Inner darkness

A woman is digging through freshly turned earth. The stones standing for the dead are the only witnesses of the nocturnal disturbance. She digs relentlessly; a steady, determined effort. Despite the fresh air of the night, the woman’s sweat falls down from her face and is absorbed by the dirt yet to be dug out. Eventually, after the light of the moon passed through the branches of the forest and continued to rise until it was directly above the graveyard, her tool hit the wood of the coffin. She freezes for an instant, breathless. A few seconds pass, the place silent again. But the woman shakes her head. She drops to her knees and continues to dig with her hands, not coolly focused anymore. She is pushing aside the earth still covering the small wooden box frantically, sobs escaping her throat. Her fingers finally find the edge of the lid. She quickly repositions her body to stand on the lower part of the casket, then pulls the upper part of the lid, revealing the baby. She stops, hands mid air, crying softly at the sight of the child, both from crushing sadness, and relief. She was with her again.

The body had been prepared for an open casket ceremony, giving the baby an unreal and waxy appearance. In the moonlight, her face looked like that of a strange doll. Taking a deep, shaky breath, the woman reaches for the corpse. She cradles it against her chest, whispering little nothings to the infant, rocking slightly back and forth. After a moment, she rises, lifts the body and rests it delicately on the grass at the edge of the hole. She puts her palms flat in the grass and gives herself a push as she jumps, landing her torso on the ground. Pulling out the rest of her, she then softly takes the baby back in her arms. She caresses the child’s cold cheek with her thumb, and gets up without ever taking her eyes off the round pale face.

An owl lands silently on a branch of an old oak tree near a small village’s graveyard, just as a woman walks between the trees, cooing at her bundle, her shadow soon swallowed by the forest.