October 13, 2022   •   By Jason Namey

He was thin and almost hairless. The slats of his ribcage threatening to burst the skin. The hair on his head grew like strands of eelgrass. He had dark pebbly eyes that didn’t see well. Coke-bottle glasses that he probably found somewhere. A jutting brow and a bent nose, a patchy beard and an incomplete set of long jaundiced teeth.

The full moon had crested the canopy of trees and flooded the graveyard in an aluminum light. Each headstone threw a spectral shadow over the wet grass. Many were coated in lichen. Some of the nicer ones, carved in marble, were polished and stood gleaming in the night, catching the light of the moon and winking it back so brightly that when Rigby closed his eyes he saw hundreds of moons burned into his eyelids. The crickets out there quit at his coming and commenced again behind him. At one point he climbed atop a headstone and turned back and saw his footprints in the dew vanish like a ghost returning to the grave.

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