Graveful

Cold damp sweat oozed from my temples; there was a dull heavy pressure upon my chest, as if there was the weight of a graveful of earth upon it; […] My senses left me, and when the men took me out, I seemed very likely to have real need of the coffin into which they had put me for fun.

Already the ivy has been carefully trained over it from top to bottom, and in front of it is a triple tomb, where a little knot of Frenchmen sleep between two gravefuls of the enemy.

Christ tears away the turf from our assumption of virtue and exposes a graveful of “dead men’s bones and uncleanness.”

It’s always cold on this Yorkshire hillside where Anne Brontë lies dead under a graveful of red flowers.

In a chilling affirmation of Dr. Donald Francis’s 1982 predictions, the Common Factor, a newsletter published by the Committee of Ten Thousand, who had brought the lawsuit, wrote twelve years later, “Like the canaries in the coal mine, persons with hemophilia serve as the early warning system for the nation’s blood supply. We all contracted hepatitis B, then non A-non B hepatitis (hepatitis C), and then HIV. The hemophilia community has provided gravesful of information about the safety of the blood supply.”

“There’s so much hatred,” Elicit said bitterly. “Pati doesn’t know what a graveful of maggots he has nurtured here. He can’t.”

We have people bringing us animal bones, thinking they’re human. And I’ve had times when I’ve been faced with a graveful of bones and I’ve had to work out how many individuals there were.

I took the job, the raise, and the cubicle, and I took my pride and stuffed it deep inside, jack-booted it down and covered it up with a graveful of dirt and regrets.