Footsteps in the Forgotten Graveyard
On a night when the city forgot to sleep, I found the gate to the forgotten graveyard standing slightly ajar, yawning at a story it had kept for years. The air smelled of rain and old pennies, of moss and wet stone. Ivy clung to the iron like a memory that refuses to loosen. Inside, the earth whispered under my boots, a soft rasp that sounded almost like a name being remembered out loud. Each grave wore a weathered face: some markers smiled crookedly; others kept silent with folded stone hands. A wind-born child’s sigh drifted from somewhere beyond the marble, and I thought of people who vanished into the ground long before I was born, leaving only the language of soil behind.
I walked the mossy lanes, counting stones the way you count minutes left in a hospital room. Then came the footsteps—not mine, not the here-and-now, but a rhythm that matched my own, treading the same circles around the graves as if the night itself had learned my gait. I turned, and though I saw nothing, the air grew colder, and a column of breath rose in front of me like a thin ghost. A whisper scuffed along the edge of a cracked angel’s wing, and a rustle of leaves spelled out a name I knew but refused to admit. The path bent: a circle, a corridor between the last rain and the next, and somewhere in the distance a bell tolled without a church, calling me to listen to what I had forgotten to remember.
Do not chase the dead, for they are waking what you forgot to remember.
- Moonlight pooling on a weathered angel’s eyelids
- Names that glow faintly on stones, spelling a lineage you never claimed
- Footsteps that imitate your own, returning the sound you thought you left behind
- Whispers that drift along the hedges, telling you who walked here first
- A hidden box carved with a single word: Remember
I pressed on, and the cemetery yielded a small clearing where the stones stood like silent witnesses. Here the ground was lighter, as if someone had brushed the dust from a face. The air hummed with particles of the forgotten: each name on the stones glowed faintly, telling a family saga I could not place. Footsteps continued to echo my own, returning the sound I thought I had left behind. A rainless rain fell—drops of memory that slipped from the air and tucked themselves into the sleeve of my coat. A wooden box lay half-buried beneath roots; letters carved on its lid spelled a single word: Remember.
At last the oldest graves opened a shallow vault. A thread of cold wind curled through the soil like a sigh; the footsteps paused at the threshold of something I could not yet name. When dawn bled across the horizon, I stepped away from the forgotten graveyard heavier and lighter at once, as if the place had traded my fear for a secret. The city woke, the gate stood open, and I could still hear the footsteps behind me—not footsteps in the street, but a cadence in my waking memory, a promise that what is forgotten never dies, it only walks beside us in daylight.