Figure in the Dark

All the mourners were clad in black around me, eyes wet, nose dribbling snot. I should’ve been no different except that all my tears had dried up. Sitting at the far end of the church pew, I found myself too

overwhelmingly afraid to simply get up and peer into the open, embroidered casket, carrying someone whose life was no more a part of this endless vicious cycle we called life.

Save yourself. Don’t wait for me to come out.

Those were the last words between us. It’s obvious what happened next. Yes, I was saved but all I wanted to do was die. A tear finally escaped from my eye after blurring my vision for what seemed like an hour. The tear rolled seamlessly down my cheeks, losing content until it just melted, just evaporated.

The tan skin would be gone and a sickly pallor would become a replacement. Eyes that were wide open in mute despair and terror were now closed, as if nothing happened, as if erasing history.

The sun shone brightly and the auburn color of the autumn day under its glare was offensively bright and cheerful. It seemed like the world had conspired how everything would go on without someone. The Mississippi would flow and the canaries would chirp incessantly like back in summer when everything was okay. For once I wanted to be genuinely selfish. Everything should’ve been great like my emotions; cold and damp like a cruel winter gust. I looked at the form of my shadow and thought of how uncanny it was, resembling my mother: diseased and stick-like. My shadow was mangled in with other shadows like they were having a funeral of their own to mourners the loss of a fellow shadow person. Everything was insubstantial, I realized. One day present, next day gone.

It started with the shadows before the monsters came. One by one, my friends disappeared, picked off by someone or something. One day they’d be smiling at you, next there’d be a cold spot in their bed where they should’ve been sleeping.