Day 2,337

Reality flickered and you were back by the lake, arms outstretched and eyes full of unshed tears. The body was floating just out of arms reach as it always was and in that moment your were so utterly devastated that you fled like you always did. As if you wouldn't end up there again.

A new name, a new haircut and jacket and a slight accent and you knew you'd still be back again some day. Maybe not soon, maybe thirty years even, but some day reality would flicker and you'd be back at the lake with your heart feeling like it's breaking and your lungs feeling so very heavy.

You were beginning to lose track of all the people you'd loved and lost, all the lives you'd lived in between the lake. You were beginning to wonder if running away was worth it but the uncertainty of acceptance was somehow scarier than starting life again for the umpteenth time.

Some day you'll find yourself staring at the body out on the lake and step towards it, gently turn them over and see your own face staring back at you. For now you'll pretend the water in your lungs is panic, the dampness on your clothes is sweat and the body out on the lake is someone else.

You'll run away like you always do.

You'll return like you always do.

You'll always be waiting for yourself.

Day 2,336

Sometimes places will remember what they used to be and old memories will echo through their hallways as if time had never passed. Like most reminiscing it happens deep into the night when there aren't as many, if any, moving things to distract the old bricks from days when their mortar wasn't so cracked nor their so faded.

Of course, not all of their memories are good and they aren't always just memories. Sometimes their past manifests and old faces restlessly wander, reliving their worst days and final moments as the walls remember how the blood felt as it ran down to the floor where the body twitched and fell still.

Day 2,335

The whispering was coming from behind a small cove of trees, past the highway barrier and just out of eyesight from the survivors huddled by the smouldering wrecks of their cars. The voices are faint but persistent, all asking each other when the others will arrive and if they will be friends like they were with the last ones.

The survivors were preoccupied at first, taking insurance details and trying to make calls and wondering why nothing was working. Their injuries all seemed superficial, blood drying fast and dizziness fading to the point where they all felt perfectly fine. This was when they began to notice the whispers.

The survivors felt hopeful that they might not be alone, might be close enough to a house with a working phone and a way for them to all leave. The more adventurous decided to head off the road, down the embankment and through the trees to find. To find.

To find a graveyard full of old and broken bodies all standing upright and staring right at them. The closest was an old woman with a hip that wasn't sitting at a natural angle - Mrs Smythe as she introduced herself before introducing all the other residents who still whispered among themselves, quietly judging the new folk and wondering how they died.

The survivors felt it then - that they had been lying to themselves and their bodies were lying further up the road. As shock faded to sorrow faded to resignation they heard sirens approaching and tried to head back to inform the others. Their feet would not move, they couldn't even turn their heads to look behind anymore.

Mrs Smythe said that they'd never be able to return, not now that they've begun to accept their situation. They wouldn't be able to tell the others that nobody had survived the crash - it was something they would have to figure out and accept on their own.

The former survivors cried out to the others, desperately trying to lure them down to the graveyard to ease them into their realisation before they could see their poor corpses loaded into body bags and taken away. Nobody else came down from the road, the sound of sirens cute out completely and they were simply left standing in a graveyard full of strangers while their own bodies were taken further and further away.

Day 2,334

The last of my flesh fell off this morning and now I am perfect bones.

There is nothing to hurt, nothing to bruise, nothing to rot and I would rejoice if I was capable of movement. 

I have no complaints though - I am exactly as I was always supposed to be.

That's what grandmother used to say when she came by to help remove the imperfect flesh.

I should have been stillborn, you know.

That's what the midwives said, that's what the scans showed in the days before I was born.

But death changed their mind and took my mother instead.

I left the hospital with all of her years and she left in a box.

Now we can return those years to her one piece of flesh at a time.

What used to be me is now becoming her and she will be exactly as she was always supposed to be.

As will I.

This morning marked the last of me becoming the last of her.

It's a special day -our birthday.

Day 2,333

Something is trying to talk to me. I feel it whispering in my ear at night but I can never make out what it's trying to say. I know it has eight fingers on each hand because it rests its hands on my shoulders when it leans into start whispering to me. I should probably be more frightened about that.

It doesn't stop at whispers. It follows me everywhere and hides just out of sight whenever I spin around to try and catch it out... which is more often than I'd care to admit. I know it's always there though because I'll whisper nonsense to an empty street and hear it whispering back from behind a bin or inside a closed-down shop.

Last week I thought I heard it saying "wake up and grab the bat", which I did. Felt a little bit daft just wandering around the house, following the faint sound of whispering until I'd wandered enough to satisfy it and it led me back to bed.

The next morning my neighbour messaged me to ask who my new roommate was as she saw me giving a tour to a "lanky, overdressed man" at 11PM. I asked her if she took any photos of him, made the excuse that he was very shy and waited for her to respond.

The police pulled up to her front door today, she stopped replying to everyone after she texted me and her grandchildren were concerned. The bodybags came out soon after. Her body had been so utterly brutalised that she fit into three.

I hope our messages don't incriminate me but the way the whispers all sound like "run" suggests they do.

Day 2,332

There was no reason to hide at this point, not when those colours were flickering behind his eyelids so hypnotically. It means the infection had already set in and the link between him and the fallen thing calling itself a god was established beyond the breaking point. Now, not even death would free him.

Still he clung to his basic human instincts, even though technically he wasn't even alive yet alone human but some tiny fraction of his mind swam against the tidal flow of the fallen god's thoughts and told him to hide when the angels began to descend for their daily collection like the great Valkyries of old.

He wondered if he would become an angel too - one of the ones with more wings than arms, preferably. The ones with too many arms weren't so good at flying and he didn't think an eternity of half-crashing-half-flying like a drunk insect suited him as well as the graceful swooping arcs of the multi-winged ones.

So even though the fallen god thing called out to him in the voices of everyone he'd ever loved, even though literal angels had come to take him and several others to ascend with them, even though he was already as alive as the corpse of his last surviving friend, he still managed to pull their body over himself like a child's favourite blanket.

He still managed, against all odds, to have a choice.

Day 2,331

Blood fell from the leaves like a gentle spring shower and from a distance it was almost beautiful. Then the wind changed direction carrying a metallic iron taste that filled the air and the faint sounds of several lungs breathing their last, desperate breath.

Trees of all ages seemed to sprout through every roof in the village, their leaves still red as wine though the older hots had long since decayed. A few cars dotted the main road, some crashed into shops while others gently idled away in place. Whatever had happened was still in progress.

Drivers were bolted upright in their seats as saplings grew steadily from their mouths, curling out of open doors and broken windows as their glistening crimson leaves reached for the sun. They were still breathing, albeit with a struggle as the trunk began to widen, distorting their throats and eventually rupturing them entirely.

If the shock didn't kill them it was the asphyxiation that did the job. Soon the village would be a forest clogged with rubble and not even the welcome sign would be visible through freshly grown foliage. This wasn't the end of anything - this was a brutal beginning.

The village would be gone, lost to all but local legends of trees that wept blood and hundreds of skulls peering out from beneath an ocean of stinging nettles. Few would visit and fewer still would return but there would always be fresh saplings, leaves red as wine.