Redemption

This is a piece I did for A174, which I hope to expand upon at some point in the future.

As the snow began to fall on his upturned face, Stephen remembered those winters when this place held no fears for him. As a child it was nothing for him to come and wander around the old graveyard. He would read the headstones, thinking about the people they named, imagining what sort of lives they had lived, and if they had been better than his. The dead didn’t scare him.

‘Look there’s that weirdo kid again,’ the teenagers from the estate would shout, pointing and laughing. Sometimes they threw stones at him, or chased him. They caught him once, and beat him with sticks and spat in his face. He’d gone home crying, and all his mother had said was, ‘Well, it serves you right – why can’t you be normal, like your brother? You’re twins, after all!’ Stephen never felt like a twin. Not with the birthmark.

Now, as he stood and watched the white flakes fall all around him, enveloping him in the secrets of the graveyard and shielding him from the outside world, he half wished times were like that still.

He moved off, the untrodden snow soft under his boots. Nobody came here any more unless they had to. Only birds left evidence of their presence before his arrival, but now even they were in hiding. There was an oppressive silence, and he shivered as much from the atmosphere of the place as from the cold.

He passed under the old yew trees into the separate burial area beyond. Down this path was where the old crypts were; his refuge whenever he was chased after that beating.

He heard the sobbing. His arm dropped to his side, the hand carrying the flowers relaxing, letting them drop with a faint rustle of leaves into the snow. There was no point in bringing flowers today.

He reached the crypts, and crept quietly between them to a solitary gravestone on the other side.

‘Dean,’ he said quietly, from just a few feet away. ‘It’s alright, Dean, I’m here now.’

Dean didn’t look up from under his hood, but continued to hug himself, rocking slightly back and forth. ‘I thought you weren’t coming,’ he said, his voice barely more than a trembling whisper.

‘I’m sorry, I was taking care of something.’

‘It should be you here, not me.’ And so it started again. The rage, always at Stephen, never at the right people. ‘I was just taking a short cut because of the rain. They were after you – you’re a coward! It should be you here!’

Stephen sighed and sat down next to his brother. ‘Dean. It’s over now.’

Dean looked at Stephen, showing no tears that should have been freezing on his young face. Just the trickle of blood from the impact of his head on the gravestone he was sitting on.

‘I have to go away, Dean. I can’t come here any more.’

‘I don’t understand…’

‘I’m no longer a coward Dean. I’ve given you justice. You can rest in peace now.’