Potter's Field
Title: Potter's Field
Characters/Pairing: Maya
Rating: PG
Word count: 553
Disclaimer: Do not own.
Summery: Her brother, John Doe.
Note: I think this is what would have happened to Ale.
In the Potter's Field the dead are not commemorated with gravestones or mausoleums but by simple numbered markers. Headstones are focal points for mourners to visit their loved ones, to remember. Epitaphs for all to read. Potter's Fields offer no such opportunity, where the dead are a homogeneous city of the unknown, indigent and forgotten.
On Hart Island, at the northern tip, trenches are dug and the dead are stacked up in threes and along a row to conserve space, all preformed by the weekly detail of prison inmates for a small wage. Positioned at the south of the island a large red brick building called The Pavilion stands surrounded by trees, it's windows gaping open blindly. It had once been an Asylum for insane women, some hundred years ago. It had also once been a small village for the workers and guards, with street lamps and roads but now it's all silent, sad and still. Eerily so. A pyramid like church stands upright and sturdy but it's flower shaped window is missing it's stain-glass. On the alter she had spotted two upturned milk crates standing together, topped with two untouched grenades. The basement holds even more, remnants from POW camps.
This Island had been many things over the years but the fields touch everything, surreal with a breath of wistfulness. In the summer the grass grows high so that it has to be sheared back in needed places. Where it's not Blue Asters bloom in droves, clustering around the deserted and haunted buildings. (Micah tells her that Aster means star in Latin, that these are star fields. Maya thinks that's beautiful, strange and fitting for such an otherwordly place.)
In the Dominican Republic, when her mother died, they practised Novena. Nice days of mourning and prayer, ceremonies, Mass and public displays of wailing grief from people she and her brother had never seen before. This place that Alejandro is laid to rest is consecrated ground but it doesn't make Maya feel any real sense of alleviation. Because there is no rest for him, there's no rest for her while his murderer, her betrayer, is still walking free.
Judas was buried in such a place and now so was her twin. No Requiems, no elegies, nothing to note his passing. She has nothing of her brother but a creased photo. Her brother had bled out his life in a rundown motel, alone but meters away from her and the injustice of it fills her with fury.
Maya visits this private place, aimlessly walking around the thousands of concrete markers that lay spread out at her feet, wishing they would tell her something. Micah had tried to help but her brother had got swallowed up in the System, an unsolved, shelved and murdered John Doe. They would have waited two weeks for someone to claim him but Maya never did. Maya couldn't. But he was here somewhere, would possibly never be disinterred but Maya couldn't give up. She wants her twin to know that she is sorry for the way they parted, she wants him to know that she loved him more then anyone. She tells him that she'll join him here one day, placed in the same ground.
One day she is certain that Gabriel would end up here to: unnamed, unlamented and unloved.
Characters/Pairing: Maya
Rating: PG
Word count: 553
Disclaimer: Do not own.
Summery: Her brother, John Doe.
Note: I think this is what would have happened to Ale.
In the Potter's Field the dead are not commemorated with gravestones or mausoleums but by simple numbered markers. Headstones are focal points for mourners to visit their loved ones, to remember. Epitaphs for all to read. Potter's Fields offer no such opportunity, where the dead are a homogeneous city of the unknown, indigent and forgotten.
On Hart Island, at the northern tip, trenches are dug and the dead are stacked up in threes and along a row to conserve space, all preformed by the weekly detail of prison inmates for a small wage. Positioned at the south of the island a large red brick building called The Pavilion stands surrounded by trees, it's windows gaping open blindly. It had once been an Asylum for insane women, some hundred years ago. It had also once been a small village for the workers and guards, with street lamps and roads but now it's all silent, sad and still. Eerily so. A pyramid like church stands upright and sturdy but it's flower shaped window is missing it's stain-glass. On the alter she had spotted two upturned milk crates standing together, topped with two untouched grenades. The basement holds even more, remnants from POW camps.
This Island had been many things over the years but the fields touch everything, surreal with a breath of wistfulness. In the summer the grass grows high so that it has to be sheared back in needed places. Where it's not Blue Asters bloom in droves, clustering around the deserted and haunted buildings. (Micah tells her that Aster means star in Latin, that these are star fields. Maya thinks that's beautiful, strange and fitting for such an otherwordly place.)
In the Dominican Republic, when her mother died, they practised Novena. Nice days of mourning and prayer, ceremonies, Mass and public displays of wailing grief from people she and her brother had never seen before. This place that Alejandro is laid to rest is consecrated ground but it doesn't make Maya feel any real sense of alleviation. Because there is no rest for him, there's no rest for her while his murderer, her betrayer, is still walking free.
Judas was buried in such a place and now so was her twin. No Requiems, no elegies, nothing to note his passing. She has nothing of her brother but a creased photo. Her brother had bled out his life in a rundown motel, alone but meters away from her and the injustice of it fills her with fury.
Maya visits this private place, aimlessly walking around the thousands of concrete markers that lay spread out at her feet, wishing they would tell her something. Micah had tried to help but her brother had got swallowed up in the System, an unsolved, shelved and murdered John Doe. They would have waited two weeks for someone to claim him but Maya never did. Maya couldn't. But he was here somewhere, would possibly never be disinterred but Maya couldn't give up. She wants her twin to know that she is sorry for the way they parted, she wants him to know that she loved him more then anyone. She tells him that she'll join him here one day, placed in the same ground.
One day she is certain that Gabriel would end up here to: unnamed, unlamented and unloved.