For this week’s story prompt image is of Dunfermline Abbey. It was taken about a year ago, or as I think of it now, the good old days. This year has been a beast so far, and not in the good way. You’ve not come here for the whining though so we’ll leave that be and get on with it.
I must admit to having cheated with the photo a bit. The lighting was nowhere near as atmospheric when I took the picture. Luckily, thanks to digital technology, my photos don’t need to be burdened by such things as the subject existing. There was also a street-lamp that crept in only to be obliterated by a few mouse-strokes. It was alarmingly easy, so I’m resolving (a little late) to never trust anything I see ever again.
On to the story.
The shadows deepened as gloaming set in, loosening the ties that bound me to the cold earth. Moonlight coalesced into a body, of sorts, as a familiar floating sensation overtook me. My annual trip to the land of the living was about to begin.
You might imagine that I’d be excited. That a chance to walk the streets of my youth once more would be a delight to savour. Oh, if only that were true. Unfortunately that was not my reality. Ghosts, you see, aren’t immortal souls given form. No, a ghost is the echo of a body reverberating off the walls of reality. And bodies are imperfect.
Every year on this night a pale shadow of my body forms in the graveyard by the abbey. For an hour as the world retraces is path around the sun I re-tread my own fruitless search. In these endless moments between risings I know the task I must complete to break my curse: I must find my son. Simple enough, you might imagine, yet in the three hundred years since I died I have not succeeded. You see the pale and imperfect spectre of my body lacks mind and memory enough to recall where I gave him up or even what he looked like.
Fingers of moonlight lifted me up through layers of soil and I felt my mind fade as my body took form. In minutes I would wander the graveyard, lost and afraid. Understand neither why I am lost, nor of what I am afraid. Only knowing that there is someone I am missing and that I have left him nearby. Close but, perhaps forever, out of reach.
“Your own…” I start to scream, but my traitor body has forgotten the word ‘son’. It cannot remember his name or his face. It just shambles on. I just shamble on pacing rings around the graveyard until the sun rises to grant me a kind of rest.
Such is the nature of my punishment. On the one hand, incorporeal and fully aware of how to ease my torment. On the other hand, able to act but lacking the faculty to direct my actions usefully. I can sense the knowledge there, like a word escaping from the tip of your tongue. Maddening in its proximity and its absence. Then, like the absent-minded professor forgetting what he’d gone to do and going back to his chair to see if that helps him remember, I return to my grave. I know I will remember as my body evaporates and my mind takes over once more. Unlike that metaphorical professor, I don’t want to remember. But that is my torment. I must live with what I did. Even thought I’m dead, it seems, I must live with it.
Brandon Lim 