Frankenberry's Attic

From this past week came a prompt from GirlieOnTheEdge for another Six Sentence Story. I haven’t done one of these in a little while but I liked the prompt word of “Dust” so I thought I would join in.

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From Tom to Dust

Bill stood just outside the small circle of those gathered, Father Malin, the two gravehands or groundskeepers or somethings (he didn’t like to think of them/call them gravediggers) one leaning on a shovel like he was honoring a cliche but as respectfully as he could the other holding the key to the backhoe, Mrs Walter from the rectory office looking at her watch and a few folks from the soup kitchen while he watched and listened to the Father drop dirt and “dusts to dusts” through his fingers, but distantly, like from another grave, another cemetery and he wondered of Tom, who was to become this dust, then, just barely, he noticed something shine and glint in the early Spring sun from out of the father’s fingers and just … float?

Bill had met Tom while doing his stint of community service at the soup kitchen of Saint John’s Neighborhood Reach, a stint he stayed on with long after a judge had told him needed to and that was mainly because of Tom, though the small community of folks there were warm and welcoming and never asked him “Why’s” only “How can we help’s?’ until he could do the same for others, Tom was a special one and enough to thank the heaven’s inside these walls that this was the parish the judge assigned him to.

The world had not been kind to Tom, though he had tried to be kind to it, it got the better of him from an evil grinning world’s perspective and that was enough for another check in a black box and then it was world forward for someone else to crush but Tom held on until he made his difficult, painful, confusing and, as Bill discovered, astounding, practically unbelievable way to Saint John’s and into Bill’s life where they talked daily, became friends and Bill found himself lighter and lighter after every conversation, found himself looking forward to getting up in the morning again finally, looking forward to just looking forward and he also found himself becoming more learned, schooled again almost, as everything Tom talked to him of, of his life, of his knowledge which Bill discovered was vast, almost impossibly so, of his few victories and many failures, the amount of which seemed equally impossible, of the hundreds of thousands of books and texts and scrolls and back even to cave walls that he had not just read but, absorbed, became one with it seemed and almost felt like, in his telling’s, that he had been a part of their creation, again impossibly so, stayed with Bill … all of it, every last word.   

He was thinking of this, everything, how Tom had helped lighten his load just through the simple action of being there but also how he had made him feel somehow different than when they first met, fuller, more complete, more worldly it seemed when that glint he saw falling from the Father’s fingers with the dirt into the grave wasn’t just a something sparkling in the sun from a handful of dirt off the tip of a shovel but actual dust of the Father’s “from dust to dust” Bill thought, impossibly so, and it was hovering just above the ground while the rest of the dirt fell from around it until it just floated, on its own, just floated.

When Father Malin was done with all the other words besides the “dusts” and the groundsmen (groundsmen … I like that better he thought) lifted their shovels and started their engines, when Mrs Walter looked again at her watch, grimaced and walked with a quicker step and the few folks from the soup kitchen made their way back to set up for lunch, Bill just stood and watched the dust continue to float over Tom’s grave until he moved and then, suddenly, the floating, glinting dust moved with him and then stopped when Bill stopped and picked back up when Bill did until Bill kept moving and the dust came to float along with him, in step, side by side all the way back to his new little apartment, the first one away from the shelter since finding St John’s and his first night before the new job he would start next week, the legitimate one, he thought, where I’m doing what I should be.

The dust stayed with Bill into this new place, settled above his nightstand. until Bill turned out the light and said “Goodnight Tom” into the air and then he dreamed, dreamed long, almost impossibly so, he dreamed lifetimes, lifetimes upon lifetimes upon lifetimes.