Funeral Garden — Claire Morse

I: OLD COMPANIONS

I followed the tall, moon-cast Shadow in front of me into forest of sickly pines. The trees’ branches wagged orange fingers at us from up high, but we ignored the warning and walked straight into a wall of brambles. I spent a fortune of skin on the unmarked passage, shredded by talon-like thorns, and lost Shadow in the darkness. The spikes were not fixed in a clumsy tangle of thousands, as anyone expects. No, they lunged and sliced gracefully, one by one, at unpredictable turns. Finally, I came upon moonlight in a clearing, along with the scent of cooked meat.

A little old woman crouched over fire and pot of boiling grasses in an overgrown meadow. Her companion looked at his reflection in a glass hung on a tree trunk. With slow ploughs of blade, he shaved his face, slick and wet from the gel of singing slugs. In between patches he swiped the blade back and forth in the air, conducting the marvelous choral sound which sprung from the jar of squirmers held in his other hand.

“Excuse me,” I interrupted, “May I have a glass of water, perhaps a band-aid?” I was dripping blood all over.

“What ho! That was quick” replied the woman, as she waved me over. I then noticed

she had been stirring with bare arm. The meat of her palm had boiled and bubbled along with the grass stew, but her face remained calm as a small bright pond. I was disturbed so it took me a few minutes to speak. First, I collapsed on a mossy log in front of the fire, which illuminated boulders throughout the meadow, painted with wolves and bears.

“You’re expecting me?”

“Your shadow came through first, but we didn’t expect you out before morning —

you’re just a child! Nine? Ten? Now we must get you dressed,” she looked at me with tilted head, then tied a dirty fur cape around my shoulders. “That’s better. Your mother will be so pleased with me.”

“Where did my shadow go from here?” I asked.

She muttered a half-reply, “Oh, she was awfully sad,”

while handing me a glass of water with ice cubes that contained frozen ladybugs.

“That’s very kind, thank you.”

With remarkable speed, she hopped onto my lap and licked each of my wounds, sealing them with an amber sap-like saliva. I was shocked by her forwardness.

“Those thorns were unnatural,” I said, trembling.

“You mean the Berserkers?”

II: FUNERAL GARDEN

“A Berserker?”

“Half your kind, half bear. Some are half-wolf.”

“We adopted them as fluffy moppets!” The old maestro’s face was finally hairless,

and he joined us. “Now they’re all grown into excellent players. Mind you, their claws are more suited to strings instead of wind.”

If these Berserkers had been hiding in the brambles, my skin was still burning from their claws. “You must replace the strings often” I said passive aggressively, while peeling back the fur to show him my cuts. He ignored this and carried on a lecture about artistry and technique. The woman shot me a pitiless wink.

“You see our trees are still green?” She asked me, when the maestro stopped for

air. “Berserkers defend against invasive species.” At these words she circled pointer finger round the parameter of healthy pine. I nodded in silence, naming in my head the various species of pests I was taught in school: pale weevil, northern pine weevil, pine root collar weevil. The man was becoming impatient with me.

“If you’re not going to talk, we must play a parlor game.” By now, I had a feeling they had done this all many times before. The woman flew to her feet and recited the rules of a game called ‘Funeral Garden’.

“We take turns burying each other in the soil. Then, at the least predictable moment, the buried pops up like a shoot in spring and chases the others around the furniture until someone is caught.” I remained mute, so the old man walked toward me with a watery stare. Our eyes were at the same level when I was sitting and he was standing, staring without blinks.

“Well?”

“I’m afraid I’m too tired… the game sounds physical”

“You can play dead first…

Collect your energy underneath for as long as you need,” she offered.

“No, thank you. I’m afraid I can’t.”

As I said this, fat tears rolled down the man’s little face.

“I’m afraid you don’t have a choice. Guests make me nervous, you see.” But I was the one shaking underneath the fur by this point. All too terrified by their defenders hiding in the wood, I obeyed and walked into a grassless plot surrounded by three boulders. I began to fling layers of dirt to the side, expecting to find bones of the figures in the paintings, finding nothing but roots and worms.

I dug and dug to make a hole big enough for myself, but I was stopped cold by a wet human nose underneath sunglasses. I quickly brushed more soil aside and found my own mother’s smiling face. It was very odd that I should find her here, and even odder that she was wearing unfashionable sunglasses.

“Hi Sweetheart!” she screeched with her beautiful gummy smile. I jumped back in horror and began to run — I only stopped when I heard her singing voice inside the plot. I looked back, through the pines, and saw the old couple weeping together.

“Every time, it catches me off guard!” the maestro wailed. They approached my mother in the cemetery and began to undress. Their naked skin melted and slowly seeped into the ground.

“She’s been buried a long time?” the woman asked.

“Many times, we’ve all been done” were the last words he spoke before they were silent. Nothing but two calm bright puddles in the moonlight.

III: GUTS vs. THE COMMON COLD

You live alone in a cave that’s also a teen girl’s bedroom. You spend most of your free time following a manga series called Berserk, relating to its violent universe even more than you did before your mother got sick and began hiding tears behind sunglasses every morning when she drops you off for school. These days, it’s easier to spend time in Midland during the Hundred-Year-War than to spend time with Mom. Guts, the incomparable ‘Black Swordsman’, is a former mercenary who joins the Band of the Falcon led by Griffith and your favourite character, Casca, who is brutally raped in the climax of the series.

You were taught about periods and rape in school, but it never happened to you — age fourteen, fifteen, sixteen flew by, and you still look the same as you did at age eleven. You’re considered a freak, so during lunchtime you read Berserk FanFiction. Hundreds of stories are posted a day, written by users just like you, who probably won’t have a kiss or get invited to a party anytime soon.

Many fanfics are about Casca and Guts together, outside the Berserk universe: Guts breaks his arm in a basketball tournament and Casca offers to help shave his face. She cuts him accidentally and they begin to wrestle and then make out. Writers partial to the high school setting also love crossovers with the plot and characters of the movie Cruel Intentions. But your favorite fanfics, which you begin to write yourself, are still set in medieval provinces. Wars have ended, Casca got her memory back after the rape, and now she and Guts can take care of each other. You listen to songs on your discman every lunchtime, and think up what you will write when you get home. Music becomes less a part of the environment, and more like an injection you take to enjoy wallowing, or to write about sex, which you have never had.

In one chapter, ‘Guts vs. the Common Cold’, Casca brings him soup during a mild plague. Later they stumble on a mysterious weapon from the future — the razor phone — and argue because Casca won’t make Guts her phone wallpaper. You play internet Valkyrie, writing the mundane fates of the new Band of Falcons instead of sleeping. At age sixteen, the only imaginable escape from hibernation is bringing hot noodles to a battle-worn boyfriend like Guts.

Meanwhile, in a parallel universe, you spend hundreds and hundreds of hours not on FanFiction.Net but instead learning to play the violin.