Cemeteries have always been my favorite parks. Especially the older ones with lots of large trees. They’re more peaceful than those other parks with living people in them. Reading headstones can be both intriguing & amusing. Then there’s the bittersweet melancholy-by-proxy thing when encountering a particularly poignant stone, like that of a child. Plus I’d accidentally almost trampled on a fresh corpse once, so I figured I might as well purposely trod on the dead who’ve been properly interred.

For a few years I lived in the Navy town across the Sound from the city I’d grown accustomed to. This was an adjustment of the culture-shock variety, but where my job took me. The best part about my new home was that it was mere blocks from a cemetery with some towering old growth trees. Another perk was that 99.9 percent of the time I walked my dog Sydney there we’d not see another living soul. Unless you count crows. Or squirrels. Or, that one time, a bat. But no human souls. Other than the ones maybe lingering by their gravesides, which frankly I don’t know why any soul would do that unless they were fans of cemeteries in life. Which makes me wonder if I’ll be hanging around my earthly remains in death? If so, I better emend my wishes so they don’t read “Donate my remains to a body farm.” Pretty sure I don’t want to watch myself decompose, no matter how it advances forensic science. Perhaps ReCompose is best.

So Sydney & I arrive at our favorite park on a sunny Spring morning & are having a pleasant time barking at crows (her), & chasing squirrels (again, her), & taking photos of lichen on tombstones (me, because all Sydney likes about tombstone lichen is the smell), when our walk is disastrously interrupted by catching sight of another person. Lying on the ground. Not moving. At first I think “Again? At least I didn’t almost step on them.”

We were still some distance away, but with each step closer it became apparent the person prone was child-size. As we near I’m madly trying to dial 9-1-1 while keeping my curious dog from bounding over there. Thankfully I’d only got the first two digits dialed when something made me stop my emergency call. Intuition said something was off here, & not of the body-finding kind. A combination of my dog’s sudden disinterest & what the child was wearing. Footy-pajamas? With a hood? I decided to investigate further before calling it in.

On closer inspection, this is what we saw:

Sure enough, as I came around the head I could see something wrong with its face. Like Rosemary’s Baby wrong. Or maybe Lord of the Rings wrong. Something with gnomes & trolls & whatever. This was a (child) life-size doll, placed face-down on the grass in a cemetery. Who would do this? I was at once creeped out & impressed simultaneously. I glanced around to see if my reaction was being clocked. Then I had to pull Sydney back because she was about to pee on it.

A brief distance on we found a regular baby-doll sitting in a monkey puzzle tree. Beyond that just the head of a doll stuck on the end of a broken branch. This was a wild & unexpected installation. I give 4 stars.