Anne sleeps on a grave every Tuesday. It’s a standing date, because Blake works the overnight shift, and there’s nothing good on tv. She wanders four streets over to the hidden cemetery on Glendale Avenue. The grave is old, and the dirt is unforgiving. She brings a blanket, two pillows, and a thermos of warm milk because a cemetery is not the easiest place to fall asleep.

In the morning the apartment building gossip waits like a gargoyle by the front door as strangers forced to be neighbors buzz through. She’s the gossip, but she’ll always tell you the truth.

“You’ve got a leaf or something behind your ear,” Diana remarks.

Anne returns home Wednesdays smelling like the outdoors. She waits until ten because she doesn’t want to run into Blake after an overnight. He’s sleepy and thoughtless. He says unkind things he doesn’t remember.

Tuesdays take forever to roll around. Wednesdays are taco and movie night. Anne hates spicy food, and Blake picks horror flicks where the girl never lives. Thursdays are a waiting game for the weekend. Fridays and Saturdays whir by in a rum-fueled haze. Sundays drip with regret for all the things Anne meant to do. Monday always slides in with a vengeance. Anne holds her breath until she’s back on the grave. Not in it. Ever since she started visiting the cemetery, she no longer wishes she was in the ground.

Anne only dreams on Tuesday nights when she’s lying on top of a dead body, separated by soil and mahogany. This is an intimacy she finds nowhere else, even though she only knows his name from the granite headstone. Ezra O’Reilly. Everything else, she makes up because he died in 1924. Ezra wore pinstriped suits, she thinks. He’s read every Sherlock Holmes book and loved a woman who didn’t love him back.

When she sleeps in their bed, Blake drags Anne towards him, towing her like a ship out to sea. He is the anchor, the barge, and when they’re finished, she showers because his sweat is a certain brand of sour. She wants to be like Diana the gossip and tell the truth. That she can’t stomach his smell or the way he tangles his fingers in her curly black hair. That she can’t forgive him when he’s never apologized. And she can’t leave, because no one taught her how.

Tuesday nights, she presses her lips into the dirt and confesses her secrets to the pile of bones beneath her. She imagines Ezra’s eyes are still intact. They are blue and endless, peering up. Anne wants her heat to transfer down to him. She pretends these are his favorite nights of the week, if time matters to the dead. He is gone below the ground. She is gone above the ground. Really, there isn’t a difference.

Blake and Anne’s anniversary falls on a Tuesday. Blake’s taken a rare night off and bought Anne a dress and heels for the occasion. He’s booked dinner at her favorite restaurant, the table by the fountain. He’s left her a handful of pennies on the counter – I’ll let you to make all the wishes you want. Normally, he knocks the pennies out of her hand and calls her a child. Still, Anne feels ungrateful. He is sometimes kind and warm. Flesh and blood pulsing, his eager eyes attached to her whenever she enters a room. He is a swarm, a hive surrounding her, but the ache for the cemetery bruises her heart.

She wears the new dress, spiked heels, and takes an uber because a steady rain beats down across the city. The driver is silent. When the car stops, he double-checks his navigation.

“Here? You sure?” The driver’s teeth are yellow from smoking. He wears a tweed cap and clicks his tongue against his teeth.

“Yeah. Thanks.” Anne hands him a tip. A twenty wrapped around Blake’s pennies, save one.

The heels aerate the ground as Anne sinks in with every step. No one thinks to put lights in a cemetery, because at night the graves are private. It doesn’t matter. She could find Ezra with eyes closed. Eleven steps past the gate. A sharp right at the angel statue missing her wings. His is the first headstone in the ninth row along the eastern field. She has forgotten her pillows, the blanket, a thermos. The earth is hard as ever. She lays there, one penny remaining in her fist, ready to make a wish.

***

Sarah’s work has been included in several dozen journals online and in print (including Milk Candy Review). A teacher, mother, and freelancer from central PA, her first middle grade fantasy novel, Delilah and the Cracked Cauldron, was released in June.