Classification - part 3

https://www.abctales.com/story/noo/classification-part-1

https://www.abctales.com/story/noo/classification-part-2

In Mandarin Chinese, words are grouped together and classified by the shape of the objects the words describe.

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Ke – small, roundish things. Teeth, pearls and distant stars 

Wherever she goes, it seems to Feng Mian that the sea follows her. So loyal a companion it is, she can’t even sleep without its roar in the distance.  And on the odd occasion she goes into town, she misses the constancy of its noise.

Feng Mian leaves the sea’s edge and walks down the front, past the pastel beach huts with their line of neglected shoes paired in front of them.  Past the walkers and joggers, moving to keep alive.  Don’t they know, Feng Mian thinks, that death runs faster?

At the end of the developed part of the sea-front, she walks up the rough, sand track that traces the length of the cliff.  It’s so high up here and the wind buffets her wildly.  The smell of the samphire and other plants is strong and when she looks over the edge, she can see brambles about to yield fat, purple blackberries.  The picnic tables are empty still, but Feng Mian knows that within the next few hours, they will be teeming with people and wasps.

She’s tracking the rough, stone wall now that leads through the gateway to her favourite place.  The graveyard by the sea.  As always when she comes here, Feng Mian thinks that this must be the most perfect place to be buried.  She senses the ease of the bodies, imagines the satisfied, toothy grins fixed to ancient skulls.

At the far end of the graveyard, a number of the older, untended graves have renovation notices on them from the local council.  These state that unless family claim and tidy the graves, the council will take them over and move the contents from their plots.  Feng Mian imagines creaking, confused skeletons awakened rudely after years of sleep.  Their perplexed quibbling with the promise, laid to eternal rest​.

Many of the graves are sunken and broken, owned by quick, green lizards who dart in and out of the cracks in the stone and marble.  The pictures and names of people – often whole families buried together – fascinate Feng Mian. One of the things she sometimes does while she’s here is to try and find a grave she’s never noticed before, looking particularly for the graves of children of the age that Mei was. 

There are a number of small, ostentatious mausoleums in the graveyard, but some are so worn that their ornate, metal doors are broken off and propped unceremoniously against their back walls.  Musty, complex air emanates from their interiors when they are disturbed by the living walking by them.

On the graves, ceramic bouquets of chrysanthemums and other flowers glint with the little pearls of fixing pins catching in the shards of sunlight cutting through the grey.  The crosses bedded in the ground are elaborate twists of black iron.

Feng Mian looks back through the gate of the graveyard at the ever present sea.  A sailing boat is drifting across the water - beautiful and formidable, moving at its own pace in response to the gentle push of the wind.  She wonders, like so many other times, whether Mei is under the sea. Forever ten years’ old, but with bones far too old now for a little girl. Sunk to the bottom in the midnight zone, caught in the mouths of strange fish or other wonders.

She prefers instead to think Mei is on the sailing ship, somewhere near the bow – excited and curious to see where the ship will sail next.  Perhaps even, Mei sails by every so often to check up on her, to see that everything is good with her?  The small, round kindness of care.

The ship’s sails will flap and the rigging will knock against itself and create the tune for a future sea shanty.  Mei will sail ever onwards, under a sky filled with distant stars.

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(I wrote this story after seeing a sailing ship from a graveyard by the sea in Normandy.  The attached picture is of the place.)