This New and Poisonous Air by Adam McOmber

I’d slipped half inside a dream, charmed by the birds. They were black-eyed and mute, moving gently across the grass, sometimes grouping in the shade of a worn monument or at the perimeter of the fence.
    Children had thrown clods of dirt at me earlier in the day for trespassing in what I believed to be a graveyard but turned out to be their mother’s washing yard. I wanted to explain that I was an official, an emissary of the Queen, yet they were so angry and chiding, I could not speak. They believed perhaps I was the embodiment of some cruel woman they’d heard about in a fairy tale. My book and my dark dress, the creases around my mouth and eyes—all of
this betrayed me. When had I become such a distasteful creature? Over what line had I stepped?
    It was pleasant to simply take leisure with the ducks and hens, where I knew I would not be attacked. Apparently, this yard had been turned into an aviary years ago by some urban peasant, and I thought the dead should like to watch the comings and goings of animals, as I myself have often preferred the lower beasts to their supposedly evolved counterparts.
    It is the will of the Metropolitan Gardens Association, my new employer, that all such consecrated grounds should be located, labeled, and preserved. Mrs. Octavia Hill, head of the board and fierce proponent of urban renewal, imagines these yards transformed into what she calls “outdoor sitting rooms,” and the notion conjures curious pictures: a sofa of dewy lichen, a hearth that burns with untended violets. The difficultly is that the yards themselves have floated free from the churches and institutions to which they were once tethered; fires and the shifting tides of urbanization have razed those structures, yet the graves remain.
    Before my deployment, Mrs. Hill, with the high and regal voice of a clarion, provided a collection of cautionary tales—hidden graveyards destroyed by property-hungry industrialists during the boom. Carbolic acid was used in many cases to dissolve the bones so no record of exhumation remained. “We must mark these grounds,” she said. “Save the dead and save ourselves, Miriam. And it’s women like you—childless and without other occupation who shall lead the way. You will become mother to our ancestors and therefore mother to us all.”
    And so I persist in my survey, mothering and dreaming, carrying the accordion-style grid map provided to me by the board and labeling it carefully as I have been hired
to do. And I am thankful. Mrs. Hill is correct; women like me—nearly forty and without husband or station—are rarely allowed such new beginnings.

20 August
    THE HEAT WAS LIKE A CEILING on Staining Street, and I struggled to remain upright. My newfound friend, Alain de la Tour, did not fair as well. He collapsed dramatically in the shade of a poplar tree, pale and dripping in his fashionable suit. Hand at his chest, he moaned comically, “Miriam. Oh, Miriam.” He suffered from palpitations, and I told him that if he could not keep up with a rheumatic woman, he was clearly not taking enough morning exercise. He waved a porcelain hand, telling me the French did not exercise as the English. It was crass to even mention such a thing. “And you, my dear, are not as rheumatic as you seem to think.”
    I’d made his acquaintance at one of the new coffee palaces that have sprung up in the city’s finer neighborhoods—glowing bargelike buildings full of girls in hats who believe they are made beautiful by lantern light. M. de la Tour approached my table in all his threadbare regality, and after a brief introduction, explained that he had arrived in London to make himself known to society, believing it would bring him either fame or wealth. Despite my wish to hurriedly dismiss him, I found that he possessed a magnetism—not animal but mineral, glittering like a sulfide extracted from the earth. A pyrite, lovely despite the fact that it played at being gold. He admired my map, asking