who we are and all that we're trying to be
There were ghosts here in broad daylight.
He could feel the unearthly tremor, the shuddering expanses, the way last breaths were taken, and hearts extinguished in the next. He could remember the wake of terror unbidden through his chest, the overwhelming apprehension brimming, brewing, brooding over the hours of entertainment and diversions; lost for eternity. He could detail the finer moments of wraiths and the way they might have danced moments before, triumphant and gleeful, and now haunted, juxta-positioned with oblivion, with chaos, with upheaval.
The Sword had come back once or twice in the intertwining days, to assist however possible, to bring his catapult back to the barracks where he’d left it abandoned, by the hollows and husks of stalls and kiosks, by the torn perimeters where they’d thought to dance. The traces and foundations scratched and wore at his surface, and for a few moments he couldn’t fathom looking out over the earth again, where children had been vanquished and friends had sputtered, stabbed, or been lacerated, where crestfallen, anguished beings had fled to mar and bludgeon temples.
It was only the latter that maneuvered him onward, a jar in hand, towards silt and loam, towards fertile grounds despite all the punctures and pieces torn from them, despite the blood and the anguish melded, molded, into their schisms. Catalysts by default now: orchestrations of what could have been and fringes, echoes, of their failed moments. He kept to the outskirts, to the shadows, to the beat of the sun, avoiding everything but a hastened breath and a lasting, withering gaze – casting it along the boundaries, before kneeling, descending towards the ground, a tiny shovel in his palm too, intending to dig into the earth.
It takes dying to know
How to live as ghosts
