He’d planned to stay inside but George showed up unannounced. He had booze and weed and some K that Old Jesse had sent his way, as a thank you for helping him with deliveries from the shop. They railed and smoked and drank and by twelve o’clock they were biking carelessly in the rain. They came upon the lake of garbage and dirt filling up the avenues. Julian imagined a map with a huge drop of water in the middle, like a tiny ocean connecting all the businesses, and giggled to himself, calling it the “Mare Grosstrum.”
They circled the outskirts of town, craning their necks to look back at their homes, silent except for their bikes and voices and the sound of dripping water. Wooden buildings drenched and trees twisted out of shape. Old toys drifting by and plastic cups and junk food wrappers like little fish in storm drains. There were no people or animals that they could see. The rain kept on, merciless. Julian’s parka stuck to him like a hairshirt.

On the corner of Geyser and Weier they happened upon the cemetery gates, overrun with undergrowth and colonies of moss. Beside it was a small abandoned cot where they parked their bikes. It used to be the gatekeeper’s post before whoever owned the place skipped town for good, like almost everyone they knew. The rain was the least of it. Back in 6th they’d been a group of almost thirty kids, but now they were sophomores and only a handful of them remained. Their friends had gone to better cities, or were sent away, or joined the town’s evergreen list of accidental overdoses. Those found leaning on the stalls of gas station bathrooms, face down in yards at doomed house parties, thought sleeping in school buses before the terrifying screams of curious children. Their mothers and faces in the raindrops at night. Their bodies specked like stars along the sidestreets.

Walking into the cemetery, off his head, Julian realized how comfortable he was among the graves. So many things he knew were gone. He dismissed the thoughts but they lingered in the back of his mind. Perhaps the dead gave him a sense of safety because they couldn’t leave, or more like, he felt a kind of  belonging, as if he were already with them. The thoughts shot forth again. Alone with George and his mom, rooted in a town that seemed pushed out of time, where nothing happened, where no one came in but everyone left. He looked down at the mud and thought it concrete, drying around his boots. Maybe the dead understood. Maybe it was kinship that made him take the head back to his mother’s home.