The Cemetery That Became a Gallery

Claudia's mother died when she was very young. She had fallen from a ladder and broke her neck. Her grief-stricken father accepted the fine marble gravestone from the town church but refused to let the carver mark the stone in any way. Instead, he painted the scene of her death on its polished surface. The tree, the ladder, and her mother with her head in an impossible position.

Initially annoyed at being rejected for his generous offer, the stone carver soon let the offense fester. In a drunken rant at the local pub, he railed against the idiot that tried to paint marble and invited the tavern to visit the grave to see the washed blank stone memorial. Only one person walked up to the grave, but they returned to the bar to say the stone carver was wrong. The painting stood intact.

The gravesite was only a small curiosity at first but, soon, thousands came to see the painting that miraculously adhered to the stone. It withstood the elements without aging and denied even a flake of paint to the fingernails of tourists or the pocket knives of malicious children.

When the village baker's husband passed away, she asked Claudia's father for a similar marker. After the funeral, crowds gathered informally, casually, often pretending to visit dead relatives they hadn't paid respects to in years. They circled in threes and fours, but the first rainy afternoon brought nearly the whole town. The painting of the stone oven, the husband ablaze, the blackened bread on fire and bouncing like a comet at his feet, it stayed intact, undamaged by the storm.

Soon all of the village's dead were honored by Claudia's father's miraculous art. These gravestones, all painted with the scene of the person's death, refused to age or fade.

Her father found a new trade, but Claudia watched him paint these memorials with little joy or pride. He seemed to move through the commissions as if they were just part of his daily routine, like brushing his teeth.

The town prospered from the tourism, and the land surrounding their farm became the largest cemetery in that part of the country. Claudia spent much of her youth wandering the cemetery that had become a gallery. She dodged the crowds and searched for the ladders her father had hidden in each painting.