Buried

By Daniel R. Snyder

A few weeks after his father’s funeral, Stephen stripped his room. He took down the posters of his favorite bands and the pictures he’d drawn in art class, removed all his books, and tossed his rock collection into the front garden. Trinkets, toys, games, computer, everything ended up in the trash. Finally, there was nothing left in his room except a twin bed, a dresser, a nightstand, and an empty bookshelf. 

His mother told him he was just going through a phase, rescued his stuff, packed it into boxes, and stored it in the garage. 

For his birthday that year, all he asked for was a set of black sheets, black curtains, and a black comforter. His mother consented, but drew the line at the floor. She wouldn’t let him paint the hardwood floor black. She did, however, buy him a black rug that covered most of it. Over the course of the summer, his mother had multiple talks with him, expressing her concern. He dyed his hair black, and once school started again, no one saw him wearing anything but black jeans, black shirts, and lace-up black military boots. 

His mother started to wonder if he was on drugs, which he wasn’t, and then she started to wonder if he was suicidal, which he wasn’t, and then she started to wonder if he was on the way to pulling a Columbine, which he wasn’t. He never skipped school, his grades didn’t drop, and he did his chores without complaint. Still, she set him up with a psychologist at a mental health clinic about a mile away. He rode his bike there every Friday after school, talked for an hour about nothing in particular and never felt any different afterwards.

It did, though, keep his mother off his back.

One weekend in late Fall, a wind came up, blowing almost all the leaves off the trees, leaving the lawn buried under a carpet of brown, yellow, and red. For some reason, he felt the need to rake them up, and by the time his mother got home from work, he had the front yard cleared. She smiled, said thank you, and went in to fix dinner.

He headed for the backyard.

As he was stuffing the last of the leaves into a bag, something caught his left pant leg. He looked down. It was the stump of a dead lilac bush. His father had cut it off near the ground, intending to come back and dig the rest out, but of course, that never happened, so Stephen decided he would finish the job. He went into the garden shed and grabbed a shovel.  

He dug around the stump and yanked on it, but it wouldn’t budge, so he went deeper. After about twenty minutes, about a foot below the surface, where the roots were so tangled that he had to dig with his hands, he ran into something solid. It was round and hard, and he couldn’t get his hands around it, so he went back to the shed and grabbed a pair of snips, and a few minutes later, got it free of the roots and pulled it out of the hole. It was very light, almost like it was hollow. 

After using the hose to clean it off, he realized it wasn’t a rock. Two empty eye sockets were now staring at him. He put away the tools, hid the skull in the garden shed, dragged the lawn bags out to the curb and went inside, where his mother had dinner ready. 

The next day, after school, before his mother got home from work, he grabbed some of his father’s tools from the garage and headed upstairs to his bedroom. He slid his bed to the side and rolled up the black rug, revealing a couple of loose floorboards. With a hammer and chisel, he carefully pried them up. Now, with a safe storage place for his find, he went out to the shed to get the skull, returned to his room, gently placed it into the crawl space below the joists, replaced the floorboards, then slid the rug and bed back.

It became a ritual for him that winter. Every afternoon, he would carefully remove the skull from its hiding place and set it on the dresser. He wasn’t sure if it looked out of place or whether it belonged in his black room. It was mottled gray, light in some spots and dark in others, and as the afternoon sun traveled across his window, it seemed to change color. Every once in a while, he would touch it, running his fingers carefully along the ridge of its empty eye-sockets, and sometimes he would lift it, holding it high and turning it round and around, looking for the key that would unlock its secrets.

Some days he would set the skull facing forward, the black circles of its eyes staring directly at him. On other days, he would set it sideways, studying it in profile, occasionally turning it backward so it looked at the wall. The skull never stopped its sightless gaze, and it never opened its mouth to speak to him. There were even a few days when he was too frightened to look at it, thinking maybe its original owner might come back for it, but no ghost ever showed.

Every day, just before his mother got home, he would slip it back into its hiding place. He couldn’t see it there, but he could feel it, a presence he found both frightening and reassuring.  

He began to imagine scenarios that might explain how the skull got under the lilac bush. First, he considered the possibility that the house was built on an old and forgotten graveyard, maybe a sacred Indian burial ground, or a cemetery beside a long-forgotten church. And then he considered murder, a crazy axe or knife wielding psychopath trying to cover their tracks. Lizzie Bordon. Charles Mason. Ted Bundy.

He poured through records at the local library and came up with nothing. There were deaths, of course, and a few murders, but no record of a headless body being found any time over the last century-and-a-half. His house sat on a plot carved out of an old farm years ago. The land had been owned by the same family for generations, and according to the newspapers, every member that died was buried in a churchyard three miles away. 

When spring finally arrived, he decided to give the skull a proper burial. He brought in cut flowers from the yard, put them in a vase, and then sat down to write a eulogy, but what could he say? He didn’t know the person’s name, or age, or sex, whether he or she was a good person or a bad person, whether he or she was missed or loved or hated.

Finally, he decided it didn’t matter. All that did matter was that he’d lived with it for almost a year and he was still completely unable to unravel its mysteries. So, he took the skull out to the yard and reburied it where the lilac stump used to be, said a final goodbye, then went out to the garage to unpack his stuff and put his room back together.  

Daniel R. Snyder is a writer with dozens of essays and stories published in magazines and journals. He plays the accordion quite well, and the piano and guitar quite badly, which is fine because he never wanted to be a Rock Star. All he’s ever wanted is for people to read his work. He and his wife currently live in South Carolina. To read more of his writing, please visit danielrsnyder.com.