A Most Spectacular Rift

Chapter 5

The graves reached above ground so that they gasped in air, and weren't drowning in a soil of decomposed leaves, matter, and corpses, that a city under the mound of lightish brown soaked in moss could build a house of bones, and constitute a village of the dead.

Those ghastly obelisks were about his waist, and the path to the small cabin was far and jagged. They jutted up like stone crags with embedded fonts and dates in the shape of a clock tower.

Piles of ash littered their feet, and erected were some wreaths which beat color into the gloom of the vernacular. Huncho's eyes followed every line, every shadow underneath the arches, the design, the pop-out of the tombstones, so that what he saw, he pictured of himself, and like a sponge waiting to absorb, his brain mustered the trends of death which these graves conceived so bluntly.

Like a lone wolf upon a mountain of trees, the wooden cabin with its logs horizontally and quite sedulously wafered one upon the other was staidly remarked and cloistered upon its little mound of dirt, relative to the sea of mourning lanterns that dimmed low so that they dithered beyond life. The gates around corralled the graves, the cabin, the dead, and the one living, so that it resembled a stomach managing its glob-like matter.

When Huncho finally finished his reluctant excursion, so that the path he took, grass too dead and flat for it to be affected by a stomp, lead way to the cabin whose door was a greyish tone with the lines of wood like an ocean's tide on a smooth rock, and holes upon it like freckles on a shy boy. He rapped twice, then thrice, before there came no answer, but the wind that clapped him in the ear, and whistled out through the other ear. Huncho stood still as rock opposite the door, upon this selectly raised mound of dirt, a susurration of worry floating across the sky in the form of dark, dark clouds.

The door opened slowly as if a man was prodding it open with a finger.

He was frail and crooked and age gave his chin so much weight that it sank below his mouth.

"Hello?" Huncho managed.

He was frail and crooked but age gave him the eye's beneficence, an odd sparkle, and a smile that denoted munificence, and seldom came with the mortician's plaque.

"Yes..." He drew the letters with his thin mouth.

"Mr. Hans, I was ... uh ... wondering if I could get a job, because you know, Enzo, no I mean Joel, Joel told me, no, told Enzo, then, he told me to come to you because you need a 'prentice." Huncho had assumed it was Mr. Hans, and would not know what to do if the elder was not.

There was a pause, and nature in all wind and sound subscribed to the interim.

"Sure," he croaked, for throats of that age were as desiccated as winter leaves. "I could use another hand. My own hand is losing its vigor, maybe a young lad could do a thing or two, help me with some labour. There was another man who asked me if there was a job open here, he was quite rude, he said he overheard someone talking 'bout me needing a hand, and I very much do, as I said, his name was ah... Joel! Yes, and I told him yes, especially," he gasped in the cold breath. "Especially, when it was for a kid. Is that kid you?"

Huncho had not paid attention, as his surreptitious rumination traversed to Mr. Hans, assuming it was him, his way of speaking was to stretch out his words like pulled noodles and to entertain a deeper voice than a soldier whose puberty hit him before he hit it.

"Is that you?"

"What, sorry?" Huncho fumbled. "I'm looking for a job. Joel told me to look for Mr. Han's, it is you, right?"

"Yes, it is me. And you are the kid whose job was obstructed by what happened. My, my, I haven't received such solemn news before the Frantics."