"And Still I Walk..." by Matthew T. Summers

And still I walk... It’s the little things I miss.

I don’t miss the busy city streets.  Not at all… Rush hour always sucked, and it seemed like I was never in the fast lane.  And God help you if there was an accident, it’d take three times as long to get home.

No, I don’t miss that… I do miss driving though… the feel of the engine throbbing through my bones, the response in the car when I stepped on the gas…  I miss the back country roads that always came after I managed to make it out of the city.  A good two-thirds of my daily commute was through these paths, and rarely if ever did I come across anything more threatening than a farmer’s tractor, or occasionally the stray cow or goat.  

That was the enjoyment, right there.  I’d put the top down on my convertible and let the wind blow through my hair… well, when I had hair, anyway.  Toward the end of my time, there wasn’t anything left for the poor breezes to tickle.  

The smells… God, how I miss those.  The smell of freshly-cut grass, the natural smells that came from the farms… though the cow fields left a bit to be desired, and occasionally someone would run over a skunk, but those were only minor blips on the radar.  Nothing can touch the scent of a pine forest, in my opinion… I’d purposefully go down side roads, specifically chasing a particular smell, just to locate its source for my own knowledge.

Hell, I even occasionally would stop along the side of the road, sit in my car, and listen.  Once the fan in my car stopped turning, the silence would assault my senses… and then the noises of nature would resume.  Birds would call out, speaking to my soul… squirrels would chitter, happily celebrating the latest find of a hoard of nuts… and the far-distant sounds of farm machinery or the occasional locomotive.  

But invariably… as I meander through this desolate wasteland, my thoughts would return…

It was raining that day.  The roads were a bit slick, nothing too major… until the two kids had run out in front of my car.  I couldn’t… I couldn’t stop.  I had no warning.

No warning… no… those poor kids…

The paramedics told me later that there was nothing I could have done, and mercifully neither of them likely felt anything, but that did little to soothe my grieving soul.  It wasn’t a month later that my own life was snuffed out by my beloved shotgun, passed down to me from my grandfather.

It went to auction with the rest of my stuff, I suppose… I had no heirs, no living relatives, the last of a dying breed, I suppose.  I hope whoever received it took good care of it… that was a nice shotgun.  

When I awoke three days later, I assumed that I would be going to hell.  Suicide is, supposedly, one of the unforgivable sins against God… but there were no fires to sear my soul for eternity.  I simply… stood back up and walked out of the graveyard.  

Of course, it was later, when I tried to speak to people around me, that it occurred to me that I was no longer with a physical form.  The people I encountered… could not see me, could not hear my words, could not feel my breath… I was alone in a sea of humanity.

I wandered for probably decades; time meant nothing to me anymore.  Out of idle curiosity, I went to see the sights of the world.  Though it took me years to reach anything, over time I was able to finally transverse the world, one country at a time.  

During this time, I learned that I was naturally drawn to two different events in the lives of the people around me.  The strongest pull on my soul came when someone was either in the process of dying or had died very recently near me as I traveled.  It was odd… the first time I watched someone’s soul extricate itself from its body… God, that still creeps me out.  I’ve gotten used to it, of course, but it’s still strange to see this shining, silvery substance leech out of its former host and make a beeline for the heavens.

I have watched children die in war-torn countries.  I have been there when a grandmother passes away, surrounded by her large and diverse family members, grieving over her passing.  The hardest for me to watch, of course, were the multitude of accident victims I’ve seen over the years; it reminds me pointedly of my own accident, and I cannot bear to remember that incident.

Secondly, I’ve oddly found myself pulled to young lovers in the action of expressing their love.  Initially, I wondered about this… why was I pulled to people engaging in sexual activity?  I had no hormones to get excited with, and watching that sort of thing had only marginally interested me in life to begin with… in wandering death, it was even less exciting for me to watch.  I rarely stuck around for more than a minute in these situations, at least initially…

It wasn’t until I met another like me that I understood… I was standing impassively by the bedside as a young couple in England moaned and thrashed on their bed when she arrived.  Her face was sullen, downcast… and she walked through the door like it didn’t exist.

Upon seeing me, her face went even more downcast… until I shrugged in her direction.  We couldn’t speak, of course, but somehow she seemed to know that I didn’t have any idea why I was there.  Her face lightened and she smiled, even to the point of giving me a knowing wink as she gestured down at the couple below us.

I shrugged again.  What was I to care if she got her jollies watching this?  I was just about to leave when the living, loving couple came to a close in their entertainment…

I stared in shock as a rippling white, faintly shining substance literally appeared out of the air before me.  And then I knew… I was not being pulled to the action of sex; I was being called to the CONCEPTION.

As I stared, the female shot her hand out and grabbed hold of the soul before us.  To my horrified amazement, she began to rip the soul into shreds, pulling the pieces into her body savagely.  After a moment, it was done… and with a satisfied look on her face, she vanished.

The new soul that appeared was tainted in coloration; the pristine white muddled with darker grays and faded black sections.  The soul settled into the lower regions of the living woman below…

Sickened, I fled from the room.  I never again heeded that particular call… I would not murder someone else’s soul in order to have another chance at life again, I refuse to debase myself as such.

So time passed.  Eventually, mankind depleted the resources from the Earth, and quite some years ago they moved on into the cosmos.  Where, I do not know… I tried to follow one group onto a rocket, but when the rocket blasted off, I passed through its floors and stood in the blast zone, watching sadly as it reached into the heavens.  

I thought that, at least with mankind gone from the planet, nature would return over time… but they had removed most of the life-giving elements from the planet, wholesale.  The oxygen, gone… with it, most of the fresh water, and a vast majority of the saltwater had been converted and used as well.  Plantlife dwindled and died, and now only dust grows as I walk.

The world is a barren wasteland, and now I finally know…

Hell is not eternal agony of fires eating at your soul.

Hell is… watching everything around you die, and watching your people leave you behind, never to return… and still I walk.

It’s the little things I miss… and the littlest ones that I didn’t miss that have condemned me to this eternal hell.

And still I walk…