SKELETONS ON THE SHELVES.
On my country, you don’t “buy” a place in the graveyard, you just “rent” it, put simple, your family has to pay maintenance fees every year, or your remains will be dig and put in an ossuary, the final resting place of those who don’t pay their bills. It’s a disturbing place, bags, black trash bags, filled with human bones tied with cheap strings, stacked on smelly, dirty shelves, crowded with rodents. The only thing left of their past identities as human beings are paper tags with names and numbers, but those often disappear, by lack of proper care, or by criminal action, once is common that those bones end in the black market of bones and teeth to med and dentist schools.
I had no option but to work on one of those ossuaries as a night watch, and I see many unsettling things, but made no mistake, all doing of the living.
The processes to dig off the coffins are disturbing: Even if you know no one will care with this action, I always felt uneasy just from watching it. They dig it off the ground with no respects, and literally crack the coffin open with crowbars. Many times all is left are bones, and clothes clued to them, due to the decomposition process. They literally peel those clothes of the bones, and grab anything the corpse may have, wedding rings, ear rings anything they can sell cheap later.
The coffins are sold back to mortuaries, to be re used, and the bones are tied like wood, and stuffed in garbage bags to be treated as garbage for the men who take them in the ossuary.
At the dead of night, I would keep watch on the only door to the ossuary, sit in an old office chair, with and old revolver and a flashlight. Different than most think, cemeteries aren’t abandoned at night: Many times families come to the wake that precedes the funeral. But there are nights when no one is around, most lights are off, and even the office people don’t leave the administration, and I would find myself alone, surrounded by and absolute silence.
One night, a furious storm hit the graveyard. Soaked, I have no option but to open and enter the ossuary, something I had been always afraid to do. As the light went out, I closed the door behind me, and turned my flashlight on. Nothing but bone-bags and the dripping sound of the leaky roof.
As the hours went by, and the storm didn’t gave in, I felt tired, and sit on my chair, quiet and in the dark, when I started to hear faint voices. To scare to even move, I just keep silent and listened.
-… My weeding ring… where they put my weeding ring?...
- …Dear god, they pulled all my good teeth, it hurts, it hurts!
-… Where I am? I cant move… it’s so dark, please…
-… That’s not my grave… my family is rich… you can’t take me off my grave like this…
- …Help, someone help me… There are a rat nesting on my bones, please, I beg, someone take it off me!
-This can’t be right! It’s just a bad dream… I will wake soon, I cant be dead… I’m still too young to be dead!!
As the night went by, the voices become more in number, and slightly louder. I was completely paralyzed, when they start talking among themselves:
- They are a bunch of thieves… they stole even my shoes… what man steal a dead man shoes?
-Who cares? Isn’t like you still need them…
- This is hell? They just dug us off… I thought they would save us from the dark, but them they… they did all that horrible things… Why they did it to us?
-Hell? Hell is listening to you whinny voice… I wish I was back to my hole in the ground… I used to think the worst possible thing was to stay alone, buried seven feet under…But that was before I had to bear with you…
- I am so alone… I miss my family… God, have mercy of my soul, let me at least see my family again…
-Why do you bother about your family? They surely don’t bother about you…
At this point I was almost on the edge of my sanity, when in disbelief I spoke softly:
-It has to be a nightmare…
And they heard me.
-A nightmare? You wish pal!
-Who is this? I don’t know his voice?
-Probably someone fresh dug off the “final rest”…
- Oh god… I, I can’t believe…
-Buaaa, he can’t believe… God if I got a penny for every time I heard that one, I could buy my grave back, and maybe even my teeth!
They all laughed, some loudly and heartily, others forcing a laugh.
-I am not dead…I am the night watcher!
A minute of silence, followed by a torrent of angry and anxious voices.
-A guard? You bastard, why you let them take my teeth?
-Are you alive? Please, can you look for my daughter? I want to say her I miss her!
-Please, can you take off those rats from me? They are really annoying…
-Whoa, if you gonna go around doing favors, you cold please take me away from this loser who cry day and night, put me in the garbage, if I care, but I don’t want to be stuck with him another minute…
The voices were so loud and so many, it deafened me, I was too scared, so I ran out of the door like a mad man under the storm.
I burst inside the administration , returned my tools, and disappeared from there, under the storm. I never returned, not for pay check, for nothing.
Now I am sure of one thing: When I die, I’m go be cremated, not dirt shelves full of rats and dead people to me…
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