Holdinghands
by Benjamin Johnson
The only important thing to come from all of Beth-Anne’s drivel is this: don’t go anywhere near the far corner of Holdinghands Park after dark. You know, the corner where no footpaths wind, where the trees drape their dark, needled branches over the ground, where the sun seems colder, where all of those odd rocks stand around.
“It’s haunted,” Beth-Anne told me. “This spot in the park is a graveyard.” She told me so while standing atop one of the rocks themselves, looking like a fool with her hands on her hips, after having dragged me out to nowhere in the middle of bleak November to look at that say-so cemetery.
Of course, this was drivel, just like everything Beth-Anne ever told me was drivel.
Drivel. That’s a word Mrs. Meyer taught us the other day. She said it about a boy in class who wouldn’t stop spouting damned nonsense, except we aren’t allowed to use the word ‘damned’, and so she taught us the word ‘drivel’ instead. I took to it like a bird to seed, especially as I’m trying to expand my vocabulary before I enter fifth grade.
But anyway, drivel’s all it ever was from Beth-Anne. She told me the scattered grey stones were actually headstones and that people were buried underneath there.
I asked, “But why not use regular headstones like in a normal graveyard?” I was thinking about the time Beth-Anne told me that all store-bought ice cream was just sweetened mashed potatoes and what a load of drivel that was.
“They didn’t want to pay money to do that,” she said. “You see that building over there? There used to be an insane asylum built on that exact spot. Some of the people had families, but a lot of them didn’t. The ones who didn’t, well, they’d just bury them wherever and didn’t even put names on the rocks.”
That didn’t sound right, but I knew better than to argue, because oh lordy, when Beth-Anne got going, she could really get going, talking about conspiracies and ghosties and, well, drivel. And she might cry, too, if you called her out, and that would make me want to punch her in her nose and make her cry even harder. “These stones are so big,” I said instead. “Seems like a lot of effort to get them here. Probably a lot of money too.”
“They rolled them down from that hill,” Beth-Anne said, pointing. “They came right out of nature for free. And they buried the bodies with the rocks right over their heads.”
I walked three paces from one of the rocks. “So, I’m standing on a dead person’s feet right now?”
“No, they were buried standing straight up.”
“Straight up?”
“Facing the sunset in the West,” she said, like I was a fool and she knew better by spouting off like this. And then she pointed down near my feet at the base of the rock, to some needleless fir twigs lying there like withered brown smiles. “That’s what the dead eat,” she said. “They strip the branches bare with their rotting tombstone teeth. And then they sit and scream and hope something or someone tastier will come to investigate.”
But I knew damned well that the twigs had simply lost their needles in the cold and that Beth-Anne was not only spouting drivel, but actual damned nonsense. That’s why I snapped the branch from a nearby trunk, stuck it beneath one of those big rocks, and levered it up, my skinny Grade Four legs straining from the effort. Lo and behold, there was nothing beneath the rock but dirt. “There, Beth-Anne,” I huffed. “I don’t see any dead mental patient.”
Beth-Anne shot me a withering look, but got down on her knees and scrambled her hands through the dirt as if she could prove her theory, as if she could dig the body up with her bare hands, as if it all wasn’t, obviously, drivel. And as she dug, I swear she muttered something rude under her breath and, really, what Grade Four student in a fight with her friend wouldn’t have pulled the branch out and let the rock go? You tell me.
It rolled back in place and Beth-Anne sure did yell when her hands got crushed, but I didn’t care. I didn’t care when I left her there either, because I knew she was just faking, that her bones weren’t actually broken or stuck, that she was being a puss and a crybaby and was only having a “wah-mburger and some French cries”. That’s what Mrs. Meyer says when one of her students throws a temper tantrum.
And I’m not wrong, no matter what the police say or what her mom told mine over the phone or what the people on the news say either, because she’s almost definitely fine and is probably sitting atop one of those big rocks pouting, waiting for me to come back and hear more drivel.
But I’m not going near Holdinghands Park anymore. I’ve decided, and that’s that.
I’m not going to let her be right.
Benjamin Johnson (he/him) lives and writes on Treaty 6 Territory in the Canadian Prairies, his work focusing on queering space through magic and camp. He holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and has had work published previously in the queer horror anthology Dark Rainbow (2018). He can be contacted at ben.adam554@gmail.com.