Dark grey clouds covered the sky above the Bekdorf graveyard. Johanna stood in a small pit, shoveling heaps of dirt out of it onto the ground. A chill breeze whistled by, rustling the clothes and hair of the five corpses that lay beside the pit. The bodies lay still, their eyes closed as if asleep; a man, a woman, and three children. Johanna climbed out of the pit and dropped her shovel on the ground with a weary sigh. Starting with the man, she dragged the bodies to the pit and threw them in as best she could. The last of the children was a boy of just three years; Johanna picked him up and held him in her arms for a few moments, staring at his cold, lifeless face before gently laying him atop the bodies of his parents and siblings. She muttered the funeral rites to herself before shoveling the dirt back into the pit.

An entire family lay in the grave, all dead within the space of a few days. She marked the grave with a plank of wood, carved with the family’s names and dates of birth. Above the names and dates was simply written: Died 1374. It had been a bad year. Despite the Lady of the Rain providing fair weather, the harvest had been poor. As the hungry villagers grimly awaited the coming winter, plague had broken out. The family she had buried were but the latest victims, and there would surely be many more before the sickness passed.

Johanna picked up her shovel and walked through the through the rows of graves, stopping in front of the stone slab that marked her father’s resting place. She had buried him seventy years ago. More than a hundred years had passed since the Angel had made her the Gravedigger. She had watched generations come and go; she had seen all the friends she grew up with grow old and die while she never aged a day. It felt strange and unnatural to bury someone she had seen grow from a baby to an elder, to stand over their grave in a body that barely felt twenty summers old. All the men and women she had laid to rest were now in the Angels’ Realm enjoying an eternal life of bliss. And she was still here, covered in dirt, dragging a shovel, staring down at her father’s grave.

“You said that one day we’d all be together in Heaven,” Johanna said, tears welling in her eyes, “that I’d finally be able to see my mother again.”

She smiled bitterly as the tears ran down her cheeks.

“Well you were wrong!” she screamed, violently throwing her shovel to the ground.

She looked up at the dark sky, her tear-stained face contorted in fury. “Why me?!”

She received no answer save for a cold gust of wind. She turned and ran from the graveyard across the open field, leaving her shovel lying in the dirt. In the middle of the field she stumbled and fell to her knees, sobbing.

“That was a bloody good trick!” she screamed at the sky, “fooling a little girl into accepting this curse!” She let out a howl of rage. “What do I get? What do I  get?! Everyone else dies and lives forever in some perfect afterlife, while I’m stuck here burying their rotting corpses!” She took in a sharp breath and got shakily to her feet. “Damn you, cursed Angels! I hate you, I hate you all! I quit! Find another Gravedigger!”

She stormed off across the field, wiping the tears off her face. She stopped only once to look back towards the graveyard. After a moment’s pause she spat, “lie there and rot, damned shovel!”

She turned away and continued walking.