“There’s a legend, they say, about the priest’s house.”

       The scarecrow man stood alone, against the brick wall of the funeral home—not alone, no, for the black kitten laid contentedly on the edge, by his head. Ivy sprouted from the base of the wall and spindled its way along it, in columns of green leaves that looped around each other in a circular fashion. The man leant his head forward, tipping his broad-brimmed, frayed, black hat forward; in his left hand, he held his corn-cob pipe that smoked silently.

“There’s a legend that his brother died, one day, by suicide. Yes, they say that he shot himself in the head with a shotgun, twelve years ago, at the age of eleven. Their parents—both the priest’s and his brother’s, of course—were in the middle of a separation, at the time. They say his brother was quite upset about it; he was older than the priest.”

       The slow breathing of the kitten escaped from his pink nose in tiny sighs, then it grew louder so Frost, the cat, stretched his legs out and turned over. His fur was matted with dirt and grim from the wall’s concrete edge. The speaker paused, tapped his pipe to dump the ashes, put it in his mouth and sucked twice, letting the smoke leak out of the corners of his tight-lipped mouth and from out of his hairy nostrils. Not far in the distance, Juan was hefting a plastic trash-bag toward the dumpster behind the house of the dead.

“They say, and I don’t know how true this part is, that the very owner of this here place of business was sleeping over on the night it happened. They were friends, then, from school or something or another. On a cold, foggy morning the entire priest’s house was woken up by his screams, as he discovered that the brother had shot himself, first. He was sleeping in the same room, but didn’t wake up from the actual shots, they say.”

       The sky was littered with looming, puff-ball, cumulus clouds that were dark on the bottom with potential rain, sleet, or snow; the sun was dimmer than usual, a dull orange ball in the sky. A few stars and the brighter planets—Mars, Venus—were already visible. A breeze was picking up, bending the scarecrow man’s hat somewhat and tumbling dead leaves across the cemetery. Little Jack Frost, the cat by his full name, rolled over again and opened one eye to stare at the strange, talking man; for his part, he blew out his breath—along with a ring of smoke—and chuckled hoarsely.

“Nobody woke up from the blast, apparently—it had happened, forensics suggested, two or three hours earlier than when the proprietor of this here funeral home, as a twelve-year-old boy, had woken up. It was his father’s shotgun, that he had gotten out the shed at some point. This is what they say, how the legend goes, that his young friend, our boss, opened his eyes one morning and was coated in his dead friend’s blood.”

       Frost mewed softly, stood up, and began licking the scarecrow man’s face; with his right hand, he scratched the tiny kitten’s head. Juan, by this time, had dropped the trash off in the dumpster and come over to stand by the legend’s teller; he had both hands in his pocket and shivered from the cold wind that was increasing in velocity, gradually. The clouds were not moving very fast, heavy with their dense moisture, casting shadows over the funeral home and its graveyard. The scarecrow man tapped the ashes out of his pipe, again, and took two more puffs; shifting his eyes skyward, he blinked slowly three times as he let his vision unfocused then refocus. Smiling crookedly, he exhaled three concentric smoke-rings and tilted the pipe at Juan.
       “Have ya evah heard the legend o’ the ghost that ‘aunts the holy home of our beloved Father Briars, amigo? On a cloudy night like last night, ya can see his blue, deathly face in the window o’ one bedroom, disembodied and cryin’—the vision of a li’l child. Is a creepy tale, eh?”
       “Yea, jefe, yea. Real creepfsy. What you need me to do, now?”