Angel
A marble angel stands at the head of Arthur Fletcher’s grave. In her hands, she raises a birdbath to the heavens while, close by, a bulldozer flattens the council-run cemetery to make way for a new housing project.
Amid the noise of destruction, men wearing hardhats throw debris into industrial skips. Unseen, the angel grows taller and taller.
Beneath the angel’s feet, Arthur Fletcher stirs, his skeleton shifting with new growth that has slept inside his rotting flesh for over twenty years.
Green slime pulsates. Amoeba-like creatures hatch out. Hundreds of corpses, agitated by external activity, awaken and writhe in many old graves as yet untouched by demolition.
Rapidly, these creatures grow. Tentacles take shape. Heads the shape of footballs enlarge. Hungry mouths yawn into cavernous pits and when the bulldozer draws nearer, the angel meets the startled gaze of its driver.
Suddenly, the birdbath smashes through the windscreen. Decapitated, the driver’s head falls from the cab into the mouth of the first emerging Grunchling. Then the cemetery erupts and thousands of its species slither out from their dark nesting places.
Frantic, slithering on green slime, workmen, trying to escape, are sucked up by those immense, blubbery mouths and fresh white bones spew out on top of older, grayer ones.
Minutes later, their eating frenzy ends and the Grunchlings move en masse towards the town where, outside the Council Chambers, demonstrators hold up placards, chanting, “Save our local cemetery.”