Girl in Blue

She likes to visit the cemetery on gray days. The days when the air is full of the coolness of clouds and the edges of shadows blur into nothingness.  She moves gracefully through the lines of stone grave markers, her white fingers running over the rough top of tombstones as she passes. She hums a tuneless melody as she walks, her hair blowing around her angular face in the cold breeze. A white rose dangles from her fingertips. She wanders aimlessly through the rows of stone monuments, pausing now and then to read a name, to ponder on  a life summed up in the single dash between two dates.

She comes to a secluded corner of the cemetery, a small space overrun with weeds and fallen leaves. A stone stands tall in the far corner. A stone with the simple engraving, in memory of the girl in blue. There is only the date of death scrawled under the notation, killed by a train. There is no birth date and no dash. No indication that she lived a life at all, only the description of her dress at the time of her death.
Everything else about her was forgotten.

She lowers herself to sit by the stone, the cold in the air seeping into her bones and making her movement slow and halted. With frozen fingertips she brushes away the layer of dead leaves along the bottom of the stone, searching for the words that bring peace to a tumultuous existence, unknown but not forgotten.

The girl in blue who was killed by a train many years ago on a cold Christmas Eve has not been forgotten, but she was never known. Those who buried her here did not line the coffin with love notes and flowers, they did not know who to send the heartbreaking telegram to, which newspaper to run the obituary in, who to invite into mourning. They left her in the blue dress because it was the only thing they knew about her. Her broken body too twisted and shattered to tell any story except for the gruesome one of her death. They could not tell her age, or even whether she had been beautiful in life. No one is beautiful in death, the cold grey mask of emptiness covers the features so perfectly, but hides them so completely.  

But she was not forgotten. The girl buried in the blue dress lay here still with no one come to claim her, but the stone stood tall and proud, declaring, here I am. Here I lay until the end of days, a girl in a blue dress.

“But I know you,” she whispers, the words leaving her dry lips like the scream of wind through a canyon.

She rises from her spot among the weeds and lays the white rose atop the gray stone. She runs her gray hands down her blue dress, smoothing out the wrinkles and the moth eaten holes. Her gray skin turns to smoke, and the transparent fog over her thin, sharp face shifts and shutters as a cold wind whips through her bones. She turns away.  A few stones down from her own quite tomb she vanishes into the cold gray air.