At Recoleta
By David Backer
The night the dead woke at Recoleta Cemetery, the statues came alive too. They formed cliques. Statues stayed on the east side of the cemetery, zombies on the west. Rumors circulated. One feisty and proletariat-looking likeness of Death started calling the zombies pussies. The statues chuckled. A marble cherub asked a likeness of Mary, "What's a pussy?" Mary's stone cheeks blushed.
The zombies heard these rumors and were unimpressed. "At least we had genitalia at some point," said the rotting corpse of Dr. Francisco Gomez (d.1797).
There were a few touching scenes. Little David Ruto Rodriguez, dead on his first birthday in 1922, played finger games with the statue of a boy angel a few years older. David giggled, his wide-dead eyes searching the sky for stars, though they found none in the ambient light of the city.
Lincoln Zela Ruford, a lawyer who saw most of the 19th century, lingered in his tomb. He sat passing his thumb over the daguerreotype of Marta, his wife, in whose arms he died as fireworks burst over Palermo to celebrate the revolution. So lost was he in the memory of Marta's aspect--her rosewater perfume, her skirts nestled one upon another--that he didn't hear the screams of the residents of Buenos Aires as their ancestors ate them alive.
(As the city was engulfed in blood the likenesses of Jesus played charades. The winner would be allowed seven minutes in heaven with the likeness of Mary in Evita Peron's empty sepulcher.)
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A bit about me: I edit fictiondaily.org, an aggregator for online fiction. I've fiction and non-fiction in various places, most recently The Legendary and Luna Park. I teach the Theory of Knowledge in Quito, Ecuador and I play old-timey banjo.
By David Backer
The night the dead woke at Recoleta Cemetery, the statues came alive too. They formed cliques. Statues stayed on the east side of the cemetery, zombies on the west. Rumors circulated. One feisty and proletariat-looking likeness of Death started calling the zombies pussies. The statues chuckled. A marble cherub asked a likeness of Mary, "What's a pussy?" Mary's stone cheeks blushed.
The zombies heard these rumors and were unimpressed. "At least we had genitalia at some point," said the rotting corpse of Dr. Francisco Gomez (d.1797).
There were a few touching scenes. Little David Ruto Rodriguez, dead on his first birthday in 1922, played finger games with the statue of a boy angel a few years older. David giggled, his wide-dead eyes searching the sky for stars, though they found none in the ambient light of the city.
Lincoln Zela Ruford, a lawyer who saw most of the 19th century, lingered in his tomb. He sat passing his thumb over the daguerreotype of Marta, his wife, in whose arms he died as fireworks burst over Palermo to celebrate the revolution. So lost was he in the memory of Marta's aspect--her rosewater perfume, her skirts nestled one upon another--that he didn't hear the screams of the residents of Buenos Aires as their ancestors ate them alive.
(As the city was engulfed in blood the likenesses of Jesus played charades. The winner would be allowed seven minutes in heaven with the likeness of Mary in Evita Peron's empty sepulcher.)
- - -
A bit about me: I edit fictiondaily.org, an aggregator for online fiction. I've fiction and non-fiction in various places, most recently The Legendary and Luna Park. I teach the Theory of Knowledge in Quito, Ecuador and I play old-timey banjo.
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