“Hello, Mister Frost, how’re you fairin’ this fine morrow?”

The aged scarecrow-gravedigger held a pipe in his hand, and sat backwards on a grave marker; at his feet, a small, black kitten curled about him and made tiny ‘mewing’ noises. The young cat had showed up, unexpectedly and without reason, three nights back during the snowstorm. He had come clawing at the door of the funeral home, pitifully coated in white cold and shivering. The caretaker had noticed him while locking up, and brought him inside. A can of tuna later — out of the employee fridge — and he was indoctrinated into the staff as ‘Frosty,’ in homage to the conditions of his discovery.

“What do you think about this day, as the sun peeks over the trees and life begins anew? I can’t guess what words float through your cat-mind, no sir; not I, the human with his human head.”

A light snow was drifting from the cloud-dotted sky, still pink with the residue of dawn. Frosty yawned and stretched, clawing the old man’s pants-leg. Cracking his wrinkled lips halfway in a bemused smirk, he reached down and patted the kitten’s head with his free hand. They were positioned in the shadow of the angelic statue of a winged, knightly woman, the centrepiece of the graveyard. Wet stains ran down her checks, as the snow hit and melted and traced paths down her psuedo-flesh.

“Do you think about death, Mister Frost? Does a lost kitten in a dusty cemetery contemplate things such as that? Does your walnut-brain stop and wonder about the great beyond?”

The smoke from the ancient gravedigger’s pipe swirled and danced in the air, twisting around the sunken face of the spindly figure of a man in black, bounded upward for the endless, gray forever that hung like depression over the world, cut and bled crimson by the vengeful sun. If the innocent and chilled kitten was not so preoccupied with his own tail, he would have seen the blank, veined eye of the man playing with him twitch as if to move and see something else. More obviously, his right-hand, still-functioning eye swung toward the funeral home’s back building, where the silhouettes of three people emerged from a door. Standing up and putting the pipe to his mouth, the stick-man, attendant in arms to the master Frosty, stretched the muscles of his legs and watched.

“I do ponder, Mister Frosty, such things as death, I must admit. It does not trouble me in my sleep, however, nor does it haunt my dreams like a spectral nightmare. Too many people, they fear it and repulse from He Who Ends All Things.”

Many yards away, long from being in earshot of the strange man and his kitten, the trio of figures stepped up to the edge of the cemetery. One, a slender and clean man in a red jacket and mauve pants, held a clipboard in his left hand, while his closest companion, a Latin, burly man in heavy dress, crossed his arms and lazily looked about. Behind them, keeping behind in either shyness or wariness, a plain-looking woman in a light, green hoodie stood, head-down and hands-in-pocket. The front man’s voice, soothing and soft, pierced the morning snow’s silence and calmed the world about. “This is, as you can very well guess, where he will be bured, ma’am, and I must be so bold as to say it is the finest and most well-groomed resting place for the deceased in the tri-county region. We have been in business since the 1800's, in fact. . . “ The hooded woman kicked the snow and sharply jerked her head around, as though wishing to appear interested and looking around at the site but failing.

Deliberately at the pace of an aeon, the one-eyed scarecrow approached the stone angel — permanently on guard for some unnamed threat — and placed a hand against her base. Letting out a few rings of smoke, he removed his corncob pipe and knocked it against the bottom of his worn-through boot. Frosty hopped through the half-inch deep blanket of winter and followed his current keeper, leaving paw-prints in his wake over the graves of those-long-gone.

“Now, Mister Frost, one must not tread on the Houses of the Dead, I tell you. For when you knock on their doors, they are liable to stir from their Sleep and come to answer, and we really dun’ want that, do we? No, we don’t . . . we don’t.”

The olive-skinned man started walking toward the middle of the cemetery, where the scarecrow stood by the Lady in Waiting, while brushing flakes off his arms. Behind him, taking the arm of the green jacket the woman wore, the pristine-faced man smiled and offered her a steaming, Styrofoam cup he had been holding. “Miss, if the weather is too much for you, we can move inside, of course — but, I merely desired to show you the beautiful Garden your loved one would be soon joining,” he spoke, in a low and impossibly reassuring tone. She shook her head very slightly, and took the hot drink he offered, sipping it carefully. The black coffee scalded her lips, and she cried out abortively, biting her tongue to stop herself. “It’s o-okay.”

“Death has to be an amazing thing, I think — a life-changing experience, hehe. So many of us humans, we treat it in as wide a variety of ways as the width of disparity between our births and lives . . . Someone else said that once, but I forget who.”

Pulling the hood from her head, the woman revealed a mess of brown hair that splayed over her shoulders like grain spilling from a silo. Her face was the colour of a robin’s egg from the frosty, early morning, but her cheeks were red from some other source, perhaps a blushing or a sun-burn. “I’m fine, I’m fine. Just tired, you know? Cold, too. I’m fine.” She took a slower pull from the coffee, and sighed deeply as the heated liquid hit her insides with a splash of warmth.

“There are those who detest it and despise it, making it the centre of their hatred and contempt, loathing and disgust. Their whole lives go into death, by the end of it — kinda ironic, as the book-worms says, that what they hate becomes who they are, and blah, blah.”

The kitten took this opportunity to start scaling the pants of his tall escort, claw-by-claw. Reaching down and snatching him up by the nap, the human of the two placed him on the looming angel’s pedestal. Coughing in the raw cold, the Spanish-looking man came up to the watcher of Frosty and nodded. “Buenas manañas, amigo, we got a job,” he slurred, wiping his mouth with his hand; he was holding a Styrofoam cup of coffee, too.

“And others make it their Muse, their Saviour and Lord, welcoming it and awaiting it and counting the seconds until He comes a’knockin’. I dun’ really like them any better than the first kind of people — they’re too melodramatic about the whole thing and write a slew of bad poetry and music about it, you know, Mister Frost?”

The scarecrow did not particularly visibly acknowledge what the young, Hispanic man said, but he nodded, again, anyway, more to himself than anyone else. Turning back around, he lifted his feet and made sure not to stomp on the squares of graves on his way back toward where the woman stood with the man with the reassuring voice. Knocking more ash from the pipe, the time-withered, eccentric fellow dropped it in one of the large, deep pockets of his coat and pulled, from elsewhere, a tin of chew. Reaching gnarled fingers into the black mass of tobacco, he popped it in his cheek and bit down, producing a squishy sound. The kitten repeated his chant of ‘mew, mew, mew’ from the sandaled feet of the angel-woman; one might imagine him saying, in repetition, ‘cold, cold, cold.’

“Me? I think of it like this — death, that is — it’s a part of life, thus a slave to life. Treat it as such, and He’ll stay put, wherever He comes from, like an ignored, disobedient child. It’s like in those books with magic, where the Dead can be brought back to Life — I don’t mean the Bible, but that’s kinda the same — who cares about what comes next, then? When you can just be brought back around, no matter if your head done been severed or age has dug Her icy claws into your soul, then why concern yourself with Death? Sure, nobody can cast no spell to bring me back to life, but I may as well pretend they can — maybe they do, maybe I have been brought back to Life, and that was the day I was born? Or maybe this is where you go when you’re Dead, and I’m just somewhere else, waiting to be ress’rected . . . Huh, Mister Frost, want some fish?”

The kitten had begun to rub his head on the hand of the talking man, which he had absently let sit against the edge of the statue, and was meowing louder. Picking the kitten up and raising him to the level of his operable eye, the scarecrow spat out of the side of his mouth.

“Don’t matter to me, though, ‘cause I dun’ feed’ya, hah!”