Cracked Pastels and Hollow Hunts
Out in the churchyard field behind the old brick chapel where the grass grows patchy and the stones lean like they’re tired of remembering names, the Sunday school crowd spills out with plastic baskets and squeals, chasing pastel bait tossed by adults who never notice how wrong the air feels, how off the sky seems in its faded frame.
Somebody’s mom is laughing too loud, already filming the chaos in vertical blur, while the pastor stands with his paper cup of coffee, talking about resurrection and hope, not bothering to look down and see the way the ground itself seems restless, seams cracking softly.
The plastic eggs shine like cheap gemstones scattered through the brittle green, pink and blue and yellow shells winking from the roots of gravestones, the whole scene trying too hard to look clean.
But there are others, tucked closer to the shadows by the iron fence, not quite the store-bought sort–painted in shades that don’t show up on any craft aisle, colors that make your eyes tense.
Their surfaces are just a little too smooth, a little too cold when fingers close around them with that greedy little thrill, and when you shake them, they answer with a weight that doesn’t sound like candy, more like something that’s been grinding its teeth still.
Little Tommy dives behind the angel statue with the chipped wing, spots a strange egg tucked in the crook of a root like it grew there from the tree’s regret, painted a faint, sickly lavender with hairline veins running through, as if it remembers every secret this yard won’t forget.
He laughs, calls dibs, holds it up like a trophy, expecting chocolate coins or gummy worms that dye his tongue, but the thing vibrates against his palm in a low, steady hum, like a throat warming up a song it has no business being sung.
Down near the rusted gate, Ellie finds a robin’s egg blue shell split along one side. Inside, not jellybeans, but a fleck of something dark and wet that smells like burned soil and formaldehyde.
She frowns, wipes it on her dress, pretending it’s just dirt, just mold, just some weird old bug nest, but when she blinks, she swears she sees tiny faces pressed against the plastic from the inside, begging the shell not to rest.
At midnight, the shells that weren’t found split open without hands, spilling, not candy, but fragments of whispered prayers, fingernail scratches, scraps of burial bands.
Each pastel dome cracks like a rotten tooth, releasing flickers of faces, fragments of youth.
Out crawl small shapes that aren’t quite bones and not quite smoke. They gather around the places where small feet stomped earlier, sniffing scent trails like some joke.
They remember being hidden every spring, not as a game, but as a bargain, a trade.
“Let the children laugh,” the old caretaker used to mutter, “if they tread over us, maybe the digging stops, maybe the debts fade.”
But no debt really fades, it just waits beneath plastic shells and cheerful lies.
By sunrise, the field looks harmless again, dew shining on cheap grass and crooked markers.
Only a few suspicious parents notice the faint little handprints on their children’s bedsheets, darker.
The eggs go back into storage, plastic bag inside cardboard box inside church closet that always smells wrong.
Next year they’ll bring them out again, polish them with wipes, fill them with sweetness and one more venomous song.
Somewhere in the walls, the foundation creaks like a throat clearing before a sermon nobody wants to hear.
And beneath the flowerbeds, the ground hums lazily, counting down another restless year.
The dead know how holidays work; every time you bury dread in sugar and religion, you give it one more decorated shell, one more home.