Creepers by Joanne Dahme Page A

because of them, of course, but because of the things that had been happening to me since I had met them. Yet at the same time, I felt alive. I never remembered my life being so full of adventure. I sipped at my glass of ice water and hoped the cold sliding
down my throat would jolt me into action.
    Margaret and Mr. Geyer were prepping at their house, and were to come over tonight so that we could practice our routine in front of Mom and Dad. Mr. Geyer had sketched out tomorrow’s event. Margaret and I were to stand by our posters after Mr. Geyer completed his brief cemetery tour, ready to explain the history and meaning behind the photos we chose. I looked at my poster. It seemed out of place against the pastel blue sky, although the ivy hanging outside the window made an appropriate frame for it. I had to make sure that I knew each photograph as if the people remembered were my own family. Only then, Mr. Geyer had said, would I be able to stir something in other people’s hearts. I did not dare let Margaret and Mr. Geyer down.
    I studied the black-and-white photos. I had carefully captioned each in large black letters so that someone in the back of the crowd could read them. Margaret had said the lettering looked Gothic and then did the same with her poster.
    The photo in the top left corner was the grave of the Fletcher children. At first, all one saw was the huge slab of stone, shaped like the A frame of a house. But once you peered at it, you could not help but recoil from the sneering skeleton head on top, his wings huddled possessively
around the carved names beneath them. Each name was crowned with its own small symbol. John, six years, had the crossbones, while Sarah, three years, had an hourglass. Ann, nine weeks, had an angel, not as angry looking as most I had seen in the cemetery.
    The next photo was of a little boy’s tombstone. Mr. Geyer had told me about the stonecutter who had carved this stone. He had been an acquaintance of Christian’s. In most of the stones this man carved, the Death head symbol was always wide-eyed and calm, looking fairly untroubled to people passing by the grave site. Mr. Geyer said that the art on this tombstone gave a person the sense that death was not something to dread—until it came for this stonecutter’s own son. Little Joshua’s Death head had an angry expression, its eyes near slits, its forehead shortened, and its teeth scrupulously cut. I remembered Mr. Geyer telling me that Christian never carved another stone after Prudence’s death, although Joshua’s father apparently did nothing else but crank out angry angel after angry angel. Each man handled his burdens quite differently, he noted without irony.
    I stared at the other tombstones captured in our photographs, amazed that I felt a real sorrow for them, even though the people they remembered had been gone from this world for more than two hundred years. There was
Ebenezer, the shipwrecked sailor. Patience, the young mother of four and the reverend’s wife. The most heartbreaking of all was the baby’s stone. The name had been maliciously scratched out because the infant had been born out of wedlock.
    Skeletons, angels, urns, fountains, Death heads, suns, and moons, and everything with wings—they were all mesmerizing, but not scary. It made me sad to think of the long-lost lives, yet happy that their memories had been so preciously preserved.When I had told this to Mr. Geyer, he smiled and said that that was precisely what I should say to people. I must make them feel a kinship, he said, as if those people remembered by stones could be our own family and friends.
    I must have been practicing for at least an hour. My throat felt scratchy from talking out loud like Mr. Geyer had instructed, but I was feeling a little more confident because I could now just look at one of the photos and talk about it without memorizing a word-for-word summary. I was ready for our practice run