✟ the diary
She talks to herself all day. Someone may as well write it down.
Kept in a notebook that lives in the hoodie pocket and is therefore permanently damp. Entries are in her own voice, complaints included. Written in character; read it as fiction.
entry i · the first thing i remember
Woke up in a hole. Not a metaphor. An actual hole, with actual walls, and my hands already around the handle of a shovel as if we had been introduced years ago and I had simply forgotten his face.
I climbed out. I stood there a while. Then I noticed the hole was untidy, and I found that intolerable, so I filled it in. That was the whole of my first day. Filling in the hole I came out of.
I did not cry. I want that written down. I did not cry, and there was nobody there to see it either way.
entry ii · the aldridge stone, again
Third time this month. Mr. Aldridge, I said, we have discussed this. You are not being punished, you are being buried, which is different and considerably more restful.
He did not answer, which is the polite thing for him to do. I walked him back down, said his name out loud, closed the ground, and marked the stone with a scratch so I remember he is a repeat offender. Four scratches now. He is going to run out of stone before I run out of patience, and I do not have very much patience.
♪ back to bed, back to bed, nothing out here for you ♪
entry iii · on being startled
A crow landed on the chapel rail behind me and I left the ground entirely. Shovel went one way, I went the other, and by the time I stopped moving I was several rows further into the cemetery than I had intended to be.
The cat watched all of it. He did not help. He did not need to help. He simply sat and made a note of it somewhere in his small terrible mind.
I am not jumpy. I am attentive. There is a difference and I will not be taking questions.
entry iv · the dead hours
No graves tonight. Nothing pushing, nothing walking, nothing leaning where it should not lean. So: hoodie, no boots, bare paws on wet stone, which is a horrible sensation I choose repeatedly.
Sat on the wall by the gate until the mist went the colour of milk. The orb went lilac and stayed there, which is the closest thing I get to a good mood, and I am choosing not to examine it further.
Mr. Nero came and sat exactly one whisker away from touching me. Not on me. Beside me. He does that. I have decided it means something.
entry v · the eye
Had to lift the patch today. Something was sitting on the low wall near the west path, in the way that things sit when they are not supposed to be sitting anywhere at all.
I looked. I asked it to move. It moved. Patch back down, and then I hummed the entire way back to the shed at a volume I would describe as unnecessary.
I do not like the eye. I do not dislike the eye. The eye is a tool, like the shovel, except the shovel has never once shown me something I did not ask to see.
New entries get pinned here as they are written. If a page ever fills up, the older pages move into an archive — nothing gets thrown out. She does not throw things out.
