Unsold Companion Plots

By Hawkelson Rainier

We walked among the headstones last autumn. The trees looked like fire; it could have been oil on canvas painted by Van Gogh during an absinthe delirium. We joked that we’d bargain shop for companion plots when we hit middle age. I’d check out first, around 85, and she’d follow soon after of a broken heart.

It didn’t work out though. After she left, the skin of the universe became translucent to me. I saw its skeleton – just a scaffolding of ones and zeros stacked to infinity. There was no ghost inside. There was no mystery in it at all.