Graham never felt more lonely than when he stood in the center of Lander Cemetery, watching the mist roll over the fields. The exact middle of the vaguely roundish cemetery was marked by a tall, Gothic mausoleum, built ages ago by some rich family no one knew the name of anymore. Graham didn’t mind being lonely, at least not here. He liked to stand on the mausoleum’s front stoop, leaning against the wrought-iron doors, listening to the wind gust through the trees and rattle the padlock that kept the structure sealed. He liked to look up at the overhanging roof, with its decaying slate tiles and moss-covered stone. It reminded him of the first time he’d ever heard the word Gothic in relation to a building and not a teenager — sitting in community college architecture appreciation class, looking at a slideshow of castles.

If Graham had had his way, he would have gone to college and become an architect himself. He loved the idea of building things, creating with his own two hands, drawing something technical and perfect on a piece of paper and then watching it come to life before his very eyes. But people from Lander don’t go to college, his mother had gently reminded him, standing in their kitchen with his younger sister on her hip. The best he could do was trade school, maybe an Associate’s if he worked hard and saved his money.

Now, all of that seemed like several lifetimes ago. In a way, it was. Graham was sixty now, as of one month and eight days ago. Soon he would have to retire, as the work he did here was beginning to warp his weathered fingers. Every morning it seemed he could hear and feel a new vertebrae creaking in his back. This particular morning, he’d awoken with an ache between his shoulder blades, and his wife, Esme, had urged him to call in sick. You’ll do nothing but harm if you go to work, Graham, she’d scolded, reminding him of the doctor’s orders. But he waved his hand at her and put on his jeans and his muddied boots and got in the cab of his truck anyway. She was mad at him, he knew, when she hadn’t poured coffee into his travel mug and laid out the customary two packets of Splenda on the countertop next to his bagged lunch. He’d had to fish them from the worn wooden cabinet himself.

The ache persisted even now, as he stood with his back pressed against the mausoleum door. Graham sighed and looked at the shovel propped up beside him, then down at his creased hands. Digging graveyard dirt had a way of staining skin, leaving it the same color as the soil, like the earth was claiming some small part of him prematurely. When new diggers were hired, Graham always looked at their unstained palms with something between amusement and sadness. His father had always said that you could tell a lot about a man by his shoes and his hands. Some of the younger men had baby soft hands, the kind that had never labored over a shovel like Graham, or hand-planed a piece of wood like his father. Some of them showed up to their first day of work wearing white socks and tennis shoes, smiling at him with their straight white teeth and superficial arm muscles. Graham always out-dug them, working longer without stopping, moving more earth and dripping more sweat. Soon, he knew, that would not be the case. He’d already thought about that and come to a conclusion. The day a younger man outdid him, he’d retire. Not a day sooner.

Wiping his hands on his jeans, Graham looked up at the cemetery around him. It was a foggy day. Headstones and statues poked up through the mist like splatters of black paint on a grey canvas. He knew each of them by name. In his thirty years at the cemetery, plenty of new stones had arrived, plenty of new names had been carved on family plots. On his daily rounds, he made a point of it to scan the new stones and memorize their locations among the masses. Graham thought of it as part of his job to know them, to care for them. Some plots had never been visited in all the time he’d worked here. He swept the leaves away from them in the fall and brushed the snow off in winter, cut the grass and weeds back in the spring and summer, reading their name every day. As long as he did that, he thought, there would be at least one person this side of the earth who knew it.

A footstep to Graham’s right snapped him back from his thoughts. He instinctively cleared his throat to let the other person know he was there. He’d learned a long time ago that it was best to make your presence known in a place like this. Some people don’t take well to being surprised in a cemetery. From around the corner of the mausoleum, a figure appeared in his periphery. He turned his head slightly to acknowledge its presence. Much to his surprise, he found a pair of eyes looking back at him.

They were blue and set squarely in the head of a pretty woman, no more than thirty-five. Her face was framed by long dark hair, and she was wrapped in a long black coat. She pulled back her ruby lips and smiled at him. Graham swallowed and his lips twitched in reply.

“Hello,” the woman said, her voice soft and melodic.

“Hello,” Graham said back.

He was trying very hard to be polite. He knew that some people are very lonely after losing someone. They’ll try to talk to anyone they see, including cemetery maintenance men who are trying to enjoy the peace and quiet.

“Lovely day,” the woman said.

“Yes, it is,” he said, looking out over the mist. He twisted his hands together and tried not to stare at her. She simply peered around them with a small smile on her face. Graham couldn’t help but think there was something off-putting about her, but he couldn’t place it. He didn’t want to seem like he was analyzing her.

“Is there something I can help you with?” he asked after a silence that felt like ages. Perhaps she was trying to find a specific plot.

“No,” she said simply. Graham felt a knot begin to tie itself in his stomach.

“Oh,” he murmured. He wasn’t sure what else to say. A growing sense of dread was rising in his gut. He didn’t know why. He’d always been the type to be nervous around strangers and ended up not saying much, even when he meant to contribute to the conversation. But this was different. Looking at her made a chill run up the back of his neck. Suddenly he was even more aware of the pain in his back. Graham shifted his weight between the balls of his feet.

“Do you have someone here?” he asked, trying once more to understand why she was there. Perhaps if he could find the reason for her presence, he could point her in some other direction than his.

“Oh, yes,” she said. “Everyone here is mine, I suppose.” Graham felt like he was going to be sick.

“Pa… Pardon me?” he stammered. She smiled a bit, eyes drifting from his face down to his feet and then back out into the field before them.

“Oh, you know… We’re all connected in some way,” she said.

Graham felt a bead of sweat dripping down his temple, even though it was only forty degrees outside. He was practically begging himself to calm down, trying to reason through the situation. Maybe she’s just one of those hippie spiritual types. Maybe she just likes graveyards.

“Don’t you think so?” she prodded him.

“I… I suppose so, in the grand scheme of things,” he said flatly, trying to steady his voice. There was a moment of stillness.

“What do you think happens after we die?”

“Ah, well… I haven’t thought much about it, miss,” he said, reaching down and wrapping his fingers around his shovel. His knuckles turned white. If the woman noticed his movement, she gave no hint. She just smiled at him.

“But you’re sick, aren’t you? Surely you’ve thought about it.”

If Graham had been calm up to this point, all semblance of that was gone now. The breath caught in his lungs and in his throat, and he made a gulping sound when he tried to inhale. His tongue felt like a cotton ball. He gripped the shovel handle even harder.

“How…” he began, but could not find the strength to continue.

“You’ve got bags under your eyes, and you’re sallow… And you’ve lost weight recently, as you’re wearing your belt at the tightest loop it can go, but there’s a wear mark three holes up. You’ve only recently tightened it, haven’t you?”

Graham looked down and saw that she was correct — the leather of his old black belt was creased and worn exactly where she had said it was. Without thinking, his hand traced the divot back and forth. Something in his stomach churned, and the fear in his gut turned to something like sadness. His shoulders relaxed, but only slightly.

“Yes,” he said quietly. “I am sick.”

The woman’s mouth twisted into a sympathetic smile, but Graham saw sadness in her eyes. It was the kind of expression someone gave when they knew the answer to their inquiry before asking, but knew that asking was more polite.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

Graham felt a strange calm settle over him. He couldn’t help but think about all the times he’d hear those words in the coming months. He knew his test results were due back any day, and he knew it wouldn’t be good. Cancer, maybe, or a heart condition, or something of the sort. The only person who knew so far was his wife, but he knew he’d soon have to call and tell their son, Vince, and then all of his siblings, and Esme’s family. The neighbors would find out, of course. And the people at church.

He wondered how many people would give him that sad, knowing look when his hair fell out, when his eyebrows and beard stopped growing because of the poison being pumped through his veins to kill the marauding cells. He wondered how many strangers would give him their bus seats or their spot in line at the grocery store, all while wearing that same expression. He wondered how many times it would take before the words I’m sorry started to make his skin itch like poison ivy.

“I don’t want people to feel sorry for me,” he blurted. “I don’t want to be treated like an old man.” The woman cocked her head at him like a curious dog.

“Don’t you think you’ve earned it?” she asked. “The respect that comes with age.”

Graham looked up at her with a frown. The stark contrast between her dark hair and her pale face reminded him of an old black and white photo, like the yellowing family portraits hanging in his hallways at home. He didn’t know why he wasn’t nervous anymore. It almost made him nervous to not be nervous, but that foreign calmness was hanging over him still. He wondered if it would ever leave.

“Respect? Sure… But that’s not the same thing as being treated like an old person.”

“Don’t you think people honor their elders?” she asked.

“Honor is a funny way of calling it,” Graham replied. “When you get old enough, people start making all these damn plans about you, without even asking you how you feel about it.”

He’d seen it when his father was sick. Twenty years ago now, he realized with a pang of grief. When his father had been in the last months of dementia, Graham and his siblings had gotten together to make nursing home and hospice arrangements. All the most morbid tasks had fallen to the Graham, since he was the oldest. Going through box after box of old photos and paperwork trying to find his father’s will, deciding who would get which antique, donating his father’s old clothes to Goodwill. Things no one else wanted to touch, afraid the memories might seep into their skin like ink. All the while, they planned their father’s final days right in front of him, without even asking him how he’d like to be dressed in his coffin, or how he’d like the photos to be arranged at the funeral.

Dad doesn’t even remember who we are most days, Graham’s youngest sister had told him. Do you honestly think he’ll be lucid enough to tell us these things?

Maybe not, Graham had thought, but you’ll never know until you ask him, will you?

These were the images that were plastered behind Graham’s eyelids when he pressed them shut in the middle of the night, as he was trying to ignore the screaming questions swirling in his brain. His rough-handed carpenter of a father, wrinkled and small and fragile, sitting in a padded wheelchair, wearing three sweaters because he couldn’t keep the heat in his bones anymore. Graham cried when his father died, but it was just as much in relief as it was in sadness.

He felt a sour taste rise in his mouth, and he fought the urge to spit into the dirt.

“It doesn’t have to be that way, you know,” the woman said gently. Graham realized he must have been making a face.

“Hmm?” Graham hummed, looking up into her sky-blue eyes.

“There are many options in death, especially these days.”

“You mean people being turned into jewelry, or in one of those pods that turns into a tree or something?”

“Mhm. And wills that state your preferences in your twilight moments, even when you are no longer able to voice the choice yourself.”

Graham sighed. The woman just kept looking at him. She had a piercing stare, he thought. It wasn’t frightening or anything. Just... intense, in that unblinking way that birds and animals stare at something they find interesting.

A thought wandered through his mind. What if he didn’t die from this illness, and he was planning things that didn’t need planned? There was always a chance, wasn’t there? Graham took a breath, looked at his still-white knuckles. His back hurt. He supposed he’d find out in a few days. As much as he wished the thought comforted him, he realized that he and this stranger had been speaking in terms of finality until this point, and he hadn’t questioned it. It hadn’t even startled him. Perhaps there was a part of him that already knew.

“Options,” he said out loud, letting the word slide off his tongue. “It’s funny, isn’t it? All these choices, surrounding the one thing you can’t choose.”

The woman gave a half-smile and then looked back out at the mist. The sun was beginning to rise higher now, and Graham knew that soon the fog would dissipate. He always hated to see it go.

“Where does all this mist come from?” she asked.

“There’s a river back behind the cemetery,” Graham said. “It rolls in from there.”

“Ahh… Would you mind taking me there? I’d like to see it.” Graham nodded his agreement.

“It’s just over this way,” he said, motioning for the woman to follow him as he walked out into the cemetery, shovel in hand. He led her down one of the many cement paths that spiderwebbed out from the mausoleum, leading deep into the forgotten corners of the graveyard. For the first few minutes, they were silent.

“I never got your name, miss,” Graham said suddenly. The woman smiled to herself, keeping her eyes forward.

“Lora,” she said. In the stillness of the misty morning, her voice seemed to ring off the headstones. It was eerie, he thought. He never liked to talk much when he was at work because of the way voices carried here. And it wasn’t like he had many coworkers to speak to.

“Graham,” he said back. She flicked the corner of her mouth up, but still did not look at him. The silence settled back into its resting place between them. The only noise was their shoes clicking against the pavement and the far-off chirping of robins and warblers.

“Is it always this empty?” Lora asked, peering around them.

“In the morning, yeah,” Graham said. “People usually come around lunch, if at all. Busier on the weekends.”

Lora nodded, pulling her coat tighter around herself with her thin, white fingers. There was no wind, but her hair seemed to move as if there were a slight breeze moving through it. Graham found himself looking at her from the corner of his eye, as if waiting for something to happen, for her to do something. But she did nothing, only walked, following his lead. They passed a small thicket of oak and maple trees whose limbs dangled over a patch of very old graves.

“How old is this cemetery?” Lora asked, looking at the headstones.

“First grave goes back to 1835,” Graham said. He pointed at the graves under the trees. “These ones here are from around then.”

Lora hummed to herself and kept walking. Graham didn’t say anything. He was protective of these graves, and the rest of the oldest ones. They were the ones he brushed leaves and dirt off of the most. When the newer graves went unvisited, Graham could curse to himself and blame the family, get angry over how little some folks care for the dead. But these graves, some so old that the engravings had worn off with water and wind, were lonely in a different way. There was no one to blame when no one visited. There was no one to be angry with. Everyone who cared about these stones was probably buried here, too.

In a few more minutes, they reached the river. It was more like a large stream than a river, really. Graham could see straight to the bottom on days when the water ran clear. It was on the clear side today, despite the mist blanketing the surface. But there were no fish or frogs to be seen darting around. Too cold. They were all buried down in the mud, waiting for spring to be fully sprung.

When they arrived, Lora found a large, dry-ish rock on the riverbank and sat on it, looking out at the fog-covered water. Graham pressed the blade of his shovel into the soft earth at his foot. He stood beside her, watching.

“Do you come here often?” Lora asked.

“I try to,” he said. “On my lunch, or when there isn’t anything to do… Although, there’s almost always things to do.”

A few moments passed, and then a rustling from the other side of the stream caught their attention. They watched as a small brown and grey rabbit emerged from under a bush. It scurried a few feet until it found something interesting and began sniffing the ground, its little nose bouncing, whiskers twitching. Neither of them spoke for a few seconds.

“I’ve always thought it would be very nice to have one’s ashes scattered in a river like this,” Lora said quietly. Graham looked at her with a worried crease deepening in his forehead.

“Why?” he asked.

“Look,” she said, pointing at the rabbit, who was chewing on a piece of grass. “He’s fed by the river, just like everything around here is. If you become part of the river, you also become part of everything else.”

Graham thought about fish and insects and birds eating little bits of a person, and he felt a chill run down his spine. He knew that was probably what nature intended — come from the earth, go back to the earth, all that. It was beautiful in a way, he admitted, being able to say that your body turned into the grass that helped a rabbit feed its little rabbit family. Or being present in the sip of water that a fox takes from the stream, so it can go and find a squirrel to eat. Or even being taken up into a cloud and rained out, stormed out, all of your cells turning to drops of water or crystalline snowflakes. But still, Graham thought, there was something vaguely horrible about the idea of your ashes being something else’s nourishment.

“I guess it’s better than being left in the ground,” he said finally. Now that he thought of it, he had always thought it strange that people were buried in clothes that someone else could have worn, with things other people could have used.

They watched the rabbit as it chewed its breakfast. Usually when he was with another person but not talking to them, Graham felt the urge to say something, anything, to break the silence. But here, he felt comfortable just sitting with his thoughts, watching the little rabbit. It was almost like there was no one next to him, like he was alone on this riverbank like normal.

“Have you ever thought about reincarnation?” Lora asked.

“You mean getting reborn as something else after you die?” Graham said. “Not really.”

“I think it’s a beautiful idea,” she said. “Almost like getting another chance to fix your mistakes, even though they weren’t really yours.”

Mistakes, Graham thought. He didn’t know if that was the right term. It seemed to him that there were things in life you just couldn’t control, things that you wanted that you never got for some reason or another. He guessed that some things really were mistakes — drunk driving, shoplifting, things teenagers do when they want attention or feel like they can’t do anything else. But even then, people tend to do those things because they feel lost. Out of control. Graham felt the ache in his back get sharper, like someone had pressed their thumb into his tender muscles. He sighed.

Regrets was probably the better word, he decided. He had plenty of those. Getting too drunk at his sister’s wedding and making her cry, not visiting his father enough before he inevitably forgot his son, working too much while his own son was young. Not going to college and becoming an architect. Never seeing even one of his hundreds of sketches of buildings become a real, tangible structure. Maybe, he thought wistfully, he’d be an architect in some future life.

Graham realized that the rabbit had moved away from the patch of ground he’d been staring at. He blinked once and looked around, but the animal was gone. Lora was still looking serenely out onto the water, like she had no cares in the world except this trickling river and its creatures.

“I’d better be going,” Lora said quietly, rising from the rock in one swift motion. Graham nodded and turned to leave. As Lora passed him, walking back toward the cement paths, he turned and looked over his shoulder. He wasn’t sure what he was trying to see, or what he thought he’d find, but all that greeted him was the tranquil water, babbling over the rocks on its bed and the logs that had fallen into its path. He turned around and walked with Lora back into the cemetery.

“Would you like me to help you back to your car?” Graham asked as they reached the mausoleum. The fog had faded, like condensation disappearing from a bathroom mirror, and fully unveiled the landscape around them. The wind picked up, a powerful gust rustling through the gnarled tree branches and stirring up autumn’s leftover leaves around their feet. Graham reached up and held down his hat, squinting against the sudden wind.

“That won’t be necessary,” Lora said with a sincere smile. Her dark hair whipped around her face. “It was lovely talking with you.”

Graham smiled, and pulled his shovel a little closer to him.

“And with you,” he replied. And he meant it.

Lora turned and began walking off in the same direction she’d appeared from. Graham looked down at his boots, noting the new layer of mud that had accumulated on them from the walk. The wind died down around his ears, and the leaves settled back down onto the grass and pavement. The eerie stillness returned. Graham looked up and scanned the cemetery. Lora was gone.