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the church. With the tree crowns forming a barrier above to protect the habitat below, only rays of filtered sunshine trickle through the canopy of green leaves, giving the forest a shadowed, magical appearance that would’ve made an awesome shower. The water is a great subject to sketch. But it’s the cemetery just beyond the forest that I’m interested in. I discovered it a few months ago, over summer vacation when I first started skipping devotional to explore the forest. I loved it the minute I saw it because it wasn’t like anything I typically drew. There was nothing conventional, or beautiful, or even picturesque about the old cemetery that had been abandoned many years ago by the church because I assumed there were no more graves. It was in badly need of upkeep now, but doing that would strip it of its allure. It’s unrepentantly ugly, with years of decay painted across sunken, cracked, or listing tombstones overtaken by mold and moss. It’s silly of me to think of a place as being lonely, but this cemetery has that feel to it. The crows, its only occupants, have made it their home. Some of them are perched on the tombstones, while others gather like a bad omen to peck and scavenge at the ground for food. I don’t know why I’m so fascinated by it, but the dark, haunted setting always makes my fingers itch for charcoal and my sketchpad.
    My places to sit are limited, but I’m not too picky so I settle beneath a tree, positioning myself so I have the perfect vantage point of the cemetery from where I’m seated. Retrieving my sketchpad and charcoal case from my bag, I set it against the base of the tree and flip through the pages covered with various pencil sketching until I arrive at the page I’m looking for. I grab a piece of charcoal pencil from my open case and start from where I left off last Sunday. My fingers flit across the page, gentle and light, as I occasionally look up to make sure I’m capturing every tiny nuance—everything that makes the cemetery special. It’s the brown, broken kindling scattered along the moss-covered grounds, the branches of the trees eerily stretching out over the graves like the mangled fingers of the grim keeper, the murder of crows crying out into the muted silence, and the trees that stand like specters, casting long shadows across the cemetery. Crosshatch shading makes the sky look far more ominous than it currently is, highlighting and darkening tombstones so that the image takes on the aspect of a black-and-white photograph rather than a pencil drawing. I forget everything, the world blurs on the edges of my peripheral as I lose myself in this dark, almost macabre world I create.
    But then the illusion shatters, fragments of inspiration falling around me like precious glass as I’m startled out my concentration. The sudden acceleration of my heartbeats sound like a stampeding herd of wildebeest in my chest. I turn my head to the right toward the location of the noise and spy broken beer bottles a few feet from where I’m sitting. Someone had hurled it against the tree and as my eyes search wildly around, I’m not left wondering for long who the culprit is when seconds later I notice a small group of three across the cemetery. One girl, two guys. The girl has her back to me, in fact, she’s slowly walking backward while engaging the two guys in conversation. She has a head of dark green hair that’s hard to miss; it skims past her shoulders in layered waves. She’s in a pair of dark-rinsed skinny jeans, with a white camisole on top that shows off her golden-hued skin. Her feet are encased in a pair of black low-tops.
    With the guys lingering behind and facing my direction, it’s easier to make out their appearances, and instant recognition has me inwardly face-palming for not putting two and two together. Bria Daniels, the girl with the dark green hair, always hung around Noah and Maddox Moore. Twin brothers who couldn’t have possibly been more different.