The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!

The Oculus
by Amanda Worthington

He is the ghost that I carry

I will leave it up to you to decide if I am haunted

Or possessed.

I think I was possessed

And now I am haunted.

.

I am still, unmoving, afraid.

.

As he gazes through the dust-begrimed oculus

The beams that support us shiver

Like cold things that can’t get warm.

.

I am a space for his spirit to occupy

A familiar room in which to dwell

My mind is an attic where the past accumulates

I am borrowed space.

And I also borrow space.

.

I wonder sometimes if he requires me

If my body failed, would he rejoin the vapors?

Drift into a lone cup of coffee

Or a passing cat?

Are angry felines and mediocre lattes

The result of aimless ghosts?

.

His father was a painter

And his grandfather worked wood

But go another generation back

And it’s a man with an axe

And I feel the blade embed itself into my skin

Slicing through sinew, burying itself so deep within me

That the handle vanishes

And so does the man.

.

Maybe death is the basis for all art then

And I’m just the paper remembering the tree

That used to twist and reach and sing

And whisper its truth into the waiting breeze

Maybe loss always precedes rebirth.

.

I just know that rebirth cuts too deep sometimes

To feel worth it.

.

And why am I an attic

While my mother is a basement?

.

Fiction © Copyright Amanda Worthington.
Image courtesy of Pixabay