into the parking lot of the cemetery and picked up the lilies and the vase.  He’d bought a dozen of these vases and used them when he placed flowers at her site.  They were designed with a particularly heavy base that gave them the stability they needed to sit outside in the wind and on an even surface like grass.  Black had a water bottle shoved into his jacket.  He could walk the familiar path to her grave with his eyes closed it seemed, though it’d been several months since he’d stopped by.  As he approached the gravesite he saw that the old vase was still upright and filled with the lily carcasses of his last bouquet.  This annoyed him to no end. 

Why don’t they take care of stuff like this? Black wondered, looking around to see if anyone happened to be passing by. 

“Shit.  Don’t know why I even bother to look.  It’s not like they pay someone to keep this place up.”  He muttered to himself and shook his head.  He knelt down and pulled the dead lilies from the vase and laid them aside.  Then he turned the vase over to pour out any old water or dirt that might have collected.  Then he gently replaced the vase and inserted the new lilies.  After he arranged them, he poured the water from the bottle into the vase until it was nearly full and drank the rest.  He sat back on the ground and looked at gravestone.