The Ferryman

~

Tendrils of snow drifted from the grey expanses above, encasing the city beneath in white film. The frigid air coated my windpipe in frost as I stepped along the blanketed sidewalks to her place.

In the recent months she became more detached, passing along in life as though she were an unlettered shadow that expressed no care for those around. Her eyes were dulled by some strife she didn't mention. I watched as fragments of her person chipped away, trickling out from every breath until her skin was a shell of her former self.

On that wintry evening of late November, I knocked on her door. The unceasing sounds coalescing from that ruddy hallway fell short compared to the silence inside her flat. I used the spare key above the door frame, and stepping inside, the copper tang of blood stung the insides of my nostrils.

I watched her worsen, I smelled her blood, and yet, I was unprepared to see her there, laying in a tub of red water. She had deep, crimson gashes along her forearm, and she looked at me still with those dulled eyes. They haunted my dreams ever since.

~

I sat in the booth with old man Grim and his daughter Hope- she had recently turned of age and celebrated with shots of vodka coating her virgin liver in stains.

I wondered if she had lived whether she'd come to indulge in sin, or whether she'd have finished school. She always wanted to find a career in environmental law. She was particularly passionate about dolphins; said they were people of the seas.

She wanted to change the world but wound up only changing mine.

"It's been three years, Billy." Grim held my arm tightly, the other wound along the handle of his mug. "Drown yourself in ale so your mind doesn't kill you."

"That's so dark." Hope looked around the room, eyes flitting between each person present. "Everyone has struggles but most live through the day."

I saw them as darkened vessels, fillers of the empty space. What thoughts or nature they held inside appealed to nothing in me. They were all the same, each thinking the world orbited their doings, crumbling at their measures of emotional expression. Industry fashions the product that breeds the same consumer, and here they all were, talking amongst themselves as though their words were worthy of sound.

"Living is subjective." I looked down and stared at the face of God as he peered from the bottom of my glass. "Mine has rotted away to keeping only my organs functioning, and even in that I lack real effort. I can't even hear the wind, anymore."

Grim downed his drink. "The wind doesn't sound like anything. It's like how the color white doesn't look like anything beyond the color white. Why bother?"

Hope lay her forehead on her arms, head spiraling under her drowning synapses. She didn't respond to anything we said after that. She probably wasn't even listening.

~

I decided to visit a man the city called a prophet. He worked at the back of a rundown Chinese restaurant, sticks of incense mingling with day-old chicken. His dress was unceremoniously bland and contrasted with the vibrant shades of red that decorated the walls. He sat me down at a collapsing table, wrinkled hands subject to tremors as he held them towards me.

"You are heavy with loss," he said, his voice strained under a thick accent. I stalled in showing any mark of surprise, given my grief was written in the folds of my face. It didn't take humbling insight to see that my shoulders sagged under the weight of the dead.

At my silence, the prophet pulled a stack of cards from his sleeve and laid three on the wood between us. He mumbled in his native tongue as he considered my fortune. The first depicted a traveler, the second a reaper, and the third I couldn't quite interpret.