Stones

Imagine the ghosts who relive again and again the violence of their deaths, the emptiness of their mouths dark with dirt or dark with the absence of a mouth. Dead mouths because their mouths are gone, because their mouths are murdered. These are the mouths that have been fed a dinner of stones. After a dinner of stones, these are the mouths that are left.

Imagine the dark shaping a cycle of words, unreadable. To be unheard is to be haunted, the ghost in your own house, the house the body, the body the grave, the grave the ghost, the ghost the absence, and we are back again at the beginning again: imagine the ghosts.

The ghosts are men. The ghost are women. The ghost are the bodies buried with nothing to make them known. The ghosts are the words that are unheard. The ghost are the records that are recorded incorrectly. The ghost are the holes worn in the elbows of history’s most comfortable clothes. The ghosts are absent. The ghosts are the black obliteration of mouths. The ghosts are haunting the wet caves where tongues once hibernated through long winter to emerge again to sing in the warmth of spring.

Tonight, it is October, and the sunset is as orange as anyone could want it to be. The passage of time is vivid, the sky draping its blank body in skeins of color. Take a pretty picture at whatever moment is your preference. Orange is one option, orange in October, but the sky offers pink too, or candy stripes, red like split skin, like lashes, and there is an ashes-of-lavender half an hour, bleeding upward in thin threads like smoke toward brackish night black—my favorite, this, the color of a peaceful hour’s sleep.

Giles Corey, pressed to death under the weight of stones stacked on his stripped and supine body—not for witchcraft, as is commonly believed, but for his refusal to enter a plea of innocence or guilt—beat a servant to death with a stick. Ten days passed, all with striking sunsets, all with starry skies and sweet smoke curling from the chimney, deer delicate in the fields, hens dozing safe on the roost above the pointed face of a fox, all while the beaten servant swelled and seeped the fluids of his body onto a spread of rank than ranker and ranker hay. On the eleventh day, Corey did call for a doctor, but the beaten man was by then, already as good as dead, some might say that he was already a murdered man, though he was still wetly whistling through a blotted-out mouth.

This is history, as is how, stacked with stones, suffering three days of slow crushing for his refusal, Corey’s tongue protruded purple from his mouth and was pushed back in by the sheriff with his walking stick.

Jenny Irish is from Maine and lives in Arizona. She is the author of the collections Common Ancestor and I Am Faithful.