FLIGHTS OF ANGELS

Rose

I clutched the purple shawl close around my shoulders, under my cloak. It was cold, with a smell of snow in the air. It was two days after Halloween, and I was going to the cemetery to look for Polly’s grave.

Mrs. Lacey had told me where to find it. I had been over to their house to help with Susie on Halloween, and, I have to admit, I’d had fun. Polly’s family was exactly the way she described it: Lucy was stuck-up and snobby and used a lot of big words, Moo was drippy and Goo was caked with makeup, and everyone talked at once and the Horrors were dressed up as pirates and doing a lot of jumping around and yelling. Their noisy dinnertime seemed like a circus compared to my quiet suppers in our empty dining room. Mr. Lacey was going on about the origins of Halloween and how today was called All Soul’s Day, the day to pray for the spirits of the dead.

Eventually nearly everybody had gone about their own Halloween business, and I’d put Susie to bed and looked around Polly’s room at her books and her old dolls. I kept feeling that she would appear any minute, but she didn’t. Her presence was everywhere in that house—and yet she was gone.

I waited till today to go to the cemetery. It seemed fitting to visit Polly’s grave on All Soul’s Day. I wanted to get there while it was still light, so I hurried over as soon as I got home from school, looking nervously through the iron railings for ghosts. Suddenly the stone gateposts of the cemetery loomed up ahead of me. Beyond them, the road twisted into darkness.

After walking for half a minute I left the road and headed along a path that led off to the left, past gravestones that were newer and smaller than the Victorian monuments. I had never been in this part of the cemetery.

I looked over my shoulder. The shadows were gathering behind me. I thought I caught a glimpse of something flickering through the trees, but when I focused on it, it was gone.

The path led nearly all the way to the railings that bordered Sumach Street. When I got to the end, I turned right and counted ten big steps. I stopped in front of a newish-looking granite headstone. I bent over to read the inscription in the fading light.

Pauline Margaret Lacey
March 4, 1951, to April 8, 1963
May flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.

And underneath that was the outline of a bird with a forked tail, flying, wings outstretched. A swallow.