★ {ORION HARTMYRE} ★ D6 [FIN]

Senseless injustice, tread on heads like dust of the earth
Cut off the hands of the ones that are reaching out
Are we so calloused, these cries are going unheard?
This blood covers me just as much as you

★ { n a m e } orion solomon hartmyre
★ { a g e } eighteen
★ { g e n d e r } male
★ { l o c a t i o n } district six

They say this world is what I make of it
Am I the only one that wants to see a change?
I've turned my back on all my brothers dying in their broken homes
I dug the graves of the ones I am called to love

The mist that saturates the air around me and spirals down into my lungs is thick and cold, heavy with the many souls of the cemetery’s countless dead trapped within the tiny crystalline droplets. I can feel them, dancing just out of reach, ghostly fingers whispering across my skin in ethereal tendrils, spirits doomed to a never-ending waltz that has haunted me since the day my mother became one of them. Sometimes I think I can see her, drifting just out of my periphery, flickering and pulsing like the fire that had consumed her all those years ago in a house that now sits as all but a charred memory in the far reaches of my mind. They say I look like her, but I know that can't be true. She was beautiful. Even in death, her spirit radiates with a haunting luminosity that shines even in the fringes of my vision, but when glass-bottle blue eyes flick to catch even the tiniest glimpse, she flickers out like candlelight, and you'd think it was only a trick of the mist. And people wonder why the bags beneath my eyes are as dark and prominent as they have become.

At times like these, my fingers tighten around the handle of my shovel, the permanent calluses along the broadness of my palms digging into the dulled wood. My feet beat a steady rhythm against the hard-packed earth of the cemetery, trekking past the endless rows of cracked headstones, many swallowed up by weeds or the lettering dulled by time. I did not put these here - these weather-worn stones closest to the church have been here much longer than I have, a testament to time and its ability to wreak havoc on those that keep still for too long. Perhaps that's why I am constantly moving, pushing myself to always have something to do - a grave to dig, a body to bury, siblings to look after. It's a wonder that I have yet to crack beneath the weight of my responsibilities, as though the narrow slope of my shoulders couldn't possibly have the strength in them to carry it all. But years of bearing the weight of my family's needs - since the first day my fingers had curled around the handle of what had been my father's only shovel - have tightened the cords of muscle threaded beneath my skin and broadened my body into the strong frame it is today.

When I arrive at the site - a single patch of undisturbed soil on the far outskirts of the cemetery, a spindly oak tree to my right, its branches reaching skeletal hands upward into the sky as if begging for the sunlight it is so often deprived of in the near-constant fog of the cemetery grounds - I dig my shovel into the earth, sinking it deep into the soil before hefting it up with a grunt and depositing the disturbed soil off to the side. The veins beneath the skin of my arms bulge with each thrust of the shovel's long-dulled blade into the soil, icy blue against the paleness of my flesh. Despite the unearthly chill of the cemetery and the prevalent mist, before long sweat begins to form along my brow. My hair begins to stick to my forehead, dark chestnut strands wet against my skin. Dirt and grime begin to gather beneath my chewed stumps of my fingernails, and when I lift a hand to swipe at the moisture, it leaves a dark smudge across my face.

This is what I do. This is what I am. Damned to an eternity of servitude for Death itself, digging myself into a void six feet below the earth alongside the countless bodies of those I've buried in all my years as the care-taker of these haunted grounds. When I tilt my head upward I see a perfect rectangle of overcast sky, the bare branches of the oak tree trembling in the breeze, and I imagine the soil I've unearthed spilling down around me, flowing in like a murky brown current and dooming me to the same fate I've given to hundreds of cold and hollow-eyed corpses, and sometimes I wonder if that is where I truly belong.

We are forsaken, empty shells still fill our seats
How quick we choose to forget the desolation in the streets
I can't believe this that we still won't see the truth
I won't quietly sit and choose not to be moved

My father's soul departed from this world a long time ago, though his body still remains - a hollow shell of the man that had once been the sole caretaker of this cemetery and the family that resided within it. I remember the day when I first realized that the emptiness within his near-lifeless gaze was there to stay, a void that could never be filled by any of his children's efforts. I took the shovel that he had always kept propped up beside the church's front doors and trudged out into the field of cracked, faded headstones to an empty patch on the outer fringes, and I dug my very first grave. It had been just barely six feet deep, the edges more oval than rectangular and the ground at the bottom uneven and jagged against my back as I lay panting in its depths, my hands raw and bleeding from where the shovel's wooden handle had rubbed away the skin with each laborous thrust of its blade into the earth. I remember seeing the faces of my siblings as they gathered around the pit I'd dug myself into, their round faces peering down at me curiously, and I remember thinking this is it. We're on our own now.

And that's exactly what happened. With a mother who now sleeps six feet beneath the earth and a father who pines for the day he gets to join her, the Hartmyre family needed a guiding hand, someone to take the place of our ill-fated parents. And that someone became me. I've tried my hardest to be the constant among us, the one that keeps on pushing everyone to work hard, to never stop smiling, lest we become empty shells of ourselves just as our father has. At first, I had no idea what I was doing - running a family when I was hardly even a teenager myself, much less a man. But I learned. The weight of my responsibilities has never ceased to crush down onto my shoulders, a constant reminder that if I were to fail - just one slip up, one wrong decision -and the fragile strings that hold my family together would snap in the blink of an eye.

For a while, I thought I could handle it. I learned how to thrive under pressure, how to block out all my thoughts and worries and uncertainties and just simply be the best big brother I could be. But I can feel myself getting weaker, the crushing weight of our tiny ethereal world beginning to become too much to bear. Each shovelful of soil is heavier than the last, each finished grave more difficult to drag myself out of it. It's not that my muscles are beginning to fail me, but that my will is. It's as though each new grave dug is just one closer to my own, and it is, if you think about it. My father lost himself to this cemetery - it sucked all the life out of him, sapping him dry of his sanity, and I often wonder how much longer it will be before I follow in his footsteps.

This time, when the grave is complete and the sun has sunk further down into the suffocating fog of these haunted grounds, I do not lie down in the cool darkness of its depths and stare blankly skyward as I usually do. I heave myself up and out of the pit, arms straining to lift myself over its precipice and onto the dew-covered grass. I don't see the dark current of mud and grime pouring in from above or feel it crushing down on top of me, filling my lungs and freezing my limbs to the bone. Instead, when I turn to examine my work, I see my beloved siblings. They sit with their arms wrapped around their knees at the bottom of the pit, peering up at me with hollow eyes and still hearts, ghostly smiles frozen in pale perfection on their lips. I see the edges of the grave crumbling down on top of them, cascading in an earthy torrent as I throw the shovel to the ground, dropping to my knees and clawing desperately at the dirt that has begun to suffocate my brother and sisters beneath its weight as terror flows cold and striking through my body, and even after I find myself sitting upright in my bed, even after the scream that had been tearing from my throat dies on my lips as the world falls back into deathly silence, I still can't seem to convince myself that it was only a dream.

They say this world is what I make of it
Am I the only one that wants to see a change?
I've turned my back on all my brothers dying in their broken homes
I dug the graves of the ones I am called to love

I think I see my mother again, a flickering white shape out of the corner of my eye that seems painfully familiar. But when I turn my head it is only Esther, standing not twenty feet away with the tatters of her stolen wedding gown billowing in the wind, watching me as I work. I allow my eyes to simply graze over her before settling on a tombstone at her left, making it seem as though I hadn't looked right at her - she is most content when those around her believe she is the spirit of Esther Hartmyre, still trapped in the belief that she had died when she was five years old in the fire that also claimed the life of my mother. Of all my siblings, she is the most peculiar, but I suppose it's safe to say that we're all a little off our rockers, seeing as we live and work in a that reeks of death.

The sky is growing steadily darker as I make my way back towards the church, fingers curled around the dirt-encrusted handle of my shovel while I use the other hand to wipe at the thin layer of sweat across my forehead. Tinkling laughter floats to my ears on wind, the small form of little Clara dancing through the cemetery with an energy I don't ever remember possessing as a child. It must be so easy for her, to not have to work, to have not known our mother well enough the miss her quite as much as I or some of my other siblings do. I was eight years old when my childhood went up in a cloud of smoke, eight years old when our father moved us to this dismal church in this forsaken cemetery. Eight years later, he left us just like his wife did, spending his days sitting as unmovable and silent as a tombstone just a few meters away from the church's front doors, eyes as blank and unresponsive as the ones that belong to the many corpses buried in these grounds, buried by me. He's just as dead as our mother is, if not even more so.

The doors to the church creak loudly as I push them open, propping my shovel up against one of the old wooden pews that stand in uniform rows throughout the darkened sanctuary, long emptied of its former congregation. The floor creaks and moans with every step I take down the aisle, the stained glass windows depicting a god that must have abandoned us a long, long time ago. Despite the chill that this room allows to creep into my veins, it is warm - something I have Beatrice to thank for in her long hours spent sitting in the basement, tending to the furnace. An open casket sits before the cross at the front of the room, freshly carved and painted in a way that whispers Theodore in the silence of this deserted sanctum. The body is missing, probably laid out on a table in one of the church's many dark and somber rooms as Florence prepares it for burial. How futile it all seems, Beatrice keeping warm a home that isn't really a home, Theodore creating such exquisite works of art that can only be appreciated for a short time before being lowered into the earth, each one containing a body beautifully primped and prepared only to soon rot six feet beneath our feet in its permanent resting place, never to be seen again. I often wonder, never aloud and always to myself, what even is the point of it all?

What's the point, spending all hours of the day laboring in the graveyard, digging and digging graves for people who can't even appreciate the work put in by us for their burial, for people who come and mourn and lament the loss of a loved one only to go just as quickly, often returning years later to be prepared for just the same fate? It seems so pointless, all of it - working with the dead until the day that we join them - we're trying to make a living, but is this really even considered living? I know we deserve something else, something more than this, but for now I'll have to endure it - endure the doubt and the sorrow and the meaninglessness of our existence, if only for them, for the people I love. I'll keep working for whatever happiness they can salvage from this life, until the day that the one that Florence dresses and preens, the one lowered into the ground within a beautifully carved casket and buried alongside the cemetery's countless dead, the one that sits beneath the earth as Clara plays and Esther haunts and my father sits and stares, is me.

Come stand with me, I'll never walk alone
My words are not enough, I will love the unloved
Come stand with us, we'll never walk alone
Our words are not enough, we'll love the unloved
We'll love the unloved

★ { o t h e r } ★

★ { f a c e } james hampson
★ { p l o t s } clover's hartmyre family plot
★ { s o n g } digging graves by close your eyes
★ { c o d e } oDair