The best thing about being dead, he decided, was not having to deal with people.
There were other benefits too, but they paled into insignificance with the burden of obligatory interaction being lifted from his shoulders. Downsides existed, naturally, and he'd never dealt with boredom well to begin with, but all things being equal - and since he did not exactly have a choice in the matter - being dead probably wasn't as bad as it had been made out to be.
That this stance was the result of a long-considered conundrum rather than some revelatory moment of insight felt evident, although he'd be the first to admit he couldn't actually have told anyone how long he'd been not been alive. Worse, for a long time he hadn't actually known that was the case.
In a stone-built shelter overlooking the clifftops and the ocean beyond, this was a quiet, contemplative spot. Never the best at keeping track of time, his instinctive memory had been that this was a place he came to think, because of its solitude. So a lack of people was to be expected - indeed, enjoyed. They came by occasionally and for the very most part ignored him. This was fine. He'd caught the interest of a handful of children in the company of distracted or disinterested parents, although he refrained from properly engaging with this young audience. Dogs didn't seem to like him but that had been the case when he was alive, too. Nothing had felt inherently unusual.
No, it had been the slowly changing style of people's clothing - those few who passed by his way - and the developmental shift in their manner of speaking which caused him to realise all was not right. Most of the words seemed to make sense individually, but their flow and subject matter became more... abstract. It had gotten to the point where he struggled to understand overheard conversations, when he remembered he could not quite compare their utterances to others he had recently heard elsewhere. For he had recently been nowhere else. At all.
Once this perceptual barrier had been broken, more followed as swiftly as his fragmented train of thought would allow. For instance, he could not remember the last time he had been at home. Nor where that home actually was. Hazy images of a town were evoked by these ponderings, but he found he couldn't name that town. That it was within walking distance of these clifftops seemed logical, but who was to say what sway logic held?
No, the gradual realisation that he was dead was only alarming in how little alarm it caused. Then again, he'd already noticed that he wasn't conscious all of the time, so any distress it could have engendered was therefore limited in a strictly mathematical sense. This didn't feel like a cycle of waking and sleeping, more phasing in and out of being. As if existence were defined solely by the presence of self. And who was to say that it wasn't? No one, any more.
It was after this that the unease started. The restlessness. A nagging voice in the back of his head reminding him at all times that he was dead and that he should do something about it. But what could be done? He'd argue with himself that he (they?) just had to wait. To wait for what? To wait and see. To just wait.
When boredom got too much and he decided to leave the refuge, he'd take no more than a handful of paces beyond its open front before a howling, primal fear forced him to retreat to its safety. A screaming in the soul; not his screaming, but the very voice of creation assuring unending torture to any who dare defy its warning. He felt enough to believe. He'd lost count of the number of times this had happened, always forgot the intensity of the feeling before he set out again and always instantly remembered as he scurried quickly home.
Home.
Because this was where he lived now.
Well, not 'lived', but...
But there should be a system. This thought would flash into his mind in fits of agitation, when the gently crashing waves and rolling clouds failed to salve his thoughts; failed to perform the very play for which this box - this amphitheatre - had been constructed. There should be a system where he was told what was going on, what he was supposed to do and how he was supposed to do it. But there wasn't. There wasn't a messenger or an angel or a light or a tablet or a handbook. It was just this. Being trapped - sometimes contentedly so, admittedly - in a small section of a much larger everything. Life was unfair, uneven and confusing. So was death.
But getting angry about things changed nothing. Wasn't that what he'd always said? He had no idea. It sounded like a philosophy and in the absence of anyone to rail against, it was certainly proving to be true. No, the plan was just to wait. To think. To grow? To hopefully be here for whatever came next. Some conversation might be nice, although when the people were in here lately with their bright clothes and glowing hand-tiles, so might some peace and quiet. No. He was good at waiting. That would be enough.
If he'd ever been able to walk around the stone building, the rough-hewn brick wall facing outward over the clifftops, he'd have seen a large, inbuilt engraved block bearing the legend:
FOR PETER.
TAKEN TRAGICALLY FROM US IN A MASONRY
COLLAPSE WHILE BUILDING THE SHELTER
IN THIS, HIS SPECIAL PLACE.
MISSED BY ALL, ESPECIALLY ELIZABETH & ANN
1881
Although if Peter ever managed to read that, it would no doubt spark the memory that it was his own fleeting, distracted daydreaming and absent-mindedness while he was supposed to be working that had caused the wall to come down in the first place.
C'est la vie.
DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• Short stories © WorldOfBlackout.co.uk, all entries are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. Y'know, mostly.
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