I didn't know why I was walking, why I was wearing a black suit, where I was going, where I even was. It just felt like the way things had to be.

  The fabric of the suit was stiff against my skin, unfamiliar, constraining. The collar pressed against my throat like a hand, not quite choking but present, insistent, a reminder of something I couldn't name. The sleeves were too long, covering my hands to the knuckles, and when I looked down at myself, at the severe black that seemed to absorb light rather than reflect it, I felt like I was wearing someone else's skin, like I had put on a costume for a role I hadn't auditioned for but was nonetheless expected to perform.

  Blank faced mannequins stood around me, a mass, a crowd forming walls on either side, leaving only a path between them all, a path in the middle, a path I knew was just for me.

  They were motionless, these figures, their faces smooth and featureless, no eyes to watch me with, no mouths to speak, no expressions to read. But I felt their attention nonetheless, felt the weight of their witnessing, felt observed and judged by these hollow simulacra of humanity. They stood in rows that stretched back into a fog I couldn't penetrate, dressed in dark clothes that blended together into a monochrome mass, their hands at their sides or clasped before them in attitudes of reverence or mourning or prayer.

  The path between them was narrow, barely wide enough for my shoulders, and as I walked, I was acutely aware of how close they were, how easily I could reach out and touch them, how their stillness was somehow more oppressive than movement would have been. The ground beneath my feet was solid but uncertain, each step feeling both too heavy and too light, as if gravity itself couldn't decide what hold it had on me.

  I could hear church bells the more I walked, distant at first but growing clearer with each step. Deep, resonant tones that rolled across whatever space this was, marking time or calling the faithful or announcing something I should understand but didn't. The sound seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere, seemed to exist inside my head and outside it simultaneously, seemed to vibrate in my chest cavity like a second heartbeat.

  And beneath the bells, voices. Singing words of death, grief, sadness and the like. A funeral song, though I couldn't make out the words, couldn't identify the language, could only feel the weight of it, the mournfulness of it, the way it pressed down on my shoulders like a physical thing. The melody was old, ancient, something that predated memory, something that spoke to the part of the human soul that understands loss before it understands anything else.

  The voices were layered, complex, weaving in and out of each other in harmonies that should have been beautiful but instead felt like lament given form. Sopranos climbing high and thin like threads of spider silk. Altos providing foundation, earthy and grounding. Tenors reaching, yearning, never quite achieving resolution. Basses rumbling underneath, the sound of earth settling, of finality, of things returning to dust.

  My steps led me forward, and the mannequins began to thin, began to space themselves further apart, until finally they stopped altogether and I found myself walking on grass. Wet grass. The ground soft beneath my shoes, yielding, threatening to give way entirely with each step.

  It was raining.

  Not heavily, not the dramatic downpour of movies and melodrama, but a steady, persistent rain that fell straight down without wind to give it direction. Each drop was cold where it touched my skin, my face, my hands, soaking slowly into the fabric of the suit, weighing it down, making it cling to my body like a second skin or a shroud. The rain made no sound, or if it did, it was lost beneath the bells and the singing, absorbed into the general atmosphere of dampness and sorrow.

  The sky above was the color of slate, uniform and oppressive, low enough that it felt like I could reach up and touch it if I tried. No sun, no moon, no stars, no markers of time or place, just that endless gray that could have been dawn or dusk or the middle of the night for all I could tell.

  I continued moving, still not knowing where I was going, just that I was going the right way. Some instinct deeper than thought guided me, pulled me forward like a string tied around my sternum, like a compass needle finding north, like water flowing downhill because that's what water does, because there's no other option, because the laws that govern such things are fundamental and inescapable.

  Around me, markers began to appear. Stone, old and weathered, some standing straight, others tilting at angles that suggested the earth beneath them had shifted over time. Crosses, mostly, but other symbols too. Angels with worn faces, their features eroded by time and weather into suggestions of grief. Obelisks pointing upward toward the gray sky like fingers or accusations. Simple rectangles with words carved into them, names and dates that I didn't stop to read but registered nonetheless in my peripheral vision, a catalog of loss, a monument to the universal truth that everything ends.

  The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

  A graveyard.

  I was in a graveyard.

  The realization should have surprised me, should have provoked some reaction, but it didn't. It felt inevitable, felt like arriving at a destination I'd always been heading toward, felt like coming home in the worst possible way.

  The path I was following wound between the graves, and I noticed, distantly, that fresh flowers had been placed on some of them. Lilies, mostly, white and funereal, their petals collecting rainwater, their stems wrapped in plastic or bound with ribbon. The flowers looked too bright, too alive in this place of death, an obscenity or a comfort, I couldn't decide which.

  My walk continued, and the bells grew louder, the singing more insistent, and I could feel something building in my chest, some pressure or anticipation or dread that grew with each step, that swelled like a tide, that threatened to crack my ribs from the inside.

  And then, my steps stopped.

  Before three graves.

  The ground here had been disturbed recently, the earth dark and rich, not yet settled, not yet covered by the grass that carpeted the rest of the cemetery. The rain was turning the dirt to mud, thick and clinging, the kind that would stick to shoes and never quite wash clean.

  Two of those graves were closed. The earth had been mounded over them in gentle hills, and at the head of each sat a stone, gray granite polished to a shine that reflected the sky, reflected the rain, reflected nothing.

  On the stone to the left, words were carved in letters that seemed too precise, too perfect, too final:

  Louis-Philippe Archambault Beloved Husband and Grandfather His strength was gentle, his love unwavering May he rest in the peace he gave to others

  On the stone to the right, more words, equally precise, equally devastating:

  Marguerite Archambault Beloved Wife and Grandmother

  Her kindness knew no bounds, her heart infinite May she find the joy she brought to all who knew her

  I read the words without reading them, absorbed them without processing them, and felt nothing and everything simultaneously. The pressure in my chest had become unbearable, had become something that felt like it would either shatter me or transform me, had become the weight of the world concentrated into a single point behind my sternum.

  Between the two closed graves, between the two people who had loved me more than I deserved, more than I could comprehend, more than I could survive losing, there was a third grave.

  Still open.

  A rectangular hole in the earth, deep and dark and waiting. The rain was falling into it, collecting at the bottom, turning it to slurry, making it slick and treacherous. The sides were straight, cut with precision, the work of someone who knew what they were doing, who had done this before, who understood the exact dimensions required to hold a human body for eternity.

  I could hear the sound of a shovel still digging, metal striking earth, a rhythm that matched the beating of my heart or perhaps was creating it, was the only thing keeping time moving, was the only thing keeping me tethered to this moment instead of floating away into the gray nothing above.

  I moved to the edge of the open grave, my shoes sinking slightly into the soft earth, mud squelching around the soles. The sound was obscene, too wet, too organic, too present in this place that felt both absolutely real and entirely impossible.

  I looked down into the hole, into the darkness, into the waiting earth, and saw someone there. In the grave. Still digging.

  I could see from the back that the one digging was wearing a suit. Black, like mine. Formal, like mine. Wrong, like mine. The fabric was soaked through, clinging to a frame that moved with methodical purpose, lifting the shovel, driving it into the earth at the bottom of the grave, lifting again, throwing the dirt up and out, a rhythm that never faltered, that suggested this had been going on for a long time, would continue going on for much longer, would perhaps never stop.

  The figure must have sensed my presence, must have felt my eyes on their back, because the digging stopped. The shovel stuck into the earth, left standing at an angle. Slowly, the figure turned.

  And I was welcomed with a face identical to my own.

  The same olive skin, gone sallow. The same dark eyes, too large in the same face. The same nose, the same lips, the same bone structure, the same everything. It was looking in a mirror, except the reflection was standing in a grave, was covered in mud and rain, was holding a shovel like a staff or a weapon or a tool of salvation, was smiling at me with an expression that held sorrow and understanding and resignation in equal measure.

  The same me, but not the same. Something in the eyes was different, older, more tired, more knowing. Something in the set of the shoulders suggested acceptance of something I hadn't accepted yet. Something in the way they stood, knee deep in earth and water, suggested comfort in this place, familiarity with this task, a belonging that I simultaneously envied and feared.

  I opened my mouth, and only one question came out, the only question that mattered, the only question I could articulate past the pressure in my chest and the bells and the singing and the rain and the overwhelming wrongness and rightness of everything.

  "What are you doing?"

  The other me, this doppelganger, this reflection, this other self or future self or truest self, looked at me with a sad, soft smile. The kind of smile that understands pain intimately, that has made peace with it, that has learned to live with it or perhaps has stopped living and simply exists alongside it.

  When they spoke, their voice was my voice but gentler, resigned, carrying a weight of inevitability that made my bones feel hollow.

  "What we both knew things would end up as the moment we lost them," they said, and gestured around the grave with one mud-covered hand, indicating the earth, the shovel, the hole that was the exact size and shape of a human body, the exact size and shape of my body. "Digging for our last home."