walking at night

They leave their front doors open in the summer, and beyond the dark hallways, you might make out a glow coming from the back of the house. There are toys on the lawn, and bundled bikes; there are wind chimes, and haphazard constellations of bright stickers on the windows behind which children are sleeping. Once in a while, on the front porch, you can spy an old car seat, like a throne.

Sometimes there are voices: people you can't quite make out, on a balcony somewhere above you, whispering mysterious, intimate things. Leaves rustle in the breeze, which, for a moment, trails a faint whiff of reefer; a fat man is watching an infomercial on television, sitting alone in a darkened room.

"May you be healthy. May you be happy. May you be well-loved," you mutter, as a car passes.

You bless the banal, secret lives sheltering behind the flimsy walls that line the streets and alleys of Verdun. And you are genuinely moved, because, as your restlessness carries you still deeper into the forest of the night, you realize that with every step, you are coming closer to the place where the tyger burns and darkness gathers.

very old bones

It used to scare me, going down to the crypt. But I liked it too: the peculiar earthy smell that became more intense as you walked down the shaky wooden steps; the sense that you were leaving behind the mundane world where the noon sun bathed the shadeless village square, cooking your parent's rental car, as you descended into a cool and unsettling nether region — where the mummies were.

During the Wars of Religion there were massacres in the Forez, near where my paternal grandparents used to live. In 1562, the dread François de Beaumont, baron des Adrets, a Protestant captain infamous for his wanton cruelty, cut a bloody swath through the region, brutally burning down castles, sacking churches, and executing the vanquished by forcing them to jump from their town walls onto upheld spikes. The "mummies" might have been the victims of his exactions. Perhaps they were walled in? Perhaps still alive? That was the story anyways. The remains were naturally preserved by the potassium alum and arsenic in the ground.

We would go to the crypt, and then we would drive on a winding mountain road for a while, until we arrived at a path. You could walk down into the woods, by a stream, and all of a sudden you would be overlooking a waterfall, which gushed down quietly into a river valley bellow. The prospect stretched, lush and green, into the distance. And you could clamber down the soft incline of the rock face, till you touched the cool running water.

And the sun kept shining, and the cicadas kept calling, and the breeze kept blowing, and your mother still warned "be careful," but you — you remembered the mummies.