Nightmare Fuel 2018, Day the Third - Remembrance of Reconstruction

This one is nakedly topical, drawn heavily on current events for the last year. Also a ghost story, because October is the time for ghosts.

So... boo!

Remembrance of Reconstruction

You never fired a gun, barely held one. You remember that, barely.

Memories are always hazy,  from before your death. They all get tangled up by how the living look back at you, where you're memorialized, the passing of time.


You must have for a time posed as a soldier, because that's who you are, here in the hereafter. That's what people see when they look.

You don't remember anger from your life either, but you feel that. It's nearly the first thing you remember from the years after your death - a seething resentment. You feel spread out, losing your sense of space.

You're in a meadow.

At the edge of a forest.

Outside a courthouse.

In a public park.

You're many places. The further you stretch, the less you remember yourself. You lose your hometown, your first kiss, your job.

You forget your name.


You remember hatred, anger.

Grass grows short and scraggly around your markers, trees grow stunted. Autumn comes a bit earlier, spring a bit later. You are winter. You are death, or death's cousin.

Then, slowly, perhaps, the world changes. Your awareness of the courthouses and the parks and the town squares fade. Still you are hatred, you are bitter anger, but your world is shrinking.

Finally, there's nearly nothing more. Just a quiet, dark place near the edge of the cemetery, beneath an oak tree too old and too strong to care for your anger.

Finally, not even a memory remains.