The Power Of Night

The Goodbye

Two days after that Friday night, church bells rang on a Sunday morning. Little did Delaney know, but she was going to enter a church again sooner than she had expected. And most definitely not the way she expected either.

As the bells did what they could to bring happiness into the gloomy morning, it still couldn't fulfill the light.
Someone was missing from it. The Renaissance of new life was now being transformed into a death march.

People fled through the doors,
Ones who had known the deceased, and those who wished they'd known them better.

They trudged as though being forced, not wanting to believe they were awake. Not wanting to believe it was real. The people coming to pay their respects were young and old alike.

No matter the age, every single person who entered grimaced at the open coffin.

Many tried to avoid were the corpse lay, but it was unsurpassable.

The pale face showed through like a spotlight on a black curtain, one glowing with youth.

As they walked by, some shared the same expression as the body,
Lifeless.

As the dead lay, it sat with it's eyelid's anticipating to flutter open, eyebrows arching upward.

'Show me more! Just a little more time.'

The people sat in the echoing pews, trying not to breath to heavily, as if bragging to the dead of their ability.
They sat silently, emotionless.

The clapping of the minister's footsteps walking up the alter shook everyone awake.
This was really happening.
The man that stood before them dreading being there, exposing young death, having to say the name.

Brady Sakmar ran hurriedly into the church ,holding a sweatshirt tightly in his grasp. The stomps of his feet rattled off the hollow people and walls several times before settling.

He found himself a pew in the back.

His eyes were blood red, and his breathing uncontrollably loud and obnoxious.

He received a personal call Saturday afternoon, and it still felt fresh and painful.

His parents told him what happened.
They'd found him that morning in his bed, passed away in his sleep.

His best friend, gone.

The shock of personal deliverance- the parents moaning over their taken child, one that cannot be returned.

Wittinessing a brutal revealance of loss, through the signal of a phone.

The last car he drove, his.

The last text he sent , to him.

Tell Delaney to speak. She might need someone to show her.

It said.

The last note he left, to her.
She hadn't seen what he'd left, only Brady.

"Carter passed away in his sleep Saturday morning, due to his heart complications diagnosed to him this spring."

Several wails cried through the church.

Brady shot up from his seat. He was about to head out the door, but instead he stopped to look at a girl with tan bare shoulders and a messy brown braid.

"You're her." He said the girl.

Her eyes looked up, red and as bloodshot as Brady's. He face mirrored his pain. A loss so confusing, so deep, that didn't feel real.

He extended the arm holding the sweatshirt out to her, she took it holding it in her arms.

She looked away and pretended to listen to the sermon being spoken.

"He said... That you should speak." Brady told.

He saw the girl's throat bob fearfully.

When the minister asked of anyone would like to speak on Carter's behalf, nobody said anything.

But when nobody was looking a girl had made her way up to the alter.
When everyone sat and listened, rang the words of a poet.