SoMa Literary Review - The Necropolis Next Door

The Necropolis Next Door

By Jan Steckel

Too impatient to wait for the cortege, I drove alone from the synagogue to Salem cemetery. I expected the street to the graveyard to be lined with yews, or delicate blossoms, or rippling grass. Instead, the road to Colma was sown with car dealerships: Lexus, Chevrolet, Ford, Infiniti. Only Infiniti really seemed right for the passage to the City of the Dead.

For that’s what Colma is: a necropolis. Cemeteries as far as the eye can see. No houses, no swimming pools, no beauty salons or sushi restaurants. Just mausoleums, monuments, a flower outlet or two, and the occasional good wife shouting in her SUV into her cell phone: “Where was grandma buried? Salem Memorial? Green Hills? Perpetual Peace?”

Just before you hit cemetery row is a little building labeled “Town Hall.” What do the deceased denizens of Colma discuss in their town meetings? How property values have plummeted since the Catholics and the Jews moved in? How nobody brings real flowers anymore? How that unsightly charnel house is going to ruin the plot market? There goes the neighborhood….

My wrists crackled as I turned into Salem Memorial, cruised slowly to the end, and parked next to two headstones of pink marble. I stepped out of my Honda and into silence. Not a soul. Where was the funeral party I had left at the temple? My muscles twitched. Sweat beaded down my leg. Was I at the wrong cemetery? Who could say? That’s the thing about getting lost in Colma. You can’t ask anyone for directions, because everybody’s dead.

I walked down to a large building near the entrance that I hoped was an office. It had three bronze doors with no doorknobs that were larger than mere people would need to get in and out. If it were an office, I thought, it would have doorknobs. Just before I reached the building, I spotted a woman crouched at a gravesite. She was removing some delicate dead flowers that looked like dried-up Dendrobium orchids.

“Do you know,” I asked her, “Where Jan Steckel was being buried?”

“You’re in the wrong cemetery,” she said, regarding me with the kind pity reserved for the mentally deficient. By now I’d have missed the Kaddish, I realized. Well, it might be a blessing after all. I plodded back to my black Honda hatchback and climbed in. It was such a dependable little car. It would find the freeway entrance. I turned the ignition. The air conditioning and the radio blasted on. REM sang “It’s the end of the world as we know it.” I headed into the west.

Also by Jan Steckel on SoMa Literary Review:

The Gold Club, Performance Anxiety, Charity After the Hurricane, Getting Slammed & 35^th Avenue Ladybug

Oakland writer and performance poet Jan Steckel’s work has also appeared in Margin, Lodestar Quarterly, BiMagazine, The Pedestal Magazine. She is the author of The Underwater Hospital.