Memoirs of a Ghost [original fiction]
some information: random thing I thought of when I saw this winning photo-journ picture. It's really odd, not my usual style but I went with it anyway.
--- Some people don't remember how they died, and they are the lucky ones; I've been dead for twenty-five years and I can still recall every second.
I was a normal man with a normal house in the normal mountains and I had a normal aversion to razors. So I didn't shave. Since I was fifteen my second biggest dream was to grow my beard down to my belly. My first biggest dream was to move to the mountains and learn to talk to animals like I'd heard the mages could.
Nothing fascinated me more than animals. When I was around an animal, I felt like one, and it was the best feeling in the world not being Latrator of Sato Subrisi but being a chipmunk who liked to make sounds with his big front teeth, or a frog who liked to puff out his belly, or a bull who could take out my stepmother with one slash of his horns.
My stepmother wasn't evil exactly, but she liked to mix up a bunch of poisons and then test them on me.
If I disobeyed, she'd have my father take up his axe and slice little marks in my skin with the tip, slowly, until I either opened my mouth or she pried it open, and then she'd pour something bubbly inside. That's how, at fourteen years old, I came to be afraid of razors and knives and axes. And how I came to be fleeing for the mountains and my life with only seven fingers and an old dog as company.
I ran for days into the mountains, and at night I slept with the dog by my side, his great hairy stomach all pressed up against my face as a pillow. His name was Levus. We were Levus and Latrator, outcasts and companions in those mountains for the next four years, and it was okay.
But it wasn't okay, really, because I knew that the poisons were still running in my veins, and every day they crippled me more and worse. After six months my knees turned all the way inward and gave me a duck walk; a year and my back started to hunch; two years and my eyesight was going and my teeth were falling out in my food and my red hair turned grey; three years and my hair was darker than it had been before, but my head was constantly throbbing and every once in a while I'd get sick. Sometimes when I got sick I'd aim for a bucket and miss and hit Levus, but he never turned on me.
But he was the one that killed me.
I told him to. I asked him to. I begged him to. Eighteen years old and I was pleading for death. My entire body ached and was stiff and I could barely move and now my dark hair was starting to fall out around my shoulders. My gums were always bleeding and I hadn't eaten for a week. Anything, I thought, was better than this.
And I was right, because as soon as Levus bit my neck I felt a calm and a strength in me I'd never felt before--just enough strength to pick up the heaviest thing within reach and hit him with it. I wanted him to die with me.
That haunts me every day, it does, and the days are endless here.
Like I said, the lucky ones are the ones that don't remember anything.
--- Some people don't remember how they died, and they are the lucky ones; I've been dead for twenty-five years and I can still recall every second.
I was a normal man with a normal house in the normal mountains and I had a normal aversion to razors. So I didn't shave. Since I was fifteen my second biggest dream was to grow my beard down to my belly. My first biggest dream was to move to the mountains and learn to talk to animals like I'd heard the mages could.
Nothing fascinated me more than animals. When I was around an animal, I felt like one, and it was the best feeling in the world not being Latrator of Sato Subrisi but being a chipmunk who liked to make sounds with his big front teeth, or a frog who liked to puff out his belly, or a bull who could take out my stepmother with one slash of his horns.
My stepmother wasn't evil exactly, but she liked to mix up a bunch of poisons and then test them on me.
If I disobeyed, she'd have my father take up his axe and slice little marks in my skin with the tip, slowly, until I either opened my mouth or she pried it open, and then she'd pour something bubbly inside. That's how, at fourteen years old, I came to be afraid of razors and knives and axes. And how I came to be fleeing for the mountains and my life with only seven fingers and an old dog as company.
I ran for days into the mountains, and at night I slept with the dog by my side, his great hairy stomach all pressed up against my face as a pillow. His name was Levus. We were Levus and Latrator, outcasts and companions in those mountains for the next four years, and it was okay.
But it wasn't okay, really, because I knew that the poisons were still running in my veins, and every day they crippled me more and worse. After six months my knees turned all the way inward and gave me a duck walk; a year and my back started to hunch; two years and my eyesight was going and my teeth were falling out in my food and my red hair turned grey; three years and my hair was darker than it had been before, but my head was constantly throbbing and every once in a while I'd get sick. Sometimes when I got sick I'd aim for a bucket and miss and hit Levus, but he never turned on me.
But he was the one that killed me.
I told him to. I asked him to. I begged him to. Eighteen years old and I was pleading for death. My entire body ached and was stiff and I could barely move and now my dark hair was starting to fall out around my shoulders. My gums were always bleeding and I hadn't eaten for a week. Anything, I thought, was better than this.
And I was right, because as soon as Levus bit my neck I felt a calm and a strength in me I'd never felt before--just enough strength to pick up the heaviest thing within reach and hit him with it. I wanted him to die with me.
That haunts me every day, it does, and the days are endless here.
Like I said, the lucky ones are the ones that don't remember anything.