Ethan’s family buried Gran Fern only three weeks ago. He didn’t mind passing by, though. School was in the direction, might as well bid a salutation to the cryptic residents. And from 3 in the afternoon ‘til about half after, the ice cream truck passes by to catch the busses coming from Port Fern Elementary.
The day Ethan progressed to high school he forgot that ice cream tune. High School’s direction was opposite Shady Luxuries Cemetery. There were no tunes to recognize in that direction.
Novembers were cold, a beautiful blister representing the positively frantic local spirit – We’re here; deal with it, man and weather united. The weather started suiting Ethan’s favor near Halloween. Every year there was a shift; there was never a shift all the years in that other place. Ethan loved being cold.
A week before Thanksgiving, Ethan’s walking home from a perky evening at some suburban darlings’ resident in the Thorn cul-de-sac, known as such because within resides the only home with thorns in their greenery. If you didn’t know where to turn, it’d be an instant miss, but Ethan stood there every elementary school year – at the graveyard’s edge. The road went only left, a graveyard’s tree’s limb obstructed the sign naming the street, but the voted to keep the tree intact out of respect for the lifeless tenants.
It was a good city to test a person’s will. Death was a steady business, Ethan recited. He’d forced himself to create a slogan for an idea. The chain blocking Ethan’s leg-stretching override was lower than he’d recalled, his memory salvaging itself – the mornings at the graveyard’s edge, plucking the chains, waiting for the bus; talking to Shannon Ann; still simultaneously the most beautiful AND strangest name you’d ever heard.
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