Golden October

In the afternoon my cellphone rings and I get up and head out the door.
In the middle of October the air is cool, refreshing and there is a breeze.
The forecasters here call it "Golden October" and it looks like that as I walk down the street of the small town.
Sunday afternoon and all the windows have their blinds drawn and no car is on the street and no walkers walk with me along the sidewalk. The breeze is cool and you can here it ebb and flow through the trees. The town sits in a bowl of a valley, surrounded by hills covered by forests. Seas of forests, the hills like waves a surfer would die for. I walk through the town and up one of the hills where the ruins of the Medieval church are and where the cemetery is.
Golden October and the trees are red and orange and purple and fire and yellow and green and brown. As the wind blows and I'm caught in a storm as a down pour of the bright leaves are flung from the trees and rain to the earth below.
I'm walking up the hill and the world is quiet. Save for the waves.
At the cemetery I stop and unlock the gate. The black metal is cool. I latch the gate closed again and walk into the cemetery on the main boulevard that intersects the rows and alleys of walkways lined by tombstones and flowers, the dead's last apartment.
A few blocks down, near the end of the city the blind grave digger tries to light a lantern but can't find the candle stem. The breeze keeps blowing out his flame and he struggles to relight it. I find myself near a tree and the tree is leafless and brown and gray old and it zigzags up to the blue, cloudless sky. The tree doesn't move in the wind.
Behind me an angel statue smiles, or cries, and as I wonder which one it is the blind grave digger walks over to me.
"Can you, my friend, light this?" He shouts, though he stands next to me and I'm annoyed with him but light the lantern and hand it to him.
He thanks me by patting my shoulder with his boney hands, but then doesn't let go.
"What do you want old man?" I say.
His eyes are white and his face stares away from me and he wears rags and is hunched over and struggles for breath.
"The night is coming." He shouts.
"I'm right here."
"Are you?" And his hand tightens.
And the sun is shinning bright, but in his white, pupil-less eyes I see the clouds gather and it is dark and there are clouds - grey and blue and purple and green - that streak across the sky. There is a moon and it is full and blue. It's light shines bright on the graveyard. The clouds speed past and make the moon's light flicker, like the flame of the lantern the blind grave digger holds. The angel behind me cries, or smiles, I don't know which one.
My cell phone rings and it is loud an annoying and I answer and brush the blind grave digger's hand away and he stumbles but catches himself.
There is no one on the other end, no call received.
"Always quiet here," he says.
And I am alone.
And I stand and stare at the man and using his lantern I light a cigarette, but he doesn't know it and keeps talking.
"Beautiful isn't it," the blind grave digger says and gestures out towards the city of tombstones. "The way the blue light splashes on the grey headstones, the dark, oozing green of the forest, the hiss of the wind, the glittering stones, the white bones, the air and sky and stars and blue night. And the lantern lights it all. Do you see?"
The lantern flame is orange and yellow and glistening and splashing warm light on the world. And the ground shakes and the skeletons come alive, their empty eye sockets looking where I look and at what the man gestures towards.
"Even the dead have eyes."