She’s uncomfortable with the idea of you six feet beneath the soil, your body slowly decomposing despite the advertisements of the coffin you were placed in.

You were buried in one of the thrift store suits you bought in high school, the ones you said fit you perfectly so perfectly you could hardly believe it wasn’t you that had died and given them to you, it was the same suit you took along to Africa.

Your grave, ragged and raw, stone from the quarry nearby, the entire town is filled with it, some people dig their basements until they find it and stop there, that ragged run down a thirty-degree slant and then back across the headstone, nearly interrupting the run of the letters in your name.

Jeannie and Greg stole this bizarre white pig and set it next to your grave. One person’s amusement is another’s slight, according to the Crisps, whose lineage arrangements you somehow interrupted. Unintentionally, of course. As always. Sounds like it reached a boiling point last fall then simmered then finally turned cold. The beard on the gnome is coming loose. It’s weathered and old and it’s falling off and soon it will be gone.

The wind today tearing around your grave. Jeannie said she came out once and saw four birds in the sky—her four children—and suddenly one of them pulled away and vanished across the horizon. Nature gives us signs, she said. We just have to pay attention.