Voices In the Garden

Here she lies; the garden is her tomb. The weeping willows hang not low enough to touch her decaying flesh and the bugs and rot that cling to it. Was it an axe? Perhaps a cleaver, which could have left that gash between her gray eyes and split her forehead forever open? The air chills her brains which are splattered ferociously upon the earth beneath her head; the earth that remains alive; the garden. Would it be wicked to say she is not a pretty thing? For she is not a pretty thing at present. Yet is she beautiful to her killer? Her body is displayed like a work of art; as if the grass were a canvas and she the three-dimensional portrait. Her fingers, stiff as they are, curl into her palms so that the nails have left imprints upon their pearly flesh. Her legs are twisted, heavy with rigor mortis. What was her name, you ask? I cannot provide such an answer, for what dead thing has use still for a name? For that name let us return her to her life and to her beginning when there were once voices in the garden.