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GRAVEDIGGERS - THE WORD
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Gravedigger is collectively a clan name, a job title, and a government-designated demographic. It is also used as a derogatory term or slur when directed at one who is not part of the clan, profession, or demographic.

Gravedigger is, in some ways, a misnomer. It is more accurately understood as an umbrella term, as the Gravediggers perform all death-duties, not just digging graves, from autopsy and body preparation to pallbearing and funerary rites. Not all Gravediggers perform every role, but their numbers are few and far between, so there are plenty Jacks-of-many-trades. The skills are meticulously passed down through apprenticeships.

Gravedigger-citizens are split on their views regarding the word. Both pride and shame accompany the term. Some feel that, as the name of a people and culture, it should remain unchanged. Others believe that it is time to abandon it, due to its derogatory nature, and adopt a more modern and less-stigmatized name.

—

***
PRESENT DAY
***

Graham lives in the city, training nearly every day. He wins championships and sends whatever is left of his prize money to Grandpa. Grandpa calls three times a week and says, “You don’t need to keep sending me money! I have nothing to spend it on but you.”

Graham’s days are spent in a never-ending cycle of numbers. Precision measurements invade his every waking and sleeping moment. It is a prison and a freedom. Eight-and-a-half hours of sleep. Ten ounces of protein per meal and two ounces per snack. Two-hundred-percent daily value of vitamin C. Run three miles. One-hundred-fifty pounds of weight on both sides of a forty-five pound bar. Cheat day - two brownie squares and a diet pop! Four sets of ten. Rest two minutes. Ten suicide runs. Four more sets of ten. Three cups of kale, blend on high for one minute.

Graham’s apartment is paid for. His clothes are clean and well-woven. He has sponsorships, brand-name equipment, clean gym shoes. His refrigerator is always stocked, and he buys meat in whole cuts. When he indulges, food can be delivered straight to his door, and he always tips the drivers.

Grandpa sends him well-wishes and fruit baskets all the time. Grandpa sends blankets and socks and photos of the back garden. And every time Graham opens a letter or answers a phone call, he remembers his wild childhood, unfettered and untimed and bound solely by the daylight hours - only barely, at that. He wonders about the small boy who hides in trees in the graveyard and cleans up the apples and oranges from Grandmother’s headstone.

Tomorrow is a day off; the gym is closed on Mondays. Graham stays up late on Sundays and watches syndicated television until he falls asleep on the couch. Tonight is Wheel of Fortune.

***

I wonder what has become of my friend. He left for the city one-and-a-half years ago, and occasionally I receive a letter containing a photo of him. Sometimes he holds up a trophy. Other times he holds up a barbell heavy with weights that exceed my own twice over. Always, he is smiling in the photos. Occasionally there is a small note on the back of the photos. “Hey Inchworm!” “Hope you’re well.” “Thanks for always letting me train in Morning Wood.” “:)” “-Graham”

My heart aches sometimes, when I think of the city. My childhood was defined by weights and measures. Eighty-four by twenty-eight by twenty-three inches. Forty cubic centimeters of debrider to one liter of solution. Ten units of blood. One jar of powder. Two-percent formaldehyde. Six people to a hundred-ninety-six pound man and two-hundred pounds of solid oak. Three inches of rain. Six feet deep. Not a centimeter outside of God’s Blind. Thirteen remaining plots. One day it will be you. One day it will be me.

A large part of me loves the measured life of a Gravedigger. The meticulously kept records, the controlled precision. It is cathartic, an easy, exact answer to every question I might have. But occasionally, I dream of a free life in the city, what it might be like to be a Society-citizen, that I might go where I please when I pleased it. I dream that I eat food I ordered from a restaurant, and not another rationed soup of ingredients grown from the Grave’s garden and rabbit shot in God’s Blind. I dream of watching Graham lift a comically heavy weight for no reason other than to smile and send a photo home, and cheering for him as he is handed his prize.

Dusk is falling, so I don my boots and grab my broom to begin my evening rounds. Tomorrow at daybreak I will wake and prep a body. Uncle Daniel will help, but soon he will retire. 

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GRAVEDIGGERS - SURNAMES
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Gravedigger families all share the clan name before their surnames. Gravedigger-Howard. Gravedigger-Weeks. Gravedigger-Long. There are precious few families remaining, and they keep careful records of lineage. This is both mandated by the government of Society to prevent an excess of intermingling, and to ensure there is no inbreeding within Gravedigger marriages. This is also why the clans adopted the practice of sending Gravedigger daughters (and sometimes sons) to become wards.

Gravedigger ward-wives customarily take their Society-husband’s surname, but are not required to. Many are discouraged by their husband’s family from doing so. Gravedigger ward-husbands may take their Society-wife’s surname, but it is the same. In marriages within the clan, surnames are taken on and passed down at-will.

—

***
SIX YEARS AGO
***

I hide under the protection of my old friend oak tree. It’s late. Far too late for me to be in the forest, peeking at the edge of the grounds. At Maricella Torres’s grave, a boy heaves rocks around. He’s tall and stocky and nothing like Maricella, Uncle Daniel, or myself. We’re slim, raven-haired, and tan like most Gravediggers.

He picks the stones up and puts them back down a few paces from where he started. He rolls them around the grave, picking deliberately between the markers and being sure not to step on the plots. With the smaller rocks, he drags them from the forest, hoists them up, and launches them as far as he can right back into the treeline. The boy is ever careful, always placing the stones where he found them - except for the small ones which he hurls away - and never disturbing the resting graves.

This is the second night this week I have seen him, and the umpteenth week this year. It is an uncountable number of times I have watched him.

He returns more and more often now, but it’s nearly impossible to make out his features in the cloud-covered moonlight. He wears threadbare clothes, too cold for this biting fall night. They look too small on him, though it is possibly just because he is so tall and stocky. I imagine that he must be growing too fast for his wardrobe to keep up.

I can tell his skin is ivory by its glow under the night sky. His hair looks light, too. Some time around witching hour, he rolls the rocks back to their original homes at the edge of God’s Blind, pats Maricella Torres’s headstone, and returns to wherever he came from.

One night, I follow him. He doesn’t see me, because I know God’s Blind like I know my own house. In fact, God’s Blind has been my home since I was young. It is every Raildusk Gravedigger’s first home, and their final resting place.

It is a ten-minute walk from the perimeter of the cemetery grounds through God's Blind Forest until you reach where I am not allowed. At the edge of the woods - the locals laugh and call it the Mourning Wood (Morning Wood) - is a small garden behind a small house. Both the garden and the house are dilapidated, well-loved, and bursting full of quiet life, and I am not to set a single foot upon them. Not a toe, not a single inch, not a centimeter beyond God’s Blind. The locals laugh and tell me, Where I go, Death follows.

***

Graham is almost home when he hears leaves crunch behind him. It is not unusual, being in the woods, but these crunches sound particularly like footsteps. He turns around, expecting to see a person, or even an animal, but no one is there.

It’s not like him to be nervous, but he is. He doesn’t believe the other kids, who share campfire stories about the ghosts and zombies who attack lovers that seek privacy in Morning Wood. He doesn’t believe Society, which tells him that God’s Blind - and the graveyard planted at its center - is unclean, and will cause misfortune and death to follow him home. And yet, he is nervous.

A few weeks ago, he felt watched in the moonlight. Owls hooted and nocturnal creatures snuffled around the trees, but he knew it was someone. He couldn’t for the life of him figure out who would want to watch him heave rocks around a cemetery.

Now, he is certain someone is there. He makes sure to cross into his garden and close the gate that separates it from the treeline of Morning Wood before calling out.

“Hello?”

A small gasp whistles through the leaves. Graham smiles.

“Gotcha! Who’s there?” He crosses his arms over the fence and leans forward, nosing inches over the threshold. “Come say hi!”

In the dim moonlight, a small figure creeps timidly out from behind the trunks. It looks to be a boy, only slightly younger than Graham. He’s got dark hair and dark skin and bright, golden eyes that reflect moonlight like the high-beams on Grandpa’s rickety truck.

“Were you following me?” Graham calls.

The boy nods.

“Have you been watching me?”

Again, he nods.

“Step closer.”

The boy does.

At last, the boy reaches the fence, and they are face to face. He wears clothes that look like they are pulled straight from the storybooks Grandmother read to Graham as a child. It is a loose tunic tucked into linen trousers tied by a drawstring. He wears a leather belt with empty loops, presumably for tools he doesn’t carry. Over his tunic he wears a heavy cloak big enough for an adult man, the hood resting loosely atop his shoulder blades.

There are a few, pertinent things Graham notices about the boy. First, he has long eyelashes that flutter over his large doe eyes, competing with his shaggy black bangs. Second, he has a dark, perfectly circular mole on his cheek, just down and to the right of his cupid’s bow mouth. He recalls how Grandmother called them “beauty marks.” And third - and perhaps most importantly - he is clearly from the Gravedigger clan, but he isn’t scary or unclean or unholy. In fact, under the pale moonlight diffusing through the clouds, he looks… Picturesque.

He almost reaches out to brush a lock of hair from the boy’s forehead, right where it tickles his aquiline nose, before he thinks better of it.

“What’s your name?” he says instead.