The first scene from my latest short story for fiction workshop ...

"Northern Forest"

The moon hung full and low, a heavy June weight pulling it down close to the horizon. Mary Beth paused, heaving, and sat back on her heels, feet tucked against the cool, crumbled cemetery dirt. Clumps of soil stuck in her hair but she glance at the yellow moon and bent forward, picking up the small shovel she’d swiped from her father’s garage earlier that evening. She watched the spade dive into and out of the moist earth as if beyond her control, mesmerized by the white tendrils of root that poked like tendons out of the precisely-cut edges of her grandmother’s grave. Moonlight illuminated the thread-like root structure, looking like someone had sewn a hem in the soil, crooked and crossing, four feet below the surface. The shovel clanged hard. Mary Beth jammed her small wrist against the kickback, dropped the shovel and swore, shaking her hand in the cool night air, and then remembered she was in the St. Teresa’s cemetery, standing on the grass grown fourteen years over her grandfather’s grave and halfway in her grandmother’s and quickly performed the sign of the cross. She’d hit the coffin. Mary Beth said a quick prayer under her breath, looking once more to the haunted moon, her chapped pink lips moving silently, then hopped down into the grave.