Wispy winter breezes chilled the fall air. Bonfires danced in the distance, echoes from their crackling wood rung throughout the graveyard; its smoky breath flowed in the wind. A silhouette of a woman was lying on a grave. The torn edges of her dress drowned in the gusts. The final hours of night fall diminished rapidly.


Only a few hours before hand, Leslie had returned from her husband’s funeral. He’d recently passed away in a tragic accident. Usually Leslie was quite charming and cheerful. However, lately she’d been in a fit of depression. She went to lie down, but drifted off into a state of a deep oblivion.




A muffled rattling aroused Leslie from a tranquil sleep. She gazed into darkness, her cloudy vision starting to adjust to the lighting. Her fingers fumbled on her nightstand to find her pocket watch. It was a given to her by her husband before he’d died. The gold glimmered in the dim light of the stars; it felt like a sliver of ice in her hands. The faint ticking of the clockwork sung throughout her still room. The rhythmic echoes soothed her. Then, the beat halted.

She was agitated because her sentimental gift broke and flung her head upwards at the ceiling in frustration. But, something in the corner of the room caught her eye. An illuminated figure waded forward. Leslie stifled a shriek; the ghostly image looked familiar. She realized that the mysterious shadow was a phantom of her deceased husband. Shock and confusion overwhelmed her.


Leslie found it toilsome to speak. She stammered, trying to form words to question the odd-being, but her thoughts escaped her mouth as a vocable-jumble. Taking advantage of this silence, her slain husband spoke “Listen, I speak to you with great importance. You shall venture to my lifeless body and recount worth of your existence. So long, you will be missed. Now I shall return to the land of the lifeless. Farewell!” he proclaimed as he slowly faded into the hazy darkness.
She stammered trying to make sense of it, but the image had long since gone. Her brain scrambled to decode the baffling enigma. After a moment of thought, Leslie conjured an idea. She would write him a letter.




Soon, she arrived at the graveyard, found a shovel, and started digging. She thought about what to write. She had no idea as what to record because she a mental-block. The dirt was fairly easy to uproot because the grave had been fresh, however, her muscles were a bit weak and weary.


Once she finished uprooting the coffin she began to write the note. It was very difficult; he was her life and now was gone. She glanced into the abyss in desperation. The light of the silvery moon glared on the coffin and made a reflective surface.


She was startled, because there, staring back at her was a hideous monster. She gasped. And strangely, it did as well. Bewildered, she leaned in closer to examine it and confirmed that it was herself. She was mutilated and looked emotionally unbalanced. Leslie was horrified.


She wondered how this happened. Thoughts ran through her head, as she finally concluded that she had done this to herself in her sleep.


Realization struck as she discovered that the ghost she’d seen was a figment of her imagination, a mere hallucination. She had now believed that she was insane. She knew what she had to do, though it was gruesome. Suicide. In her nervous, trembling hands she held the shovel.


It all seemed like a blur but before she knew it she was already lying in earthy smelling ground, with a welt growing atop her head. She felt her blood rushing. In her dying breath, she pulled out the parchment; it unfurled beside her, blank and empty. And with that, the Grim Reaper devoured her, and the world around her began to fuzz. And like her broken pocket watch, her heart terminated as she joined the land of the fallen souls.