Seeing your own grave is an experience best described by a simple phrase:
“Oops.”
That was my initial reaction to the cold stone slab that marked my passing. The next was one of ungodly rage followed by a dawning feeling of reality slipping through my fingers like smoke.
How am I here? What am I? What?
I knew I wasn’t human; that much was certain. It was strange. Stranger than anything I have or will ever fail to understand.
I wasn’t standing, but I wasn’t floating. When I moved I was still and everything else moved around me.
I couldn’t see myself, but I no longer needed to. I felt like a pair of eyes, looking and seeing without a body.
Flowers. Flowers, flowers, flowers. Lots of them. Why? I don’t know. I have hay fever. And I’m dead.
Very, very dead. And allergic to pollen.
I was wondering whether dead people could sniffle when I noticed them. I couldn’t see them but I knew they were there. Other pairs of eyes belonging to other bodiless souls. Rifts in space time that resulted in odd diversions of light that were only there if you were really looking. One stood (hovered…floated…existed) in front of me, glaring into my gravity.
I wasn’t too familiar with ghost etiquette. My supernatural social skills were pretty rusty; so I just stared. To be fair, I wasn’t even sure if I could speak. As I moved closer I realised that it wasn’t looking at me but rather gazing at the sky.
Lily Murphy-Burke