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This story was written as an exercise--for what, I can't remember--at a writing conference I attended. But it was fun writing. (I think the subject we were writing about might have been 'fireworks.' Maybe.)

Basically, what this story is referencing is the fact that in" olden days," especially in the Victorian era, people were not afraid of the dead like we are now. Graveyards were used rather like empty fields, places for picnics and parties while at the same time visiting the dead. I wish we still held those family values in today's world.

They remembered the old Victorian tradition of honoring the dead, even if no one else did. They dressed up nicely, in antique clothes found in a leather-bound trunk in her attic. They made up a picnic basket filled with tiny cucumber sandwiches and icea teas, with a fine white tablecloth on which to sit. Also, in the bottom of the basket was a little something extra with which to celebrate.

She stole out of the house in the middle of the night to the lawn, where he was waiting in a stark black suit and find old top hat, holding the picnic basket. Together they made their way to the cemetery by the river, and sat on the grave of Corney Buttles*. And as she sat on the white cloth, delicately eat crisp cucumber sandwiches and sipping her tea from an exquisite glass with her pinky raised, he went further afield and alighted on the grave of one Emilia Hecate, where he began to prepare.

She sighed with delight and politely clapped as the first red and gold fireworks lit the sky. More followed with sharp, swift cracks like the breaking of a stick over one's knee. And even as the police came upon them like a wolf on the fold, they finished their midnight luncheon and quenched the thirts of the spirits with tea, poured with a delicate flip of the wrist, to soak the soil of the necropolis, leaving only patches of damp soil where, only minutes before, the Victorian spirit had been revived.

While I've got my notebook here, I might as well reveal another exercise or two that I did at the conference. The following is an exercise where we had to write a complete story that was exactly fifty-five words, no more and no less. The title also had to be "Down In The Valley."

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The railway winds through the valley. The train halts, smoking. Men shout, finding the problem. One enters the steam, his face red hot like the boiler. It hisses and he spits, angry, wrenching at nuts and bolts. He swears, slamming pipes with furious hands. The boiler sighs, and the train moves on down the valley.
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In the next exercise, there was a pile of postcards laid out on the table, and our writer told us to each choose one that appeals to us. I chose a painting by Georgia O'Keefe; it was of red, red sand dunes, with a lonely cow skull half-sunk in the sands. We had to write a very short story based on the card we chose. This is mine, "Lápiz":

* Corney Buttles is the name of a man actually buried in an old cemetary about a ten minute drive from where I live. See it here.