KEEP PLANNING – Chris Scott

“This is just real basic shit,” the mayor says at his press conference. So hastily thrown together, there are still a couple reporters from local papers sprinting across the park and through the playground over to where he’s standing with three or four microphones darting in and out of his face. There’s no podium for him. The podium guy couldn’t get it together in time. That was the first thing he said actually; that was how he opened his press conference. He said, “Sorry I don’t have a podium. The guy who’s supposed to do the podiums for me, I have no fuckin’ idea where he is this morning.” The mayor actually looks like he’s fighting back tears now. “If we can’t even respect the dead, then fuckin’ -- I’m sorry for the language. Okay? I’m sorry for swearing. This is personal now though.” The mayor points over at the cemetery down the street, the headstones dotting the hillside. Construction workers are erecting poles with a broad array of lights atop them. “The cemetery is gonna be illuminated 24/7 now with some of the brightest wattage you’ve ever seen. That’s where we’re at. That’s what we’re doing now because a bunch of kids -- maybe kids, honestly probably some adults too -- can’t stop knocking over headstones every night. It’s gonna be permanent daylight in that cemetery every single night. I hope everyone’s real proud of themselves today.” “How will this affect the town’s water supply?” a reporter asks. I’m on a swing on the playground twenty feet away, gently rocking back and forth, kicking pebbles. “You’re thinking of data centers. That’s a whole data center thing. We don’t have to worry about data centers because frankly this town couldn’t handle having a data center, the way it behaves. Not even close. We’re so far off from hosting a data center anywhere near us, I can’t even tell you. Let’s try to make it through a whole 48 hours without a bunch of headstones getting knocked over, and then we can talk about a data center. And our water supply. Which is perfectly fine, to answer your question.” It is unbelievable how bright the cemetery is the first night, like a second sun in the middle of town that never sets. The hum of the electricity is also extraordinary. I can hear it all the way from my house, over a mile away. When everyone wakes up the next morning there are dead birds everywhere. “About the birds,” the mayor says at his next press conference. “The light pollution from the cemetery, which is all lit-up now, which again is only necessary because people keep vandalizing and desecrating the memory of our town’s dead, because something as simple as ‘Don’t knock over headstones’ is apparently too complicated an instruction for some of you to follow. The light is wreaking havoc on the birds’ migration patterns or whatever. Is apparently what’s going on.” Every time the mayor pauses to catch his breath, the hum of the electric cemetery is incredibly loud. “Why do the lights have to be on even during the day?” a reporter asks. “So, like, it actually takes more energy to turn all the cemetery lights off and on again than it does to just keep them on all the time, so I’m keeping them on. That’s my decision to make,” the mayor announces. “How can that be true?” the same reporter asks. “How can that be true?” the mayor repeats in a mocking voice, before abruptly ending the press conference. We go a whole four days and nights before another headstone, this one unfortunately belonging to the mayor’s recently deceased mother, is knocked over. Surprisingly the mayor doesn’t hold a press conference the next day, or the day after that. The silence, which isn’t really silence because of the ceaseless humming emanating from the graveyard, is unnerving. The whole town is holding our breath, waiting to see how the mayor is going to react to this. When the mayor finally appears in front of cameras again his eyes are red and puffy like he’s clearly been crying a lot and not sleeping. “A couple things,” he begins. “We’re setting up cameras now. Over fifty of them, and they’re going to be hidden all throughout the cemetery so you won’t know where they are. So anyone who’s thinking about going into the cemetery to cause any trouble, I’d think again if I were you. Because here’s another thing. My guys have figured out a way to rig every other headstone with an electric current so anyone who places even so much as a single solitary finger on them will get a nasty surprise. Also each of the cameras will be connected to a live feed that everyone in the town will be able to access at home on their televisions -- channel 170 and up -- so you won’t know who’s watching, when you’re in there. When you’re in the cemetery. Anyone could be watching you kick over a headstone. Which you had fuckin’ better not do.” “How much is all of this costing the town?” a reporter asks. The mayor ignores them. “Lastly I will begin sleeping in the cemetery in a tent, and I will be armed.” “How do you respond to recent speculation that, in actuality, only two headstones have been vandalized this year? Specifically the headstones belonging to your mother’s and father’s gravesites?” another reporter asks. The mayor pauses for a full two minutes, eyes closed, the loud humming from the cemetery compensating for the absence of birdsong. It is apparent he has nodded off. The mayor suddenly rouses again. “When we die…” he begins, then trails off. Another two minutes of humming. “Most everyone in this town is going to end up in that cemetery someday. Except for a handful of us who will, I don’t know, retire to Florida or want to be buried with their kids in another town or whatever. That’s up to you. But our cemetery is, above all things, a home. For the deceased. It’s a home for the dead. Respect the dead’s home, is all I’m asking. This will be my last press conference.” And it was. Anyone watching channel 197 a few nights later at around 3:30 a.m. would’ve seen the mayor’s son Jackson, age 14 and widely regarded in many gossip circles in town as the most likely culprit for the erratic and unusual vandalism of his own family’s cemetery plot. They would have seen, as I saw, Jackson meander over to his father’s tent situated next to his grandfather’s and grandmother’s toppled headstones and tentatively tap on the entry. Gratefully, the mayor did not shoot him, a thought that did cross my mind as I watched all of this live. I watched the mayor stumble out of his tent and exchange a few words with his son before hugging him and then leaving together through the illuminated cemetery. The lights went out the next day. They were removed entirely the following week. The birds returned. All living things’ circadian rhythms stabilized again, and eventually everyone moved on to the next town drama which, unbelievably, involved a mystery individual -- maybe Jackson, maybe not -- stocking a nearby lake with piranhas. In a dream last night I held a press conference in that same spot the mayor did, in the park, by the playground. The dead surrounded me, hounding me with unrelenting questions. What was the point of all this? Do you know how hard it is for a soul to rest, with all that glaring light, all that constant loud electric humming? Could the mayor not have worked this out with his snot-nosed kid on their own time, without dragging us into it? Without making it everybody’s business? And what I tell them -- or what I try to tell them anyway because it’s hard to get a word in edge-wise -- when I try to explain about how messy and illogical the living are, always have been and always will be, it never comes out right. Comes out barely louder than a whisper, in fact. It only ever makes sense in my head.

*** Chris Scott's work has appeared in The New Yorker's Shouts & Murmurs, HAD, hex literary, ergot., Apocalypse Confidential, scaffold, and elsewhere. He is a regular ClickHole contributor and elementary school teacher in Washington, DC. You can read his work at www.chrisscottwrites.com. 4 July 2026