Scenes to See

dead

She was alive. More alive than the average dead person. What every spirit had, Grey blank eyes, or the remnants of them, she had the opposite of. Her eyes were filled with color.

And many spirits had no mouth. No smile. No frown. Nothing to convey emotion because when you're dead, you had no emotion. She did.

And it was always smiling.

He could no longer remember how she died. A common sickness probably. In a time before electricity, cars, or any sort of innovation. She had been around for an awful long time. And still, she persisted.

The only one. Ever. In all of creation. To do what she did. Some souls get lost in the afterlife, a realm located at the end of all existence. Some are stubborn at first. Some claim to have unfinished business, a fallacy created by the living. But sooner or later, they all came to his call.

Death. Embodied as a person. But he was far from one. He wasn't truly a he, or even an it. He was just: death.

He was the king of the afterlife, but to be frank the word 'king' didn't do his title justice. He wasn't only the overseer of the realm, but death was the afterlife. They were one and the same.

In some ways, they were a whole new world. Everything that ever lived, died, or will die.

When they leave one place, they begin in another. Only, with death in charge, people couldn't ruin a thing. Not when they were dead and void of any responsibility for ruining things.

The year: 2018.

Death watched as life allowed the sun to set once again, seeing as she made the colors change in the sky from a light blue to a combination of red and orange, and eventually black.

He enjoyed the sunsets or anything that life produced.

Not only did he watch the sunset, he watched one of life's oldest creations walk around in a wet rainforest, doing nothing but looking at the scenes laid out before her.

He watched her from morning to night. She said not a word, but she kept walking for hours.

Being dead allowed for abilities, such as not having to use your legs. But she did. She walked everywhere.

She climbed into trees and watched the animals swing from branch to branch.

She watched it rain from the sky, and water dropped right through her onto the muddy forest floor.

She sat in the mud, stomach on the floor, watching as ants carried leaves to their hill. She watched as ant eaters came by and ate those ants.

She compared flowers to one another, pretending to smell the scent from the very middle.

He stayed back for all of it, watching in the very corner of his eye.

At night she sat against a tree, staring at a small stream of freezing cold water.  She spent hours upon hours staring at the tiny fish that swam past. That was when he decided to make himself known. 

Hopping down from the tall tree he had been forming in, he lit a fire in front of her in the same second, lighting up her face and everything around them. She smiled, "I was beginning to think that you stopped visiting me," she stood, and made her way over, slamming herself into his physical form. 

His chuckle was dark,  but he held her back; tightly. "Why would I stop visiting you," He said softly.

Grabbing his hand, she led him back to her spot, where she sat him down. She plopped down on top of him, feeling his warmth. It was the one thing she could feel, being void of a physical body.  And every time he did come to visit,  she wasn't shy about taking advantage of it.