Today's Reading
Arizona shakes her head. "I could use a little more alone time."
"Your dad needed his space, too."
Arizona deepens her voice to impersonate her dad. "Sorry, honey, but the apple doesn't fall far from the tree."
Mom forces a chuckle, as if testing out the sound. "All right. Where will you go?"
Arizona shrugs. "Just wander. Find a place to read. Maybe check out the cemetery."
"Do you think that's a good idea? You know, so soon after..."
Arizona rolls her eyes and sighs. "I like the quiet."
"This is a ghost town, honey. The whole place is quiet."
"Why do you always have to question what I do? Like you don't trust me to make my own decisions."
"I'm just trying to protect you."
"Just because I have some disorders— "
"Differences," Mom says, "not disorders. And everyone is different."
"Whatever. I don't need to be protected. I'm not your sister. I'm not going to kill myself."
Mom sighs, looks at the ground, and dons her sunglasses. "Okay, sorry. How 'bout we meet at the Methodist Church at four? Then we can find a nice spot for...the ashes."
"Sure."
As her mom walks away, Arizona wonders if maybe she shouldn't have snapped at her. But Mom's been so friggin' clingy since Dad died. And Mom apologized, so she obviously knows she was in the wrong. Right?
Arizona sets her phone alarm and leads Mojo straight for the cemetery. They stroll through a sea of gray -green sagebrush scrub, its cool minty aroma heightened by nocturnal rain, the first of the season and so light that Arizona can count the raindrop pocks on the trail.
As they roam through the 150 marked graves, Mojo's tail says he's happy to be sniffing new things, even if they're headstones instead of hydrants. Cemetery tour complete, Arizona removes her pack and sits against a large monument.
"I need kisses, buddy," she says.
Mojo licks her face and she kisses his forehead. He curls up by her side, a contented look in his eyes.
"Good boy."
She opens her dad's worn paperback copy of Brave New World. Given the circumstances, the sardonic title feels downright contemptuous. But it's a way to keep Dad close, not to mention a darn good read.
Lost in the book, as usual, she doesn't know how much time has passed when a movement catches her eye. She watches the majestic bird alight on a headstone, feathers lustrous black, talons latching to miniature dimples in the wind-worn Sierra granite. "Corvus corax," she murmurs, before scowling at the more familiar name, common raven. There is nothing common about corvids, with a brain-to- body ratio that rivals that of the great apes.
The raven's goiter of shaggy throat feathers bobs, its beak opening and closing in silence— as if it whispers to the dead. How ironic that the world's largest songbird would whisper, but she understands. Cemeteries are sanctuaries, like libraries. She puts her book away, opens her pocket notebook, and writes.
Cemeteries are sanctuaries,
like libraries—
quiet, solitude, full of history.
Permanence of stone
to mark the impermanence of life,
like the written word does
for the fleeting spoken word.
Even though she is comfortable in sepulchral settings, this time does seem different. She scans her body, tries to determine what it is, where it comes from. She feels cold and...fragile? Like the veil of ice on a pond in early winter. Is it the cool stone behind her back? Or the wind? Certainly it's not that her mom was right.
...
