Read Online Honey is Sweeter than Blood by Jeffrey Thomas - Free Book Online Page A

oak tree.”
    “You want to see their graves  now, Andy?” Jen said tolerantly.
    “Sure, sure…lead on.”
    Diane glanced over her shoulder at the tree as they moved down the grassy, shaded mound, an island in a sea of slanting, pitted tombstones stained with dirt and lichens.  She had shivered for a few moments back there in that deep shade, the rough bark cool under her soft palm.  But she had liked it in the damp shadow.  It was a place that called out for her to return, maybe to sit propped against that trunk with a book in her lap.   The Age of Fables or Beauties of Mythology  by Thomas Bullfinch, it would be.  She had her grandmother’s copy printed in 1898.
    It was glaringly summer-hot elsewhere in the cemetery, the grass yellowish and dry like straw, not moist and squeaky green as it had been on the mound, where there had even been soft-fleshed pale mushrooms hiding in the grass.
    The man’s stone was in the middle of the sprawling graveyard.  DAVID McKAY, it was inscribed.  Born in 1901.  Died in 1923.  There was no clever poem or epitaph to explain his early demise at twenty-two.  “You went out with style, Dave,” Andrea patted the top of the stone, “but that’s what you get for sticking your lightning rod out when a thunderstorm’s brewing.”
    “Talk about your orgasms,” Jen speculated.  “What a way to go.”
    “Yeah…they didn’t smoke cigarettes after-wards, they just smoked.”
    The young woman had no grave of her own, her name chiseled into a looming family monument, a weathered white obelisk.  MARIE BARNES…1903-1923.  Her ignominious fate was inscribed on the tongues of the town folk, and didn’t need to be immortalized here.  Commenting on this, Andrea said, “Hey, at least it’s nice to be remembered for something.  Everybody else in here was probably pretty boring.”
    “I think it’s beautiful, in a way,” Diane ventured, a little encouraged by Andrea’s failure to attack before.  “Don’t you?”
    “Beautiful? To get burnt to a crisp at twenty? Um, let me think about that for a second.   No .”
    “Well, I mean, to die together in a joined moment of love…isn’t that just a little romantic?”
    “Honey, who said they were in love? Joined together in lust, it could have been.  If it’s so great why don’t you go make it with somebody in a car on some train tracks? Real  romantic.”
    Diane decided to keep her feelings and impressions to herself; that had been more the Andrea she knew and feared.  Andrea knew damn well Diane had yet to make it with anybody, in any location.  And that the occasion wasn’t imminent, either.  She was bookish, dark-haired, mushroom-bodied.  Andrea was pretty, blond (artificially, but blond) and a hard, half-anorexic brown.  
    “Now do you believe me?” Jen said.  
    “ Yes , Jen, I believe you, okay ? Davey McKay and Marie Barnes really went out with a bang.”
    “Oh God.”
    “Oh Zeus, you mean.”
    *     *     *
    Jen and Diane returned to the mound the next day…without Andrea along.  It had been Diane’s idea to stroll here again.  
    It had rained earlier, the air thick, almost too heavy to breathe in.  Mosquitoes bobbed in the air.  They stopped, of course, at the mound and climbed its slippery side.  Diane’s sneakers skidded out from under her and she fell on her hands and knees, smearing them with green juice.  A mushroom had become mush under her left palm.  Andrea would have been in hysterics.  Jen helped Diane to her feet.  
    Under the pavilion of the tree they idly scanned the rest of the graveyard around them.  “Cows used to graze in that field.” Jen pointed beyond a distant fence.  It was a corn field now.  A shiny-domed silo protruded above the trees at its farthest edge.
    Diane touched the damp bark of the tree, and shuddered.  She looked directly at it.  Mossy grooves.  Hard wrinkles of age.  “I should carve their names here.  Wouldn’t that he neat?” she