The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!

Vehicles for Love
by Amanda Worthington

Your first death happens when your heart stills in your chest

Maybe you’re an older model in pristine condition

Because you only took yourself out on Sundays

Maybe your paint is peeling and you’ve taken hail damage

And you have a few too many miles

To warrant replacing another part

Maybe you look brand new but things aren’t working as they should under the hood

Maybe you were in an accident you just couldn’t walk away from

However that first death happens doesn’t matter

We’ve two lives, you and I

And everything else that’s ever been alive

And two deaths

And the second comes when you’re forgotten, discarded

But people are better overall when they remember

Than when they forget

They smile and they cry and they feel and they act and make the universe a better place

And they are the kind of present they have to be if they’re going to collectively make it

The universe strives to make them remember

And the universe, conspiring to make them remember as it does

Lets the spark that once animated their unbreathing bodies

Go into anything

The trick is that it too must be unbreathing

There is not space for two sparks in a single life

It is simply the way of things

For my part, I am a book

Whose words transport

And my partner is a camera

Whose memory is full of snapshots in time

We live on so long as we endure

And that can sometimes be longer than a single human life

And who do you think the coffee is?

Who is in your coffee come to think of it?

Ever have an especially good cup and think to yourself

What made it so good?

Perhaps the answer is not what, but who?

It’s impossible to tell.

But I hope you’ll treat everything like it was a human

And every human like they were a thing worthy of love

A vehicle for the expression of the cosmic

There is nothing you see that is not imbued with life

Why then would you not be kind?

After all we are made of stardust

And the things we surround ourselves with are made of us

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Fiction © Copyright Amanda Worthington.
Image courtesy of Pixabay