Decoration Day
Loss. 600 words, 2 minute read. With Gemini.
The scent of raw earth, sharp and unsettlingly fresh for late May, was the first thing that assaulted Daisy. It was the perfume of upheaval, not of spring blossoms. Before her, the land undulated in a new, terrible rhythm – a sea of white headstones, so many they seemed to swallow the horizon, their stark newness almost blinding in the morning sun. Each one, a period mark at the end of a life too briefly written. She’d heard the whispers, the grim accounting that felt like a physical blow: for every fifty souls who had walked this earth before the cannons roared, one now lay beneath soil like this.
Her kid gloves, already worn thin, gripped the stem of a single, blood-red rose, its thorns a familiar press against her skin. She began to walk, her black skirts whispering over the tentative new grass struggling between the markers. To her left, a raw mound: Private Ethan Miller. Ethan, who’d passionately, if not precisely, tortured the violin, convinced he could make it sing. He’d once joked he’d play at her and Thomas’s golden anniversary, a jest now as silent as his abandoned bow. The thought, a tiny splinter of memory, brought a fresh pang. It wasn't just Ethan's music that was gone; it was all the unheard melodies of a generation.
Further on, a family huddled, the woman’s shoulders shaking silently as a younger man, barely more than a boy himself, placed a small, hand-carved wooden bird on a grave. Elsewhere, an elderly woman carefully brushed debris from a stone, her lips moving, perhaps in prayer, perhaps in conversation with the one she’d lost. These small, individual acts of devotion were everywhere, a quiet, uncoordinated tide of remembrance.
Then, she caught fragments of a conversation from two women nearby, their voices low but clear in the somber air.
"Mrs. Albright insists on calling it 'Decoration Day'," one said, a hint of disapproval in her tone. "As if a few flowers could truly… decorate this."
"Perhaps," the other mused, her gaze sweeping over the vast field of white, "but we must call it something. To mark it. Some are saying 'Memorial Day.' That feels… heavier. Truer, perhaps."
Memorial. Daisy turned the word over in her mind. Decoration felt too light, like a pretty ribbon on a wound still gaping and raw. Memorial, though… that spoke to the marrow, to the enduring ache, to the vital need to carry the weight of these memories forward. It acknowledged the sacrifice in a way that mere adornment never could.
Her own path ended at a stone indistinguishable from the thousands surrounding it, save for the name etched upon its face: Major Thomas Cartwright. Her Thomas. The world seemed to tilt and narrow, focusing on those carved letters. His laugh, deep and warm, echoed in the hollow chambers of her memory. The way his hand had felt in hers, strong and reassuring, a stark contrast to the cold, unyielding marble she now reached out to touch. Her fingers traced his name as if the stone itself might yield some residual warmth, some imprint of the vibrant life it now so cruelly commemorated.
She knelt, the damp earth staining the hem of her mourning dress, a small price. The rose, a final, crimson teardrop, she laid gently upon the inscription. There were no words, no grand gestures that could bridge the chasm his absence had torn in her world, in the world. Only this. This silent offering, a testament to a love that war had ended but that memory would keep alive. Rising, she took one last look, not just at his grave, but at the ocean of remembrance stretching out before her. This, then, was how they would begin. One rose, one visit, one shared, solemn acknowledgment, against the deafening silence of so much loss.