Jude Atwood By Jude Atwood
Days were just getting humid when the prairie dogs were spotted in the cemetery. Schoolkids saw something tan and stubby-limbed scuttle into a hole as their bus rattled to a halt at the stop sign in front of Fred Nickelsen’s sprawling farm. Someone shouted that there was an animal in the GRAVEYARD, and the children squeezed against the windows on the side of the bus right as the ground squirrel popped its head up out of the earth near a headstone. Delighted squealing ensued.
“Gross,” someone said. “There’s dead people in there.”
I assigned my part-time assistant, Roger Doty, a high school senior with aspirations in journalism, the task of capturing a human-interest photo of the unexpected intruders in the cemetery.
“Take a kid with you,” I told him. Although my official goal was to maintain journalistic integrity, even in a rural paper, I knew the secret to staying afloat in a small town was to prominently feature as many pictures of area children as could fit in an issue. Most of the town’s goings-on could be disseminated through word-of-mouth, and truly dire events would be carried by nearby regional newspapers with staffs of thirty or more. For at least half of my neighbors, the incentive to subscribe to the Hillside Beacon was not the news, but the prospect of seeing a daughter or a nephew in print a couple times a year. Thus, my once-a-week visits to the grade school to photograph spelling bee contestants, and thus my instruction to Roger to “see if one of the Siewerts kids can come along.” The three Siewerts brothers and their wives had a total of nine children within town limits, and so many aunts, uncles, cousins and grandparents in neighboring counties that their consistent inclusion in the paper was a no-brainer.
Hours later, Roger returned. “Sumbitch was shy,” he said, and I questioned my decision to have him chaperone a child. “I don’t know if they’re nocturnal, or what, but I finally got one at dusk. Kid in the foreground, prairie dog in the background. Had to use a flash, but I think it’ll turn out.”
“And a headstone?” I reminded him, “That’s the human-interest angle. Did you get a headstone in the shot?”
He furrowed his brow, as if trying to remember the image he’d captured. “We’ll have to look at it and see,” he said, then suggested, “Photoshop?”
The day after the image ran on page one, near-perfect (the child was out of focus—fitting because few could tell the Siewerts children apart anyway), I was visited in my office by Cora Simms. Cora, thin and severe, was lector coordinator for the Hillside Methodist Church, chair of the fire department’s ice cream social committee, and, I learned, president of the Canoe Creek Township Historical Preservation Society.
“I wanted to drop off my letter to the editor in person,” she told me. “This is too important to wait, don’t you think?”
The letter, which ran in the next issue, read:
“The presence of a prairie dog colony in the Walker Hill Cemetery poses a threat to one of Illinois’ most important historic sites. Walker Hill, exceedingly well-kept up until now, contains the oldest graves in Rock Island County, as well as beautiful Civil War era gravestones and funereal masonry. In the interest of maintaining this irreplaceable treasure for generations to come, the Canoe Creek Township Historic Society is raising funds for effective poison to donate to the cemetery for the eradication of these pests. For more information, contact Cora Simms, Society President.”
Her letter was the first time I learned the cemetery had a name. “Walker Hill” was a strange appellation, since there was no hill for miles. There are no hills or notable geographic features anywhere in Hillside, a village whose outskirts have an unobstructed view of the horizon in all directions.
The next day, I answered a call from Erma Hendricksen, whose brassy voice was a fixture in the choir of St. John the Baptist Catholic Church in Erie, the nearest Catholic parish. Erma, a full-figured woman of a certain age, was in charge of contests and decorations for the annual Hillside Dayz Festival, served on the district school board, and, it turned out, was president of the Hillside Area Wildlife Club.
“I’d like to email you, but it keeps bouncing back to me. I’d come down in person, but I’m having a terrible time keeping my tomato plants alive; I’m heading into Geneseo for fertilizer before the store closes. Puck, bless his soul, would be rolling over in his grave if I hadn’t had him cremated.” Claud “Puck” Hendricksen, Erma’s dead husband, had been an ace gardener who founded the local farmers’ market, but his wife didn’t share his horticultural gifts. “Can I double-check the email address?” she said.
Erma, with her bounced emails, had caught a typographic error on my opinion page. After giving her the correct address, I fixed it on my layout. I estimated at least six weeks had passed where no one had emailed the paper.
Erma’s missive, when it arrived, ran on page three:
“It was with great shock that I read the words of Cora Simms in the June 15th Hillside Beacon. How could anyone be so cavalier in discussing small creatures who are, after all, only doing what nature intended? I sent a copy of the previous week’s photo to Dr. Sam Van de Walle, Associate Professor of Biology at Black Hawk Community College, who identified it conclusively as a red-tailed prairie dog, a rare and exciting species, heretofore unknown in Rock Island County, or indeed, in Northern Illinois.
The Hillside Area Wildlife Society is collecting signatures to declare the Walker Hill Cemetery and surrounding area the Walker Hill Nature Preserve, protecting its unique fauna, which are a true irreplaceable treasure, for generations to come.”
What I failed to realize when I assigned a twelfth-grader to photograph the site was that it does not, in fact, sit on public land. The owner of the property, Fred Nickelsen, was too laid-back to raise the issue with me, but several knowledgeable old-timers filled me in during chance encounters with a “funny story about that, y’know?”
These days, burial plots for private residences are rare. In the mid-19th century, however, such land use was practical and necessary. Nickelsen’s was the oldest and most visible private cemetery in the area, owing to the construction in the 1920s of a major county road alongside it.
The first grave was dug in 1862 by area farmer John Nueffer for his wife, Ruth. At the time, the location—the southeast corner of Nueffer’s fifty-acre property, was isolated and picturesque. The funeral was probably sparsely attended, since the entire township’s population at the time numbered fewer than a hundred.
Over the years, some fourteen more Nueffers, including John himself, were laid in the ground. The farm was sold by a Nueffer descendant in 1970 to Fred Nickelsen’s father, also named Fred. The younger Nickelsen inherited it upon his father’s passing in 1999.
Fred Sr. is buried next to his wife along the northern edge of Walker Hill. He signed an agreement to provide for the upkeep of the cemetery when he bought the property, and it is fitting that he lies in the land for which he served as caretaker for most of his life.
The present owner was, and is, generally regarded as a decent fellow. Tall and lean, he entered middle age bearing the same stoic expression he displayed in his high school yearbook photo. Most farmers, despite the frequent solitude of their jobs, are surprisingly social. Anyone planning to drop by a farm in Hillside must typically budget an extra thirty to sixty minutes to catch up.
Nickelsen, though, had few visitors these days, and those who stopped by usually found an excuse to leave during one of many awkward silences. Even before tragedy struck, he was the sort of man who did not smile. When his wife’s blue minivan skidded on a patch of black ice on I-88 and into an electric pole, killing her along with their only son, Michael, Nickelsen was never seen to cry, either.
For this reason, it’s not difficult to fathom Nickelsen’s neglect of the Walker Hill site. A cemetery, after all, is a luxury, a form of open-air architecture to encourage looking backward. Nonetheless, Hillside residents were understandably curious just how long he would allow the infestation to continue. Because Walker Hill’s most recent residents, buried side-by-side in earth that had been patted down only three years prior, were Nickelsen’s wife and son.
Their headstones stood facing east, overlooking land that now bore dozens of fresh, living scars.
The pair of published letters, with their diametrically opposed viewpoints, struck a chord in the community like nothing I could remember. Conversations at the gas station and the town’s lone diner were more heated even than the spring of ’04, when three members of the school board requested in writing that the high school science teacher stop making air quotes during his evolution lectures.
The next Village Board meeting, after a vote to provide for the upkeep of a frontage road, was consumed entirely by heated discussion of the prairie dog problem. No sooner had the village clerk opened the floor to citizens for “other business” than a flurry of hands shot up. The most vocal, that first night, was Cora Simms.
“This is a piece of our history being devoured by vermin. And, the cultural significance of the site aside, what about respect for the dead? Would any of us want a piece of our grandparents passing through an animal’s digestive tract?”
“Ridiculous,” Erma Hendricksen countered when she finally had the floor. “They’re not earthworms. They don’t eat the dirt, they dig into it. And speaking of worms,” she went on, “what is wrong with our bodies becoming part of something else? Why did our ancestors put the dead into the ground, if not to help them rot? Nothing is happening that wouldn’t have occurred in the long run. Our ecosystem ought to concern us, not some morbid obsession with corpses.”
“What about the Egyptians?” Simms demanded at the next Village Board meeting.
“What about the Egyptians?” Hendricksen shot her a glare. “They weren’t trying to preserve their dead for posterity, no, they were keeping everything nice because the deceased would need their physical body in the afterlife. The fact that we stumbled onto their tombs is just incidental.”
“But isn’t it nice that they were there for us to stumble onto? How much we have learned about a culture from thousands of years ago? You can bet that if their sarcophagi were overrun by, I don’t know, mole rats, they’d have figured out a way to poison the little bastards.”
The next day, mimeographed broadsides on the window of Ernie’s Diner promised a lecture on the History of the Canoe Creek Settlers, Refreshments to Follow.
“Seventy minutes of pure propaganda,” Hendricksen pronounced in her now-regular letter to the editor in the Beacon. “You’d have thought this area was settled by angels from heaven.” Hendricksen, for her part, burned compact discs full of images of the prairie dog holocausts of the Southwest, hundreds of tiny cadavers with their mouths agape. She made these available for free at the Moore Memorial Library to interested parties. I considered running one of the grislier images, but we are a family paper.
“Time is of the essence,” Simms wrote in her own newspaper missive on the same day. “Action must be taken.”
Both women, on behalf of the groups they represented, called for a civic solution on the part of the village, and the next board meeting was the best-attended since the aughts, back when the town declared eminent domain to force Ed Pettit to abandon his house (and his three cars on blocks) in favor of a small playground next to the library. The playground was five years in the making, which seems a lot for a single slide and one swing set, but after Ed relocated his personal brand of rural blight to the east side of Erie, much momentum was lost.
Notably absent from the meeting was Nickelsen himself, but he avoided criticism because he usually abstained from public meetings and because as a widower who had lost a child, it was generally accepted that he might keep to himself forever.
I was there, of course, in the back with my notepad, but I remained silent. Political neutrality is a requirement of the job, for practical reasons. If I endorse the wrong school board candidate and half my subscribers get upset enough to cancel their subscriptions, I’d go out of business. And then what would I do? Move to Iowa?
Two hours of heated arguments were mercifully cut short when the gathered citizenry lost track of parliamentary procedure during a vote to end debate.
The mayor, a surprisingly shy woman in a pantsuit, wrung her hands nervously. “Actually, neither of the proposed ordinances would pass muster. The village has no standing here. The Walker Hill Cemetery is not a registered historic site, nor is the red-tailed prairie dog a protected species in this state. Fred could dig up the cemetery to make a basement, or he could call an exterminator and decimate the entire colony. If he wanted, he could hire a contractor and blow it all up at once.”
Whether this last comment was actually intended to inflame both sides of the issue, or merely had that effect, would be the source of front porch gossip for weeks. Cora Simms immediately began collecting signatures to petition to declare the cemetery an historic site.
I opened a pint of black walnut ice cream one night—one of the few vices I allow myself—and tried to get some more background on the nature and prevalence of prairie dog infestations. They’re not exactly uncommon, although Lexis search results were oddly incongruous. They reduce property values! They’re an important part of the ecosystem! Poisoning them is cheap and effective! Poisoning them puts an array of endangered species at risk! And so forth. I was a little surprised at how often prairie dog colonies required emergency community-based solutions. I considered running a feature on different methods of dealing with them but thought better of it. Others could focus on the solutions; I’d cover the news.
I called the Beacon’s previous owner, who’d retired twelve years earlier and who now lived in a tiny two-bedroom house in his boyhood hometown of Muddy Grove, some forty miles away.
“Hi Dad,” I said when he finally picked up.
We talked about this and that, and after I recounted the cemetery conflict, he said,
“That sounds like Hillside, all right. You sure you haven’t had enough of the big city?”
Muddy Grove’s population hovers around fifty people, making Hillside a metropolis by comparison. I’d grown up there, even resented the move to Hillside my freshman year, but when it turned out after I graduated that I was a better newspaperman than Dad, that was a welcome surprise to us both. I’d learned to accept that I’d be considered new in town for at least a few more decades, but if I sometimes felt I was on the outside looking in, well, that’s just the way it goes.
I reminded Dad of these facts.
“That sounds like you, all right.”
* * *
As the sole proprietor of Hillside’s primary media outlet, I decided it was time to conduct some research in person. I gave Fred Nickelsen a call. He invited me over on a Wednesday, late afternoon.
Prairie dogs are small, but they are communal, and their collective efforts are a force of nature.
Seeing the cemetery for the first time in a while, I understood why Cora Simms’ response had been horror. Prairie dogs do not dig so much as churn the earth. The graveyard itself covered two acres, with the oldest graves lined along the back. Time and weather had snapped some of the thinner century-old headstones at the base, and these had been reset in the ground immediately behind their original moorings. No longer rigid and straight, their gently angled postures gave them a casual appearance, as though standing with a hip cocked.
They overlooked a lawn riddled with holes, each rimmed by a small mound of dirt. And where the underground tunnels had intersected six feet below with a former resident of the farm, the mounds of dirt were flecked with foreign matter. Here and there were pieces of dark red velvet, exposed to the sun for the first time since, perhaps, an open-casket funeral. Scraps of black cloth, chips of wood, and in one pile, what appeared to be knuckles all nested jarringly in earthen heaps.
I sat down to interview Fred Nickelsen in his living room. Although not a physically imposing man, his shoulders always seemed to be holding something up. His face was lined, and his eyes were blue enough to disarm if he looked too long at you. After talking a little football—he had a Florida State pennant on the wall—I tried to phrase my questions delicately.
“A lot of people are concerned, Fred. And no one’s quite sure why you aren’t up at arms to get those animals out of there.”
He rested his forehead against his fingertips.
“Look, I know,” I cleared my throat, “I know Lynn and Michael are in modern vaults, and their coffins won’t be disturbed. But still…you’ve got to know that anyone in town, and I mean anyone, would offer to help you out if you decide you want to do something. Heck, the paper would do a fund drive if it turns out to be expensive.”
He stood up.
“It’s complicated,” Nickelsen said. “It’s easier just to show you.” He led me down a flight of painted wood stairs into the basement. This part of the house had the look of a space that was only as clean as it needed to be; it took a moment for me to realize I wasn’t walking on a dirt floor. On the other side of the furnace room, past stacks of chopped wood, a door featured a poster of a menacing comic book monster. “Keep out,” the beast growled, but underneath had been markered, “Except when I have laundry.”
“I haven’t really cleaned this room out.” Nickelsen sounded apologetic. “Guess I don’t see much reason to. We fixed this up for Mike when he started practicing clarinet for school.”
The walls inside the room were no longer painted cinder blocks but clean white plaster. Instead of bare bulbs and plumbing, the dropped ceiling had been fitted with fluorescent light fixtures. A twin bed on stilts, the top half of a bunk bed, was tucked into the corner with a chest of drawers beneath it. A bookshelf on the far wall contained more soccer trophies than books. And along the near wall was affixed a large white flag with a crude animal silhouette sewn onto its face. “Troop 351—The Prairie Dogs,” was emblazoned across the top.
Walking into the room, my eye traveled from the flag to a numbered print next to it, a nature etching of a prairie dog poking its head out of the ground. Next to that, an acrylic painting of a prairie dog colony, the colors too bright and flat, a junior high school stab at impressionism. The signature on the painting (large and stylized), matched the signature on a large framed cartoon prairie dog drawing on the adjacent wall.
Nickelsen turned his palms up. “When you’ve a kid who’s gifted, you’ve got to encourage them if you want them to succeed. Encourage their interests. One day it’s model rockets, the next day it’s biology.”
I walk into the room. On the bed, a stuffed prairie dog wearing a baby-sized Hillside High School t-shirt. On the bookshelf, a pamphlet from the National Prairie Dog Museum.
Nickelsen coughed. “He wanted to be a cartoonist. He said there were a million cartoon cats and dogs, but no one had ever done a cartoon about prairie dogs. He thought that would be funnier, because they live in families. In colonies.”
He picked up a faded copy of Burrowing Rodents of North America, 2nd Edition. “Boys. Hmph. When they’re at that age, they think they can do anything. There’s no limits on what they might grow up to be. Prairie dog cartoons, huh?”
He coughed again, his eyes red. “I need to dust down here. Guess I should get upstairs.”
Before mounting the steps, he turned to me. “You see why I can’t just kill ’em? It’s not like they’re snakes or cicadas. I can’t shoot ’em or poison ’em; how would I live with that? I’d spend the rest of my life wondering,” he finally choked, his voice betraying emotion rare for men in these parts, “what if it was prairie dogs for a reason?”
Over coffee, I was unable to think of the right words. “Nice property,” I managed, looking out the window at the trees on the slope of the hill. “This is a beautiful piece of land.”
As he escorted me to the door that evening, he sighed. “I guess I’m just waiting to be persuaded.”
In the days leading up to the next Village Board meeting, things began seriously to heat up. Both of the key players conducted their own research missions. Nickelsen gamely accepted their visits.
Erma Hendricksen came to call on him Monday, and Cora Simms stopped by the following day. I can only imagine the stiffness of each visit, as the polite and patient Nickelsen offered coffee to these longtime acquaintances, both of them pillars of the community in which he’d grown up.
He had suggested when I spoke with him that he felt it best to lay out all the facts to these women. He wanted to see if their determination could provide him an insight. By this point, some of the older headstones at Walker Hill had toppled, and one of the schoolchildren had spotted baby prairie dogs pushed into daylight by their mother. They were cute, to be sure, but also a sign of things to come: a single prairie dog couple, left unchecked, could populate a field with over a thousand descendants in under five years.
It has been said that “all politics is local.” I thought about this when I envisioned Erma Hendricksen boldly suggesting that this widower farmer ignore the desecration of his loved ones’ tombs. I wondered how Cora Simms, after seeing Michael’s pencil sketches of a prairie dog protagonist, would urge him to disregard the coincidence.
I pictured them, stubborn adults, like isolated planets whose lonely rural orbits had been thrown into unlikely convergence, standing in uncomfortable muteness in a teenage boy’s bedroom-turned-shrine.
As editor, I was often asked where I stood; was I a member of the “screw the dogs” or the “screw the cemetery” camp? I claimed professional indifference, but in truth I wasn’t sure who to root for. Not because (pardon the expression) I didn’t have a dog in this fight, but because the whole event threw into sharp relief the ephemeral nature of everything we hold dear. A 150-year-old monument may be a testament to our human inclination to protest our own eventual obsolescence, but that span is just an instant compared to the millennia that burrowing mammals had evolved, say, to have red tails. (“Did they evolve?” I imagined the science teacher saying with a dismissive smirk.)
The pivotal board meeting was an event on par with a murder trial or a tractor pull. A collapsible wall was opened, doubling the capacity of the town hall meeting room, and extra folding chairs were borrowed from the American Legion building next door.
For the first time, I was not the sole media representative in the building. I asked Roger Doty to come with his camera, two TV news crews were covering the story, and I recognized at least one photographer from a nearby midsize paper.
As soon as the mayor began the meeting, a point of information was raised by Cora Simms. She introduced the aloof stranger on her left as a representative from the state historic registry.
“I’m happy to inform, ah, and I’m sure you’ll be happy to hear, well, let’s see, earlier this week, at a regular meeting of the Historic and Environmental Preservation Board, you see, upon receiving the paperwork, the vote was unanimous, to declare Walker Hill Cemetery a state historic site.”
A murmur went through the crowd.
“What does this mean, exactly?” The mayor seemed peeved she hadn’t been tipped off.
A man in back shouted, “It means Cora Simms got her signatures.”
Someone quipped, “How many of those names came right off the headstones?”
Cora, annoyed at the ineloquence of her guest, took over. “It means the state prohibits the destruction of the site. And, since the destruction of the site is already taking place, it effectively prevents the creation of any—” she paused for emphasis—“nature preserve.”
The mayor leaned back in her chair.
One of the older board members adjusted his glasses, saying, “That gives us jurisdiction, doesn’t it?”
Erma Hendricksen, surprising no one, stood up. “Wait just a minute. It might be true that you cannot create a nature preserve on top of a historic site. And I regret to inform you that the red-tailed prairie dog does not enjoy the distinction of being named an endangered, protected species. But it may interest this board to know that the reason this animal does not enjoy state protection is because, until recently, it was believed to be extinct in Illinois. And after seeing them here in our backyard, the Illinois Endangered Species Protection Board is in the process of adding the Cynomys rutilus to the list of protected species.”
“That means we’ve got to hurry!” Cora piped in. She was greeted by scattered applause and a sprinkling of boos.
The bespectacled board member slapped the table. “It looks like if we’re going to exterminate these animals, we’ve got a very limited time frame to do it.”
The rest of the board nodded.
“I can’t believe I’m hearing this.” Erma sat down, defeated.
In fact, she shouldn’t have been surprised. Small towns, and this community in particular, have a history of acting quickly to avoid impending regulations. More than a decade earlier, on the eve of oppressive state restrictions on the handling of asbestos, the grade school principal and two school board members personally ripped out about three-fourths of the school’s asbestos. They wore work gloves and 99-cent surgical masks. The remaining asbestos, under the new rules, cost the school nine-thousand dollars to remove.
Adam Dillin, owner of the feed store in town, raised his hand. “I can get aluminum phosphide at wholesale rate, if the board wants to designate me the approved vendor for this project.”
The buzzing that followed his statement was cut short when Fred Nickelsen stood up. He took off his feed cap and waited a long while before speaking.
“I suppose you all know I’ve got my family buried on the farm, at Walker Hill. Hell, I always thought that maybe someday I’d be buried there. I feel a very deep responsibility to keep it up.” He cleared his throat. “That said, I really wish there was another way to maintain the cemetery without pumping poison into the ground.” He looked around. People were silent. A few might have been ashamed. “I guess that’s all I’ve got to say.”
Thus far, I had been jotting notes on my legal pad. I sighed. Neutrality is a laudable goal, but even Switzerland shoots down planes when it has a good reason. There is a time for journalistic detachment and there is a time for action. The old man in Muddy Grove might give me an earful for this, but I put down my pen and stood up.
“I’d be remiss,” I began, “if I didn’t bring up an incident that happened in Nebraska two years ago. I read about it earlier—there was a prairie dog colony in a school playground, and the school undertook a live trapping project. Basically, they moved the whole colony about two miles, into an abandoned lot outside of town.”
A board member asked me if it was feasible.
“It’s possible, that’s all I can definitively say.” I turned back a few pages in my notes. “Local paper wrote that it took a lot of man-hours, and the hardest part was finding a plot of land of comparable size to the original colony. Apparently, they had an empty field. Every year they release a few bull snakes to keep the population under control.”
Cora Simms, Erma Hendricksen, and Fred Nickelsen all stood up at once. The board looked from person to person, expectant.
Fred nodded. “Sure, why not?”
I don’t know who started clapping. I just know that it lasted a good long time.
As it subsided, the mayor called for order. “Where would we put this? We need a donation of several acres of land…”
People looked around. No one spoke.
“Hearing no suggestions, the village will take out an ad in the next issue of the Hillside Beacon seeking a suitable relocation site. If no response is received by this body in seven days, we hereby approve funds for the purchase of aluminum phosphide poison.”
“Oh, what the hell,” Erma shouted, throwing a hand into the air. “You can have my land. I’ve got six acres and I’ve got enough canned tomatoes to last me till I’m dead. I don’t need a garden anymore.”
The mayor raised an eyebrow. “Is your offer firm?”
“If you name it after my late husband it is.”
The village clerk clarified, “The Claud Hendricksen Wildlife Preserve?”
She snorted. “Just call it Puck’s Park.”
The resolution passed the board unanimously.
The implementation of the relocation plan was complex and time consuming. It was also, according to the members of Boy Scout Troop 351 who designated it their annual community service project, a hell of a lot of fun. There may have been an attempt to take a prairie dog home as a pet, and one Boy Scout may have been involved in the unsanctioned release of two bull snakes in the cemetery for research purposes, but these stories were uncorroborated and/or resulted in minimal casualties.
To avoid disturbing the new colony, Erma had to seek out an alternative residence for a month-long transitional period while her backyard became a fenced-in nature preserve. It seemed only fitting when I heard that she accepted an offer from Cora Simms to use her spare bedroom. The noblest warriors respect their adversaries.
They each continued to raise hell from time to time, but alas, their later causes lacked the flash and sizzle of the prairie dog war.
Occasionally, on my Sunday drive, I’ll head past Fred Nickelsen’s property. I can’t help but notice that sometimes Erma’s car is parked in his driveway after church. Maybe the two of them found some communion in their grief, or maybe they just play checkers. Either way, good for them.
The cemetery now looks perfectly ordinary. The headstones have been set right, and the lawn has been patched. Spring was especially rainy, so wildflowers have popped up on the eastern edge, mostly yellow crownbeard and lavender prairie hyacinth. They’re weeds, technically, but they’re also quite beautiful.
Some people say old cemeteries are haunted. I say, they ought to be. If the ghosts of the dead never came to visit the ground where their bodies lie, it’s a damn shame what they’d miss.
Jude Atwood is best known for creating the viral Twitter thread “Tilda Swinton as Libraries.” He lives in Southern California, where he teaches media literacy to college students. His writing has previously appeared in Broadside and Literally Stories, and his novel Maybe There Are Witches will be published in 2023 by Regal House/Fitzroy Books. He can be found on Twitter (@JudeAtwood) or Instagram (@JudeAtwoodSketches).
Why we chose this piece: Jude’s style is crisp and clear, the pacing is swift, and the central plot (no pun intended) is a fantastic premise. We found his portrayal of the small town to be very authentic, and so, too, are his characters. There’s a nice mix of humor and poignancy that resonated with us a lot. This is also a lovely example of how happy endings can work in lit fic.
