Himself, he wanted to be buried at sea, though to be buried at sea you had to go to sea. The young man, being alive, was not afraid of body snatchers, but he feared the dead breaking out of their sepulchres. Bodies? No, not bodies: statuary, a stone or two, half a grieving angel’s granite wing. He was a teenager, uneasy among the living and not much better among the dead. The watchman was on the Avenue of Sorrows near where the babies were interred when he spotted her down the hill in the frost. The Gladstone bag beside her contained one abandoned corset, one small bowling ball, one slender candlepin, and, under a false bottom, fifteen pounds of gold. Even her skirt looked broken in two along its central axis, though it was merely divided, for cycling. A woman, stout, one bare fist held to her chin, white as a monument and soft as marble rubbed for luck. Soon everyone in town would know her, but for now it was as though she’d dropped from the sky. The body lay faceup near the obelisk that marked several generations of Pickersgills. An ice storm the day before had beheaded the daffodils, and the cemetery was draped in frost: midspring, Massachusetts, the turn of the century before last. They found a body in the Salford Cemetery, but aboveground and alive.
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