Dante's Fire

Chapter Forty Five: Jackie

JACKIE

In the summer, the cemetery where her mother was buried was a place of stone and manicured grass—although there were small thickets of undergrowth here and there—a place of beloved and, sometimes, forgotten people. Now, a layer of weighty, white blankness that befitted the place's purpose and mood had covered the field.

Jackie ambled through the flaky snow. Headstones made of hard, indestructible concrete grew from the soft ground, jutting from the floor like hands of stone. Hands, reaching for something, perhaps the sky. Always reaching but never touching it. A forlornness pervaded the atmosphere here even though the place was obviously tended to almost as well as some museums were, even though there were always people around, weaving between the reaching stone hands, wiping dust off them affectionately, whispering to long dead parents and nieces, weeping softly too, sometimes.

The groundskeeper asked Jackie if she needed help finding someone, but she told the woman that she di