R | Writing | Short Stories | excerpt

This is VERY old. I probably wrote it a couple years ago when I entered a novelist contest. I figured I'd post it here for the Helluvit.

His thin, frail fingers clutched my shirt sleeve, desperation apparant behind the weak grasp. "I'm scared."

"Don't be, you're dying. You should be happy..." My eyes became dead and distant, memory threatening to force solitude upon my mind. The space around me became silent, void of any life or existence except the wraith of a demon that was me. For a long moment it seemed that all I did was sit and remember my mortalhood - flashes of sunshine and short bursts of my mother's laughter. My mother...

At last he spoke again, his hazel eyes boring into my own black irises. "Why?" Then suddenly, he seemed to be dwarfed by the large, white expanse of the deathbed. The limbs of his body like withered tree branches. The skin around his eyes became sunken, shaded, and pale altogether.

A cold fear gripped my heart. "Because death is the only way out." I said, just above a whisper, the pain inside almost too much to bear.

"But...I don't want to die..." Another desperate attempt that was near unaudible.

Such pain. Human suffering is so much more different than the suffering of the Undead. A pain that was cold to the living, but radiated such warmth to us...so intimate and exotic; a distant beauty. "She's waiting for you. Go to her." That was it, I had found the answer at the death of my beloved. Human pain was beautiful to us.

A moment stretched out forever in which his chest suddenly heaved and his body writhed. His eyes that were once so full of life, now dead and succumbing to death, closed. The look on his face became that of utter and full release. "Goodnight..." A final farewell.

Solitude engulfed me and I held him close, burying my face into his dark hair as the material of his body slowly became ash and drifted away with the midnight winds. After that all I could do was kneel in the dimness of the streetlight and hold myself, shedding crimson tears that fell and chased after his ashes into the night. Life is precious, I realized, as I whispered familiar endearments that would never again fall upon his ears.