The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!
The Passage of Time
by Michelle Joy Gallagher
Lauren had always pictured death as the complete absence of light. Not dark, in the way that we know it. Our “dark” is always polluted by light to varying degrees. Death, Lauren felt, must have been an oubliette of complete darkness for eternity. The reality was far more strange and cruel.
Lauren had been forgotten. She died young. Light bursting behind her eyes in a brilliant supernova when her artery gave way, blood rushing into her skull, crushing the places in her brain that urged her heart to beat, her lungs to inflate. She was buried by her husband, in a plot meant for her mother. He hadn’t the heart to visit her grave after the new year. After he’d met Violet all the flowers had been for her.
Life flooded around the gap she had left, and in the vast expanse of time and space, incredible unknown epochs slowly unraveling. There was no one left that could recall her face.
The passage of time came down to the forgetting and the forgotten. From the atomic level, life was full of a myriad of experiences. Collisions that dug holes in the fabric of space or encouraged a new manner of being. Entropy was the process of slowly forgetting those experiences. Decay was only a stop along the way.
She’d had form once. Was made of matter. Was comprised of iron and calcium, carbon, and water. The rushing of water. If she had only a second to describe her human existence it would have been with the sound of water. But she had been forgotten and there was no one to tell this to. No mouth to tell it with.
Non existence should have been freeing. But she had remembered.
Fiction © Copyright Michelle Joy Gallagher
Image courtesy of Pixabay.com
More from author Michelle Joy Gallagher:
Disremembering
Welcome to Blackhawk, Colorado. Blackhawk has always been strange. Natural disasters. Disappearances. Murders. High strangeness is a part of daily life. We can’t hope to explain it, but we can chronicle its past. Learn from it. Fear it. Blackhawk is an experimental fiction series set in a shared universe, written by a variety of talented authors. It is the brainchild of David M Brown (Plague Doctor, Modern Animals) and Carl D Smith (Moleb the Giant, Darkness Out of Carthage). Each story will contribute to an organic, evolving mythology as diverse as the voices behind its tales. For fans of True Detective, Lost Highway, Twilight Zone, and The Terror. This is Volume Two of the series and contains five stories by five different authors, each in tune with the specific strangeness Blackhawk has to offer. NOTE: For fans of Lake Lord Publishing’s prior horror titles, be warned that Blackhawk will contain content that is perhaps more disturbing and mature.
Available on Amazon!
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About Nina D'Arcangela
Nina D’Arcangela is a quirky horror writer who likes to spin soul rending snippets of despair. She reads anything from splatter matter to dark matter. She's an UrbEx adventurer who suffers from unquenchable wanderlust. She loves to photograph abandoned places, bits of decay and old grave yards.
Nina is a co-owner of Sirens Call Publications, a co-founder of the horror writer's group 'Pen of the Damned', founder and administrator of the Ladies of Horror Picture-prompt Monthly Writing Challenge, and if that isn't enough, put a check mark in the box next to owner and resident nut-job of Dark Angel Photography.
Spreading the Writer's Word 
This is truly excellent. And sad, yes, but she had remembered …
Darkly evocative and poignant.
Poignant and disturbing – such skilled writing.