Free Before and Afterlives by Christopher Barzak

reminders, on the grave, pieces of themselves. A hand print. A piece of rose-colored glass. Two cigarettes standing up like fence posts. A baby rattle. Someone had scrawled a name across the bottom edge of the grave: Gracie Highsmith. A moment later I heard footsteps, and there she was in the flesh, coming toward me.
    I was perturbed, but not angry. Besides his family, I thought I’d be the only one to come visit. But here she was, this girl, who’d drawn her name in the dirt with her finger. Her letters looked soft; they curled into each other gently, with little flourishes for decoration. Did she think it mattered if she spelled her name pretty?
    I planted my hands on my hips as she approached and said, “Hey, what are you doing here?”
    Gracie blinked as if she’d never seen me before in her life. I could tell she wanted to say, “Excuse me? Who are you?” But what she did say was, “Visiting. I’m visiting. What ar e yo u doing here?”
    The wind picked up and blew hair across her face. She tucked it back behind her ears real neatly. I dropped my hands from my hips and nudged the ground with my shoe, not knowing how to answer. Gracie turned back to Jamie’s tom bstone.
    “Visiting,” I said finally, crossing my arms over my chest, annoyed I couldn’t come up with anything but the same a nswer she’d given.
    Gracie nodded without looking at me. She kept her eyes trained on Jamie’s grave, and I started to think maybe she was going to steal it. The headstone, that is. I mean, the girl co llected rocks. A headstone would complete any collection. I wondered if I should call the police, tell them, Get yourselves to the cemetery, you’ve got a burglary in progress. I imagined them taking Gracie out in handcuffs, making her duck her head as they tucked her into the back seat of the patrol car. I pinched myself to stop daydreaming, and when I woke back up, I found Gracie sobbing over the grave.
    I didn’t know how long she’d been crying, but she was g oing full force. I mean, this girl didn’t care if anyone was around to hear her. She bawled and screamed. I didn’t know what to do, but I thought maybe I should say something to calm her. I finally shouted, “Hey! Don’t do that!”
    But Gracie kept crying. She beat her fist in the dirt near her name.
    “Hey!” I repeated. “Didn’t you hear me? I said, Don’t do that!”
    But she still didn’t listen.
    So I started to dance. It was the first idea that came to me.
    I kicked my heels in the air and did a two-step. I hummed a tune to keep time. I clasped my hands together behind my back and did a jig, or an imitation of one, and when still none of my clowning distracted her, I started to sing the Hokey Pokey.
    I belted it out and kept on dancing. I sung each line like it was poetry. “You put your left foot in/You take your left foot out/You put your left foot in/And you shake it all about/You do the Hokey Pokey and you turn yourself around/That’s what it’s all about! Yeehaw!”
    As I sang and danced, I moved toward a freshly dug grave just a few plots down from Jamie’s. The headstone was a lready up, but there hadn’t been a funeral yet. The grave was waiting for Lola Peterson to fill it, but instead, as I shouted out the next verse, I stumbled in.
    I fell in the grave singing, “You put your whole self in—” and about choked on my own tongue when I landed. Even though it was still light out, it was dark in the grave, and muddy. My shoes sunk, and when I tried to pull them out, they made sucking noi ses. The air smelled stiff and leafy. I started to worry that I’d be stuck in Lola Peterson’s grave all night, because the walls around me were muddy too; I couldn’t get my footing. Finally, though, Gracie’s head appeared over the lip of the grave.
    “Are you okay?” she asked.
    Her hair fell down toward me like coils of rope.
    Gracie helped me out by getting a ladder from the cemetery tool shed. She told me I was a fool, but she laughed