12 Kilos
“There’s an old saying, you seem to like those, you’re born alone, you die alone, friends and family are just the illusion between the two so you don’t feel alone while doing the living.”
Garrett hasn’t heard that one before but it speaks to him, so do all his recent recollections about his aunt and his sour turn into adolescence.
“So, I’m company in your final years, then?”
The ancient shrugs, “Final days is more like it. Not company though, no, or friend, I never had none of those, don’t need none now. What I need is a reckoning, and ending to something, and you got endings written all over you.”
Garrett sits and slumps in his chair, he can hear Winneh’s final words to him as though she were in the room with them.
You’ve become a dealer of death now. This is the path you’re on, but not the one you have to choose forever.
For all his nightmares, his ruminations, his outright daydreams. Those really had been her last words to him, in person, spoken over the meaning of a bit of stitching around the neckline of a garment long since ruined and concerning a life that no longer existed, mostly.
The laughter is bitter, ruinous, it sounds strange, fake somehow, Garrett has never been one for laughter and certainly not the unhinged nearly maniacal cackling that has lodged in his throat and stuck there on a seemingly endless loop. He has to stand up, he has to massage his throat until he feels like he’s choking himself. The tears start running absently down his pock marked cheeks until the salty water hits the wound on the side of his face and reminds him that this is no dream or nightmare.
Pain is always there to remind Garrett that he is still very much alive.
The ancient waits for the hysterics to end before she continues. “You’re tired, wounded. You don’t wanna do it no more. Me neither. Difference is, you’ll mend, you have time to fix things, I don’t.”
Garrett sits back down and looks at the dry cake growing harder in the old wooden bowl. “I’ll never have a life that isn’t ash and fire and shit.”
The ancient cackles but closes it off with a brief cough. “No one does, what makes you special?”
