Restoration
*Italicized text is excerpted from Google reviews
To breach the cemetery fence, our bodies on all fours, we palmed over what the oaks and firs cast off. Earth fell from our knees as we stood. Two men hand-in-hand amid two hundred neglected acres at Philadelphia’s southwestern extremity. My consciousness swam, chain-link-pregnable, forgetting for a moment that another man had shown you this enormous, abandoned cemetery, Mount Moriah. It was in keeping with our slinking relations, this bohemian trespass so like our drugged up strolls through the art museum’s European wing, our communions at the pottery wheel in your locked studio. Years later, in a bout of nostalgia, I advance on our younger selves via an internet query. Fifty-two reviews of Mount Moriah Cemetery (4.2/5 stars) and our recollections remain private, unposted.
Do you think often of our sneakers slick on mossy granite, or the glint of a steel bucket of honeysuckle blossoms dangling from the arm of a stranger at the field’s edge. A curious, grassy seduction. You and I locked together like a secret garden of mystery, kissing atop a monument with hills of crumbling headstones before us, the squeal of the 13 trolley at the end of the line. Can’t wait to go back. Remember the herd of deer, hooves sunk in sedge, peering from between the graves? The areas reclaimed by wildlife are sad, but immensely intriguing the way the tree trunks grew up and around the headstones of Mount Moriah, embracing them, while beneath our feet laid the dead of half a dozen wars. You squeezed my hand and blinked at the young deer, tragically beautiful as two gay kids from the suburbs following our desires to where rent was cheap, where love was the well-lit boulevard between hunger and decadence, and life the colorful transit back and forth. Access is restricted to prevent vandalism and trash dumping, but there were signs of both all around us. More vivid were the moss-skinned stones, city deer lifting their hooves, and the warm sunlight that made me squint, blurring every outline, our hands and arms opening. The yellow wildflowers.
I moved across the country. You watched our once-neglected cemetery buried under restoration efforts—shovelfuls of good intentions. What about the bent-necked deer opening their teeth for stalks of wild chicory? The fields now cleared of unpenned growth, smothered in spotlights and surveillance, but still I want to be buried here, and for an oak to grow around my headstone, the root fibers working through my ribs, hoof prints and figure-eighted fox tracks stamped into the dirt above me. I want strangers to pluck my honeysuckle and fold the petals into sweet cream. I want laughter the way you and I laughed when the threads of our clothes caught on the cemetery fence, when we thought the dead were trying to hold us, to right the wrong and reset headstones…life and dignity, restored. I returned to Philly for a visit, went to our favorite dive bar, and there you were. We embraced. I waited for the whiff of dewy grass on the slipstream of the 64 bus, for a startled young animal to peek from behind a utility pole, for what lay dormant between us to poke a hand up through the dirt flexing its gritty knuckles, abandoned, and left to rot at Mount Moriah.
*all italicized sections are excerpted from public Google reviews of Mt. Moriah Cemetery.
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Christopher Santantasio is a gay writer based in the Bay Area. His fiction and essays have appeared in One Story, Epiphany, SmokeLong Quarterly, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere. A finalist for the 2020 Chautauqua Janus Prize, he is a fiction editor at The Rumpus and is at work on his first novel.