Letters on the gravestone shifted. It read, “Hello? Who’s there?”

The man who saw the gravestone stared on. “Is that what it said a second ago?” His eyes turned to the boom of thunder—the flash of lightning. Looking back, the words changed again: “Pride before the fall, I suppose.”

The voice of his mother played out of nowhere and everywhere: “There are some things you will never understand.”

He loved his mother. He hated his mother. He thought her foolish—wise—full of baloney. And she never said anything about gravestones. Or did she? Not one memory of it, anyways.

The car sat running by the curb at the end of the graves.

He wanted to leave. He didn’t want to go. He stood fighting himself. With a sharp flick of the neck, the gravestone changed again.

The letters spelled, “Made you look.”

With a grunt, his feet stepped toward the car as his eyelids squeezed crow’s feet on his face. The car felt warm. Off came his bowler.

To leave?

He had places to be, and knew sanity a fragile mirror, though he stared back at the gravestone. Just a trick of the storm he said to himself. Yes, it must have been the storm.