The Ground Beneath Them Was Dry

Fri, 30 Oct 2026 00:00:00 -0600

↳ Electric storm, midnight, July 9, 1906, Edmonton.

From the files of the Department of Secret Histories, City of Calgary

There’s a bench in Union Cemetery in Calgary, and if you sit on it your feet rest on two people.

I don’t mean that the way people mean it when they say a whole city is built on graves. I mean it the way a surveyor would. The bench is at the north edge of Section D, on the grass, with its back to the slope and its face to nothing in particular, and if you sit on it in the ordinary way, knees bent, heels down, your heels are on Block 12, Lots 1 and 2, which the City of Calgary’s burial register assigns to Charles Tawse and May Swindells, both interred in May 1915. I know this because I went with the register open on my phone and a copy of the section plan, and I paced it, and then I sat down, and then I got up and paced it again, because it seemed too exact to be an accident. It isn’t an accident. It took me most of a year to find out whose decision it was. I’ll go through it in the order I found it.

Calgary on Lagomorph

The Ground Beneath Them Was Dry