After Life, a short story by Gracifa. Date added: 2010-03-30. Times viewed: 655.
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- Intro: Recreational very short story of the poem 'I Stood With the Dead' by Sassoon, (something i did in Literature, college)
I stood in neither heaven nor hell. I stood with the Dead, those that have no destination. This was what happened to those who were slain so young. You could call it Limbo, the realm of lost souls, where I was reborn into a parallel universe. It was like passing over if you like, I changed. Time did not exist in this strange place of the forsaken, so it is impossible to tell the length of time I have ‘lived' here.
In the beginning, Limbo was like being enveloped in a thick fog; it was neither light nor dark. The grey air blurred distorting my sight, my senses. I can remember the substance surrounding me, thickening, engulfing my mind. If it was possible to choke I would have done so, but I had no physical form then. Eventually something stirred within me, the fog encouraging a distant, foreign need. The stillness of the grey began to pulsate in unison with a hunger that burned slowly in my heart. At this moment, though I did not realise it at the time, I was feeding off the essence of the Dead.
I recall an unintelligible rustle of distant whispers forming within the surrounding thickness. They were urging me, thirsty for something. I found myself desperate to listen, a staccato hushed sound that throbbed and beat to a rhythm. Detached though I was, my newfound hunger stirred my new body. It was like no other feeling. Imagine being paralysed in darkness, and then regaining life in your limbs, seeing, hearing, and feeling for the first time, knowing what you had missed all along.
When the rain fell, the fog began to dissipate, my eyes readjusted, some senses returning, my sight. I saw Him there; he looked dead, though his eyes were sick with life. His face streaked with wetness from either the rain or from tears. His expression; disjointed and feral, that could only resemble that of an animal. But reflected in his eyes was an intelligence that no living creature could comprehend. Hungry for something or nothing, I could not tell at this point, but I felt as if I was looking into my own reflection. We were the same and both everything.
Materialising out of nowhere, more figures stood still, everywhere. Some undercurrent of insatiable anger coursed through these creatures, incessant, whispering like a wind in the quiet rain. With my new form, I was able to stand with these creatures akin to me. Reborn, I found I was mouthing the words of the whispers before I knew them, watching myself in others.
"You must kill."
I had changed and so had everything else, it was not grey anymore but red. A red that mirrored the feral hunger for death. A red that echoed anger and a fury that no blood could quench. Everything fell silent and I spoke, ‘fall in for your prey.' And we hunted.
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