justprompts--Picture Prompt: Cemetery
It was foggy, dark, and it was threatening to rain more than it had in ten years; the weather was textbook for spending a night walking through a cemetery, but Jess knew that if she didn’t do it now, she wouldn’t have a chance later. Curiosity may have killed the cat in the past, but the cat figured that if she waited until midnight on a day where bad weather was an understatement to go searching the graveyard for her own grave, she might have a chance of surviving this time.
As Jess hugged her raincoat tighter around herself, she almost regretted her decision to do this. She knew she couldn’t risk doing it when it was day, and she’d heard stories of what crazy goth teenagers got up to at midnight during the drier nights. Who knows who might recognize her? She was getting better at lying, since it was all she seemed to be doing now, but she had a sneaking suspicion that the people in her town, who’d known her all her life, could easily see through anything she tried to put past them.
Then she found it. It was an unremarkable piece of land, and nothing about it stood out from the graves around it. She knelt down, and smiled when she read the inscription on the headstone. It must have been her mom’s doing; her dad would never come up with anything that short and sweet. She ran her fingers over the dates, tearing up a little as she thought about what her family must be doing now. How they must have felt after it happened.
There were flowers, too, around her grave. A little more flowers than were around the graves, and they looked fresher, too. She laughed a little when she noticed no roses, but a good assortment of daffodils, tulips, sunflowers, and things she didn’t know the names of. She’d never been much of a flower person to begin with, but she had always thought roses were overdone and tired. The lack of them made her grave stand out from the rose-laden ones that surrounded hers.
She didn’t stay too long, because the weather was getting worse, the graveyard was starting to feel creepier, and standing at her own grave was surprisingly painful. She was starting to get a headache. She picked up a sunflower as she stood up, knowing that her mom had brought them, and it was the closest thing she could get to having contact with her family; she intended to keep it with her until it dried out completely.
She brushed off her raincoat, put on her hood, and took one last look at her grave before turning and leaving.