The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!

Out There
by Kendra Hale

They say we are all reaching out for something in life. Whether it is a purpose or a driving force, a goal, there is something for each of us. I must have been the exception to this calling, to the drawing of the soul. No siren sang for me, hoping to hold me close, leading me down the beautiful disastrous path to my end. Even the reaper abandoned me in my greatest need for at least one person to be there in my greatest hour. 

Isn’t it fucked that that is what people consider the last time our blood pumps? The last time our lungs will fill with oxygen, that our eyes will open searching for this supposed purpose. This greatest hour rhetoric is for fools, with a fool’s purpose. It is blackness and cold. But at last I am not alone. 

For we are many. 

What they reach for is beyond me though I hear their hushed whispers in gravelly voices that are harsh even when soft. It is so hard to make out anything but maybe that is the point of us. We are the unfulfilled. The forgotten. This is the true island of misfit fucking toys. All of us reaching for something that was never in the scope of our realms to begin with. 

Isn’t that just the cosmic joke of the afterlife? No flashing lights, or warmth. No pearly gates await our souls. Is that even what we are? Are we shadows? Are we what these ghost hunters call echoes? Are we the goosebumps of cold you feel as we reach for something…someone…just to feel like we mattered? To feel like that existence that felt like just a moment ago has not been lost to us? 

I wish I could say that I would have lived my life differently, that those choices that confound and are often shied away from I would have grabbed with the certainty that nothing would be more important then in that moment. This is a lie. A massive one. I would have changed nothing for even with this knowledge…nothing mattered. 

But that is the past life and this is my now. This is OUR now. This mass of squirming want. Just reaching out and wanting to connect. I can’t speak for any of the souls around me…but I miss warmth. I miss the heat. The blood rushing through my pink skin and pumping with life. 

I can’t break free…there are no shackles yet my form is stitched in with these other damned souls. I can only come to that conclusion that we are damned, but there are so many. So many and yet it is so cold. What I’d give…just to have one second of warmth. I want this with all of what is left. 

I just keep reaching…

Fiction © Copyright Kendra Hale
Image courtesy of Pixabay.com

More from author Kendra Hale:

Just Emotions:
A Gothic Bite Magazine Anthology

A collection of poetry.

 Available on Amazon!