Spinning Over The Stiff Earth

I shot this grave, and then it died. 

My brother and I were at the graveyard where we had buried our mother two days before. We were still in disbelief about her sudden death. It was on a shadowy day in February. The sky had the color of one of Amsterdam’s frozen canals. The branches of trees were covered with translucent blue ice. The air had no taste but frostiness.
We passed all kind of tombs and started to read the inscriptions. Some crypts were so old that the names were hard to read. We examined an inscription with metal characters that read:

Safe in the holy arms of God, rests here my beloved wife and our wonderful mother: Jack de Wit.

It was obvious the metal character y had fallen off.
My brother and I started laughing. We laughed so loudly our laughter echoed over the graveyard. We laughed out of control and tears were running over our faces.

“O my God,” my brother bawled laughing insanely while he fell on his knees, “I’m so glad mom’s name wasn’t Jacky!”

“Yeah. Right,” I yelled hysterical back while I collapsed to my knees as well, “but the problem is, her first name was John…”

My brother and I never laughed like that before. We were laughing like idiots. We revolved over the frozen earth, embracing each other and crying with laughter. We couldn’t stop laughing for at least five minutes, spinning over the stiff earth like fools. At one point we hardly moved anymore. We just lay there on the rigid planet under that icy February sky. Two big daft orphans on an ice-covered graveyard in Amsterdam, holding each other like exhausted lovers.


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