Graveyards of the Mind: A Samhain Story

Graveyards of the Mind: A Samhain Story

The veil was thin that night.

She walked alone beneath the ash trees, their branches bare and whispering. The air held the scent of peat smoke and damp earth, and somewhere beyond the hedgerow, a bonfire crackled—its flames licking the sky like tongues of memory.

It was Samhain, the hinge of the year. The time when the living remembered the dead, and the dead remembered the living.

She carried no lantern. Only a bundle of votive offerings: a lock of hair, a folded letter, a shard of broken pottery. Each one a fragment of love, of loss, of promises made and never kept.

At the edge of the field stood the dolmen—the ancient stones, hunched like elders in council. She knelt before them, placing her offerings in the hollow where rain pooled and moss grew thick. Her breath rose in clouds. Her heart beat like a drum.

“Bone of my bone,” she whispered. “Joy and sorrow both. I remember.”

The wind stirred. Shadows gathered. And from the dark came the flicker of second sight.

She saw them—not as ghosts, but as echoes. Her grandmother, weaving by firelight. Her brother, laughing in the surf. A lover, long gone, eyes full of apology. They did not speak. They did not need to.

She wept - not from fear, but from recognition. The ache of parting, the cost of love. And as her tears fell, she lit a candle and placed it among the stones.

The flame danced. The veil shimmered. And something lifted.

Not the grief. That would remain. But the fear - the fear of forgetting, of being forgotten.

She stood, lighter now. The bonfire still burned in the distance, and the stars blinked overhead like ancestral eyes.

She walked home slowly, through the graveyards of the mind, knowing she was not alone.