Inkling

5.9 The Song of Ira Rose: An Abundance of Dead People

Why were the dead always screaming? Why did they howl and wail and yell absolutely everything. It was enough to make him start screaming himself and yet he could not. Ira couldn't walk more than ten feet without encountering a ghost of one sort or another.

The graveyards were the worst. There were some ghosts too afraid to leave the place where their body lay. Ira tried not to talk to them. He found their wailing too incomprehensive, too loud and wholly too much.

But the more Ira ignored them, the louder they got. There were days he was walking with Max - sweet, caring, angry Max - and the dead were so irritating he found himself snapping. Mean, even. Ira had never wanted to be mean. He wanted to be kind and thoughtful, the teacher he never had. Yet he snapped and yelled and became angry.

No one noticed. Not his mother nor his father. Not the tutor, not the cousins, not the aunts nor the uncles. Sure, they saw the changes in appearance (the dark circles under his eyes, the general disheveled appearance), and the changes in attitude (pessimism where there once was optimism). They saw these things and they did nothing.

Worse than that, though, was the changes in Max. Ira had promised himself, hell he had promised Max, that he would be different. He would be better than Max's father, better than Max's teachers and better than the boys who had tormented him.

The day Ira realized he had become one of the boys who tormented Max was the beginning of the end of Ira Rose.