If you squint at this abandoned gravestone, and if you read between the lines, you can tell that they were George and Pearl Mayhew, but you can’t tell when they lived and when they died. The web will tell you that in 1940, George was 34 and Pearl was 26, and that they had a four-year-old son, also named George. 

But looking them up on the web is cheating. Because after all this time, they are meant to be seen this way, abandoned and unknown, covered with lichen, green fungi that you’d have to scrape off if you wanted to read the tombstone. 

Why doesn’t George Jr. scrape off the lichen? Because George Jr. died in 2004, survived by at least one son and two daughters. 

Who were they, George and Pearl? They live on, not in the hearts of those who knew them, or in the minds of those who may see their gravestone, which will soon be completely subsumed by lichen, but as wisps of detritus on the internet that no one will read. The world will forget, but the internet will remember.