This cemetery is on a dirt road at the county line, not far from my home. I’ve been going there for years. Don’t ask me why. Earlier this afternoon, I came across the marker for a girl (bottom photo) who was two or three years behind me in school. She had a child with a friend of mine. Bobby. I guess I’d call him a friend. A couple of years after high school, he strangled her to death. I’ve been wanting to write about him for a while now, part of a larger project about the murderers I grew up with. Don’t ask me why. I don’t know if I’ll ever get around to it.

Also, I wonder who makes the tombstones. Is it one guy who does them all? Pours the cement and traces the text? There is something heartbreaking about a homemade burial marker. But I guess that’s an awfully bourgeois thing to say.