monday writing prompt

official monday prompt:

we're creeping toward Fall, toward the time of year where the natural world slips into drowsy lock-down, waiting for Winter. Hallowe'en's right around the corner, and my inspiration turns toward darker thoughts:

"You, too, wander about the graveyard silent and pensive. Your ear is conscious of the gentle echoes of deep groans and tears, while your eyes rest on rich monuments, and modest wooden crosses; and the unmarked tombs of strangers, covering their dead, who were strangers when living, unmarked, unobserved. And you read the inscriptions on the monuments, and all these people who have disappeared from the world rise up in your imagination. You see them young, laughing, loving; you see them hale, loquacious, insolently confident in the endlessness of life.

And they are dead."


Leonid Andreyev, from "Stepping-Stones", published in "The Little Angel", Knopf, 1916. (courtesy of www.ligotti.net)