Front Porch Review
A literary magazine for the young at heart and mind

            Fall has run its cycle. The trees across the valley have shed their leafy skins and stand like ghostly skeletons. The chill of the morning makes my bones creak as I slowly make my way up the grassy incline to your gravesite. I’m not exempt from the taxes that aging imposes.
            This is the first time I’ve garnered the courage to make the drive to the cemetery since your funeral. I maintain a constant eye on my surroundings to assure myself that the shooter won’t spring up from behind a gravestone, the way it happens in my nightmares.  It has taken the better part of a year to come to grips with the fact that I am really alone. I have finally stopped listening for your arrival home from work. This morning I didn’t reach across our bed to wake you. Your voice, the one I keep for our quiet conversations, has become a strained echo. I feel you distancing yourself from me. Your offer of comfort is a soft, fading, “It will be all right. It will be all right.” I try to give chase, but I find I can no longer keep up.
            That morning was cold like this. Photographing the ever changing fall scenery was your passion. You had been waiting for a calm, crisp morning, when barren trees would be lit just so by the rising sun. It was too cold for me so I remained in the car. But that moment for you, however transitory, was perfect and beautiful, and you weren’t going to miss it.
            That moment turned into a robbery that rewarded the predator with fifteen dollars and a camera. That moment gave witness that life can be so beautiful but also so cheap.
            I walk carefully up this hill. A delicate coating of frost clings to the shaded vegetation. It provides a tenuous foothold. At your grave, I notice how unkempt things look. October’s leaves are scattered about, their energy spent. They, along with dying grass and fallen twigs, entwine themselves to make an unruly carpet. Through this I see a weedthat has managed to spread across your marker. I reach down to pull it but stop. It has as much right to live as you did. I turn and walk to my car.

By Jon Beight

Jon Beight moved to western New York from Los Angeles about twelve years ago.  He finally answered the urge to put pen to paper in the last few years. The one thing which has surprised him about writing is the emotional attachment he develops with each of his characters. The one thing he realized after moving east was how true it is that even as much as people are different, we are still so much the same. His e-mail address: