there is a town that gets no visitors
Short story by Kira Compton
Three men stand in the town’s only graveyard, though one is a boy not yet twelve, and it would be a stretch to call him a man.
“Do you want to do the last of it?” asks the gravedigger. He holds the shovel towards the boy and his father, but neither of them respond. The gravedigger shrugs, then goes back to burying the body of Mary Kline, devoted wife and mother. Her tombstone is clean and simple—it had been made in quite a rush, as she had only died the day before. The father turns towards his son. He is a thickset man, dressed in a dark overcoat buttoned to the collar. His face is heavy and expressionless. It might have been better suited under an executioner’s hood.
“You can cry,” he says. He sets a hand on his son’s shoulder. “It’s alright. No one else is around.”
“No, thank you,” the boy says politely. He shifts, his father’s hand falling off his shoulder. They both turn back to the gravedigger.
Earlier in the day, there had been many more mourners. The entire town had come out, dressed in black, and had paid their respects to the deceased Mary Kline. The only way the boy had gotten through it was by thinking about his mother. How she had used to smile down at him while she cooked, flour all up her arms. She was a happy woman and would have thought all of the fuss was ridiculous. She would have laughed at every one of them and then found a way to sneak out, with him in tow. The mourners were gone now—they were back in their homes to whisper about crazy Mary, who had heard voices from the sky; crazy Mary, who had thought there was a world beyond the town; crazy Mary, who had tried to hop the fence and had been shot by the constable for her trespasses.
“It really is a loss,” the gravedigger says when he is finished. “She was a bright woman.”
“She was very sick.” The boy’s father says. “She wasn’t bright at all.”
The gravedigger cocks his head, but says nothing else before he walks away, leaving them to their grief. The boy watches him go, then asks:
“Can we go home now?”
“Have some respect,” his father snaps. “This is your mother.”
The boy falls silent, but stands fidgeting, as though there is somewhere far more important that he’d rather be. Finally, his father speaks:
“Did she say anything to you?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Your mother, at the end. Did she say anything to you about the voices?”
“Oh.” The boy turns back to the gravestone, too quickly. “No.”
“Good.” His father leaves the tombstone begins to walk towards the front of the graveyard.
The boy follows behind him as his father continues. “Your mother lost her mind. You know that, right?”
“Yes, father.”
“There’s nothing out there,” his father says vehemently. “Nothing but death and danger. We have to stay here.”
“I know, father. Thank you.”
The rest of their walk is in silence. Past the horse-drawn carriages, past the hangman’s stage that stands in the town common, past the constable who nods to them from across the street. If there is any regret on the old constable’s face, they are too far away to see it.
It isn’t until much later, when dinner is eaten and everyone is in bed that the boy finally stops moving, stops fidgeting, finally gets to what he has been waiting for all day. Silent as a whisper, he ghosts into the hall. No light leaks out from beneath his father’s door, but the boy stands watch, his tiny heart beating in his chest. An hour, a lifetime, an eternity, it seems, and his father begins to snore. The boy moves again.
Over the crooked stair, through the empty kitchen, down into the unlit basement. He sneaks past the jarred fruits, the dusty books, and goes straight for the set of mahogany drawers tucked in the far back. There, hidden in the bottom drawer under a pile of old towels, is the radio.
He pulls it out and turns it gently in his hands. It is a confusing thing—small and red, with something large sticking out the side. Before last week, he had never seen anything like it in his entire life. He’s lucky that his mother had showed him how to use it. Otherwise, he would have been very lost. There are people out there, she had told him only a week ago, huddled in the kitchen while his father was out at work. She had showed him how to make the voices come, how to make the music play. A whole other world. They speak to me through this.
This is why the boy did not cry at his mother’s funeral, why he fidgeted at the grave and could not wait to come home. He knows that his mother is not dead, could not be dead, would not be dead for a long time yet. I’m going out there, to them, she had told him. And then I’ll come back for you. His mother would not have lied to him—no, it was his father who had lied, the constable who had lied about shooting her in the back. She was out there, and the boy only had to find her. He turns the radio on.
“—playing through until November 30th. Call 515-808-2362 for tickets.”
“Hello?” the boy asks, right where the voice is coming out. “Do you know where my mother is?”
The voice does not respond. Instead, a song starts, something loud and confusing. The boy frowns and turns the knob. There is a lot of buzzing, of jarring static, before it settles again on a voice.
“In famine He will redeem you from death, and in war from the power of the sword,” says a man with a deep voice.
“Hello? Is my mother there?”
“Neither shall you be afraid of destruction when it comes.”
“Do you know where my mother is?”
“And at destruction and famine you shall laugh.”
The boy hits the top of the radio. “Hello?”
“That’s Job 5:19-22. Strange things are happening around the world, and it is only by turning to God that we—“
The boy turns the knob again. He goes past the unfamiliar music, past the obnoxious advertisements, past the lady who croons about her lost love. At each, he asks for his mother. At each, he gets no answer.
There is a town that gets no visitors, a town that might be stuck in time. Strange things happen there, stranger still that they happen in the twenty-first century. They hang petty thieves, have never known a World War, and still believe exorcisms hold weight. Only a few days ago, a young woman had been shot and killed while trying to climb the town’s fence. The strangest thing of all, though, is a little boy, not yet twelve, sitting on his basement floor. Though he will never hear his mother again, never see her smiling down at him with flour on her dress, he bends, full of hope, towards the radio speaker to ask: Mother, are you there? Mother? Mother?
Kira Compton is a writer and actor seeking out her alien roots. Her work has been recently featured in Into the Void, Creative Nonfiction, White Wall Review, and others. See kiracompton.com for more.