I found music beneath the cobwebs of memories long forgotten while tree trunks thick with age rings and moss creaked above the burial plot, arthritic from holding up the sky for so long. I heard the earthworms before I saw them, pushing dirt out from below as they swirled their faceless torsos to the clouds in prayers for rain. Their bodies slinked in and stretched out like fleshy mauve accordions and I kicked a pile of dirt on top of them. Another layer for them to fight against the way I shoveled through six feet of soil, only to find disappointment in a rotting casket; another survivor gone missing again in some universal irony.

Their bodies had been disappearing for months, leaving gaping chasms in the history of the earth’s surface. Dirt and rose petals littered the velvet lining of the caskets and no one had figured out the relevance of the petals yet. They were laid out in a rainbow menagerie body outline – normal red and whites mixed with cerulean blues and greens the color of life-providing stems showing the final resting position of the inhabitant of the pillowy innards.

We couldn’t figure out how they had done it as the ground around seemed to be untouched, but the thefts had been recent and grandiose in other cities. Letters scrawled in old English sent to newspaper editors and stuck to police chief doors by old knives with new blades. Interpol chalked it up to high school pranksters, but we started getting wise when more of them started disappearing in this manner. The manpower and money involved far exceeded what any high school student could accomplish, and the bravado of the unearthings took a certain kind of individual.

I climbed out of the plot, feeling dry dirt fall into the top of my socks as my partner pulled me out. Together, we spent the afternoon piling the dirt back on after having photographed the inside of the casket and collecting the petals. They wouldn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know. None of the others had, but procedure trumped assumption and we worked until the stars sparkled above the cemetery valley. We left with tired faces, dirty and sweat-streaked from hours of trying to put memories back to rest.

We left, shovels over shoulders, to the car. We parked it a mile away, just outside the cemetery gates, out of respect. Each footstep through clover woke another thought as the shovels bounced up and down on our already sore clavicles. We marched past rows and rows of headstones, most weathered hard from years of being in the same spot and having had the names and dates erased. More memories stolen by the slow, angry erosion of thunderstorms and wind. More memories erased and forgotten the longer they sat. More memories waiting to be unearthed and committed to paper. More memories seeping through packed soil in an attempt to taste freedom from their cells below.

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