True Vision
The unspoken death of pre-death, the exiting of spirit: a body ripped in two. It had happened when I first met my reaper, unbelievably, paranormal yet strange. He did not dress the part for it. He did not hide in the cloaks and the faceless masks. He looked like me. And I have been given a task to take someone’s life. When I asked in detestment, it reached its wraith claw through the cracks of my mirror and held my neck in silence.
He left me with a feeling of dread that carried over when I held my newborn daughter cloaked in her blanket,
“Silence, my daughter.”
I beseeched the words in a caressing whisper, hoping to quiet her cries with my own hands. This ill-born feeling of dread, it lurked in my stomach like cancerous butterflies. I kissed her head one last time, before laying her in her crib. Leaving her to strangers while I visited them.
I saw it in my mind’s eye, a man chosen by wraiths, deliverers of death. I recalled my memories, though they were lost in my fear. I had seen blood, but I was not sure if it was my own. I only hoped that I held the courage to return to my daughter once more.
I walked into this man’s home, greeted by the guards outside this prison. I was dressed in a blue uniform, and for a moment it gave me some sort of falsehood that I was a hero: delivering a death punishment unto a man because a Wraith held me. As I walked in, this anxiety swelled in my chest as I had realized the recklessness of my mind.
Was it in my mind? Or was I truly right? My questions were pushed aside as I watched this man, barely touching his plate as all the others had devoured it for him. I stayed in the shadows, dancing amidst the normality: blending in like all the rest. I didn’t even see a crumb in his gray beard.
The man had a weakness to him, frail and fragile looking, with a tattoo of a crow underneath his orange sleeve. When the buzzer had alerted everyone it was time to leave, he slowly got up: for sure I could swear I heard the aches in his back. I crept behind him, hoping that I would have the courage to deliver the act that would send me back.
Once he sat behind his bars, I had a stir of confidence: until I heard him say,
“Hello?” He called in a hoarse and defeated tone, his eyes looking right at me, yet not through me.
“Can you tell me what type of day it is?”
I walked with caution in my footsteps or was it fear for when he spoke. Plunging within me a stake of humanity.
“Type of day?” I asked in confusion. “Don’t you mean the time of day?”
As I walked closer, I had noticed his eyes were looking at me. Two unworthy pale sets of eyes that shined like glass, with a deep, dark gray. As I observed my victim, he looked like a man too starved of joy.
The Man of Solemn stood, “Aha, So I see. You’ve been sent to finish me, A rogue of the order.” He moved towards me, with a grace that was slow: until he grasped the bars with certainty.
“Can’t you see I am a dying man?” He pleaded, “You must kill me. I cannot cry, for they had already taken everything from me. My sight. I don’t remember her.”
The ramblings of a mad man, I observed.
“Her?” I carefully reached behind my back, clasping onto the sets of keys with a quietness: hoping he wouldn’t hear the rattling of them.
“My daughter. I cannot know where to look, not without the gift of sight.”
I lurched forward, and that was when The Solemn Man grinned and stole me by the collars of my uniform. I was close to him, I can smell his haunting, cold breath as he whispered, “How kind of Him to send a man with a sight he will no longer need.”
“N-No,” I swiftly removed the keys from my back in an attempt to stab him, but he clasped my arm and wrapped it around the bar: snapping my arm in the process. I screamed over his own until he reached his long fingernails into my eye socket.
The Solemn Man had me on my knees, begging for forgiveness of my desperation. Then, as much as I was screaming from the pain: I remembered. I shared the same, uncanny tattoo of a crow upon my right bicep.
And in the moments I had left, I figured, I knew it within every inch of my being that I was The Solemn Man.
My body met its ground, and just before my closing into The Unknown: He leaned in.
"How does a man become Solemn? By losing the love he loved the most."