I stood over the grave and stared at the curving letters carved into the stone. The way they were written made the name look elegant. The stone itself was flecked with grey and black, like a rock that couldn’t quite decide what color it wanted to be. A hard wind blew past me, stirring my dark hair and blowing strands in my face. I reached up and brushed them away, let them fly behind my head out of sight so I could stare at the grave.
“This is all my fault,” I whispered, but it was lost to the wind.
It had been months since he’d died, and the ground was covered over with snow. A cloudy ceiling hung overhead, dark grey that made the tombstone seem like gleaming ivory marble by comparison. I sniffed the air, caught the hard bite of winter as it slipped like a knife through my nasal passages and into my lungs. It cut me like the thought of him being gone, deep inside. I wanted to simply let the stiffness out of the knees I was barely standing on, wanted to fall to the cold, ice-covered earth, to curl up and wrap my coat around myself as I lay there, as close to him as I could get, until the Minnesota skies opened up once more and let fall the snow that would bury me in my final resting place as surely as it had buried him.
