"It's Samhain."

It's Camilla. She sounds distressed.

"So ween?", I wondered aloud.

"Today is Samhain! And it's almost over! The day's almost over!"

She wasn't making any sense.

"So what?" I tried to close the subject, but before I could say another word:

"So-o-o, what time do cemeteries close, Hauer? Dusk! They always close at dark!" She turned to me and grabbed my shoulders and looked me straight in the eyes with those pretty blues and said, "We gotta book it."

I felt a kinda-smile on the corner of my mouth.

"O? K?" was all I could reply.

Those pretty blues.

The cemetery, however, was pretty damn gray and dismal, if you ask me, but she kept saying how beautiful it was. I just never suspected conservative Camilla to be wiccan.

"So, you follow Hecate?" I tried to remember the Greek Titaness' name that the witches had since incorporated into their mythology. "You know, Sully from Godsmack is wiccan."

I had heard that on MTV or maybe it was VH1 and hearing how stupid I sounded right now trying to relate to a way of life I know nothing about forced me to turn around and start hitting my head like a Chris Farley sketch.

She wasn't paying attention. She was too busy searching for something. Or so it looked when I turned around. I had to ask.

"What are you doing again? I thought you were from New Mexico. Did some of your family live -er, die? ...here? ...uh, live here and pass on here? Move on to the Elysian fields?"

"I'm not wiccan, Hauer." She finally was acknowledging me. "Hecate. That's funny. You and your gods, again." She actually giggled.

Like a girl.

"No. I have no family in this cemetery. But, I will soon enough."

What did she mean by that?

"I need to find a plot I can honor," she said, clasping her hands up against her chest and smiling in the fresh dead people's air.

They bounced. Her magic handclasp made them bounce.

Love that bounce.

She was still talking, "A plot with no flowers."

I wasn't gonna look around for that. I wanted a flower and it had Camilla panties covering it. And I knew exactly where that was.

"Someone here needs us to remember them," she continued.

"So, so ween is a holiday", I wasn't really asking, but they always need to know you're listening sometimes.

"Hauer! It's All Saint's Day!" She was bouncing again. "All Hallow's Day, hence, where we get All Hallow's Evening. All Hallow's Eve or Hollow E'en, for short. You may have heard of it, it's the night you get to wear a coconut bra."

"Funny." I wasn't laughing. "So, you do this every November 1^st?"

"Every November 1^st," she says.

"I don't get it, Camilla."

"What don't you get? Every time this year you get a chance to remember your family and friends who have passed on. They must miss us so much and on this day the living and the dead can gather together at these places and visit and reminisce and see each other again."

I just looked at her. And her joy.

"I've never had anyone in my family die."

My words seemed like a revelation to her or maybe her eyes were far away thinking of the ones she missed and I mistook sadness for reverent awe with those lids at half-mast.

"There!", she pointed behind me, her eyes brightening. "A plot without flowers! That's the one who needs us!"

She started walking toward a barren headstone and I turned and followed.

I rolled my eyes. I had hoped maybe I'd get lucky here and it just dawned on me that I wasn't.

"Quit rolling your eyes, Hauer, and come here," she said smiling.

How'd she see me roll my eyes, I thought to myself.

Definitely wiccan.

"This is the plot," Camilla was saying. She looked around. "I realize there are several plots that are empty around here, but we're gonna visit and honor Robert here."

She was reading the tombstone as she said the dead dude's name. I didn't want to know any more. In fact, I never wanted to know anything about him. I sat down and only because Camilla had just done the same and I realized I was sitting on a headstone and I jumped up and swatted grass and dead person uck from my ass. Camilla just laughed.

"Ha! Ha!" I said. "Very funny that I sat on this--" I looked down to see the stone and realized that the person's headstone I sat on was a girl. She was 14 when she died. Her face was on the headstone and she wasn't bad looking, but the thing that made me stop talking was the fact that she shared her middle name with my girlfriend.

"Camilla." I read. "Camilla." I turned to Camilla. "Look at this." I pointed at the headstone.

She took the two steps forward after standing up and smiled when she read her name.

"This is Robert's daughter," she said, "We're visiting them both." She smiled at me.

I was kinda freaked out myself and again I rolled my eyes. These people were dead. They don't care and they definitely don't care about us.

"Why do you do that?" Camilla asked with a stern (I mean, I'm talking about a STERN) face.

"What'd I do?" I asked.

"Unreal," Camilla replied, shaking her head. "Unreal," she repeated, still shaking her head, but she was slowing down.

I spit out almost four words: "I don't know wha--."

She again kept me from speaking. Twice in one day. That's a girlfriend record. No girl had ever been able to shut me up twice. In less than an hour, no less.

"I came here out of respect, Hauer, and you have the audacity to roll your eyes at things I care deeply about, showing me you might not really care about me as much as you say. How am I supposed to react to that? With a faux smile and a shrug, pretending I didn't notice?" She was really going strong but then she stopped. This time I didn't say anything just because I wanted to know where this was going, but she surprised me. "You know what? I am gonna smile. And I am gonna shrug it off because I'm not here for you or for this. I'm here for Robert and his daughter with the beautiful middle name." At that she smiled, content with what she said and we spent the rest of sundown imagining who these two people were.

Sex was so far from my mind the rest of the night.

Doctor's should warn us that cemeteries cause impotence.

-----