"Wake Up!"

I follow the cat under a bridge spray painted with subversive graffiti:

TORIES OUT

RIOT ON

IT'S AN INSIDE JOB--WAKE UP!

I don't know enough about the country to agree. I don't know enough about the cat to be following it, either, but here I am, chasing a bushy tail through the gates of a Welsh cemetery.

I don't know what death smells like. Anyone who's seen death--actually seen it--wouldn't write about it. Death has no smell. It just is.

My ballet flats squelch in the mud. The cemetery goes on forever, grass and worms and upturned earth---a gnarled tree. The cat slips between the roots and is gone.

Remember: Gone isn't dead.

The cemetery is ancient. If radiation makes zombies of corpses, only a fine dust will rise from the graves. Buzzing, the dust will fly through our ears--Brains!--and carve away what we don't need. All those heavy, heavy thoughts. The song lyrics and movies we replay to torture ourselves. All that life.

I climb a crooked monument, stare into the face of an angel. "Wake Up!"