Cassie's Story

**A work in progress**

It was a warm day for January, but normal for Cassie’s hometown. Still, she put on her coat, grabbed her keys, and made her way to the car that her parent’s let her drive. She had found the directions the night before, scribbled them hastily onto the back of a receipt, and closed the webpage before anyone could see what she was looking up. Her mother would only be concerned about her daughter’s mental health, and her brothers would mock her to no end, she was sure of it.

The cemetery was noisy when Cassie got there; a far cry from the peaceful respite she had hoped for. The gardeners and lawn mowers were out in full force, with only a few lonely people standing over the grave markers of loved ones lost. It was a smaller cemetery than she expected, for a town that size, and it was so perfectly nestled between housing complexes and tucked behind a catholic church, it was no wonder that she hadn’t known about it before. As she wandered through the grasses, not quite sure of what she was looking for, the age of some of the headstones took her by surprise; some were as old as the nineteenth century. Cassie rounded the corner of a wall of trees and almost ran into one of the gardeners, who nodded at her with a small smile. He was younger than she expected, maybe even the same age as her, if she was any judge.

She skirted around him, and he waited to begin working again until she was past. There was a bench that seemed perfect, hidden against a back wall and packed between two high shrubs. Cassie sighed and took a seat, pulled out her notebook, and began writing. She wrote of Princesses and dragons, barbecues and fireflies. She wrote the life of the flower that lie wilted and dying on the grave marker at her feet. It was one thing to write the ‘what if’s’, she thought. It’s another thing completely to give life to the ‘let’s pretend’s’, and it’s the ‘once upon a time’s’ that so desperately want to breathe.

Cassie was somewhere in the middle of a battle between witches and giants when a shadow crossed her page.

“It’s closing time, miss.” It was the young gardener, looking only apologetic.

“Oh, I’m sorry. Wait, it’s not even dusk yet. The sign said the cemetery closed at sundown.”

“Sorry, but we lock the gates early on Wednesdays for Mass.”

“Oh. I understand.” Cassie quickly gathered her things and made to leave, but hadn’t taken five steps before her notebook fell open and the tales she had just been writing scattered to the ground. Without a word, the young man bent to help her retrieve them.

“If you don’t mind my asking,” he said, after she had thanked him, “what brings you to the grounds today? You didn’t spend any extra particular time at any one grave. Most of the time when young girls come here alone, they either bring flowers, or are dressed all in black and are only here to write poetry about...well, about death.”

Cassie blushed. If he noticed that she came straight to the bench, he must have been watching her, at least a little. “How do you know what they wrote?”

“Some of them let me read it.” He answered with a shrug.

“Well, actually, I’m here to write, too. Not dark emo poetry,” she added quickly, “just to write”.

“In the cemetery?”

“There are ghosts here,” she admitted, blushing deeper. “The ghosts tell stories.”

“So you’re a story writer.” Cassie nodded in response. “Well, Miss Story Writer, can I interest you in attending Mass this evening?”

“I...I mean, no thanks. I should be getting home anyway.”
The young man smiled. “Alright then, maybe next time. It was nice meeting you.”

“You too,” she mumbled, and hurried back to her car.

Later that night, after the rest of her family had fallen asleep, she popped the screen out of her window frame and climbed out onto the chilly rooftop. It was another one of her hiding places, and her mother would have a fit if she knew Cassie was out there, but it had been Cassie’s go-to place ever since her dad had left for active duty. Cassie didn’t really go up there to think; just to listen. She heard a siren, and imagined it wailing as the ambulance that it heralded rushed to save a small boy with a bee allergy and a sting on his arm. The imagined that the bat that flew above her was lost, looking for it’s family and a warm place to sleep. A dog barked in the yard across from hers. Cassie imagined a strange man breaking into the house, but not before the dog chased him away, forever leaving a remembrance scar on the thief’s leg.

It was a silly thing, Cassie supposed, to keep pretending the way she did. Her friends had all grown out of imaginary playmates. She never heard of anyone else her age still wanting bedtime stories, even if she usually just made them up for herself. Cassie wondered idly if her psychology teacher would call her imagination a coping mechanism. She could almost hear his nasally voice ask if she wrote fiction to escape reality. She imagined him sifting through his copy of “Freud for Dummies” and analyzing every story she ever wrote, probably only to tell her that she was a lonely old widow with a strange liking for cheese, and a desire to adopt every cat in the city. And if he found out that she now visits cemeteries for fun? He’d have a field day.

Sadly, thought Cassie, that wouldn’t have been a unique reaction. That was the reason why Cassie rarely told anyone that she wrote. It just wasn’t worth it to her anymore. She wondered why, in light of that, she had told the boy from the cemetery as much as she had. Cassie sighed and crawled back through her window and into bed, thinking of paper bags and robot fairies.

The next Wednesday, Cassie picked her way through the cemetery once more, to the bench she had adopted the week before. To her dismay, she found the bench beneath a canopy and surrounded by chairs, placed elegantly before a freshly dug grave. She noticed that the sound of lawn mowers and hedge clippers, so prominent the week before, was absent.

“There are more benches on the east side.”

Cassie jumped at the voice behind her.

“Still listening to ghosts?” It was the young gardener again, this time absent of the floppy hat and blue coveralls of a groundskeeper’s uniform. Instead, he wore pressed slacks and a white shirt with blue pinstripes. She saw his hair for the first time, short, dark, and spiky.

“I didn’t think you were a ghost,” Cassie said indignantly, “I just spook very easily.”

“Well I’ll just have to be more careful, if you intend to continue to haunt the grounds.” He said with an easy smile.

“Oh, ha ha, very punny.” Cassie said sarcastically, now smiling too. “You’re not gardening today?”

“Not on funeral days. Dad needs my help at the funerals more than the gardeners do.”

“Your dad’s a funeral director?”

“No, a priest. At the church that maintains this cemetery.”

“So that’s why you wanted me to go to mass.”

“As the priest’s son, I’m obligated to express concern for your eternal soul.” He said it with a serious voice, but with laughter in his eyes. “Honestly, I—” he hesitated, “ —you seemed interesting. I wanted to get to know you.”

Cassie blushed again. “You don’t even know my name.”

“Well,” the young man said, offering his hand for Cassie to shake, “I’m Daniel. Call me Danny. Or Daniel, or Dan, if you really want to.”

“Nice to meet you, Danny,” Cassie said, shaking his hand. “I’m Cassie.”

“Well Cassie, how do you feel about attending a stranger’s funeral?”

“Are you being serious?”

Danny looked over his shoulder to a line of cars filing into the parking lot, led majestically by a long black hearse. “I have to be here for it,” he shrugged, “and I’d appreciate the company.”

“I...I’m not dressed for it.” Cassie said, noting her faded blue jeans and university sweatshirt.

Danny glanced up and down her once, though he somehow did it in a way that didn’t make Cassie uncomfortable. “Tell you what. If anyone complains, we’ll tell the bouncer and have you dealt with immediately.”

“There’ll be a bouncer at the funeral?” Cassie asked, taken back.
Danny motioned her closer and whispered in her ear, like he was telling her a secret, “Funerals don’t have bouncers”.

Cassie shot him a glare, but ended up sitting beside him in the back row, feeling particularly odd as a stranger’s life was memorialized.

That was far from the only funeral that Cassie ever attended with Danny. She learned a lot about death from them, but a lot about life too. She learned about people and the different kinds of love, about family and friends and the importance of being true to herself. Above all, she learned to never fear the inevitable.