It was hard to imagine your own flesh dried and wrinkled, your brain shrunken by years of use so that instead of becoming wise and all-knowing you became a baby. Could you be alive at ninety-two? You could move, but could you live? The time-span was incomprehensible to Alice, who was just eleven years old. She had known the old lady – was she just bones now? – and had found the living corpse more frightening than the dead one. The headstone against which the flowers had rested was fairly new, its inscription not yet filled with dirt nor blurred by weather.
She giggled and couldn’t hear her giggle.Īlice stooped and took withered flowers from a mud-soiled vase. She imagined the mole down there, snuffling its way through solid darkness, hunting food, searching for its own death. A shudder as the molecatcher mimed eating the writhing pink meat, but she always stayed to watch him push his metal rod into the earth then poke the worm into the hole he had created. She hadn’t for as long as she remembered. His lips, ever wet, like his dosed worms, moved but she heard nothing. And chuckled when he held it towards her and she jumped away with a silent shriek. He grinned as he delicately dipped stubby fingers into his baked beans tin and plucked out a strychnine-coated worm from its wriggling friends and relatives. She had often watched the molecatcher, a round man with a pointed face, and thought he looked like a mole. Moles were difficult to get rid of poison one, another moved into its lodgings.
The girl smiled nervously at the thought as she hurried from grave to grave. The small mounds of dark earth scattered around the graveyard looked as though the dead were pushing their way back into the living world. Like pilgrim’s wither’d wreath of flowers Lay it where Childhood’s dreams are twined
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