Steem-O-Ween Fiction Entry - A Picture is Worth a Thousand Endings

source

Well, it had to happen at some point. The dead coming back, I mean.

Think about it: isn't what we all want? Who hasn't lost family? Friends? Fuckbuddies? We all wish we could return our lost ones, right? So why oh why do we get all up in arms when they actually do show up? Is it because it wasn't our doing? Is it because it was someone else's? The Devil? Some jackass with a microbiology degree?

You think those are thoughts you're thinking?

The memories, our - no, human - memories are the dead. The past is the dead, all of it. Every second, something becomes an artifact of the past tense. A skin-cell, a bacterium, a child. Years pass. Fathers, mothers, brothers, drunken driving strangers; they all pass, passed away. Past.

The past, by definition, is dead. Only now is alive.

We just couldn't let it go, could we? The past, I mean. We clung and clung to the images of dead loved ones like aberrant rats; even in the trap, we refuse to abandon the foot to save the head. First came the paintings, then the daguerreotypes, then the photos. The fucking pictures, man. Who knew? The fucking "natives" were right, half-right; photos do steal your soul. What the poor bastards didn't know was you can steal it back.

Involuntarily, I mean.

I've never liked photographs, not of people anyway. Every one of me and mine is burning in the corner right now, smoke staining the juncture of two walls. like the radio says Downtown Crossing is. TV's down of course. Off-course.

So. Us. As a species, numb as hell, dumb as bells. Clinging to our dead relatives. The Igbo and their ancestor spirits, their chi. Shrines. Memorials. Obituaries in microfiche. What else was going to happen? Stare into the abyss and it'll stare back into you -- and, unlike you, it can't even blink. Just like a photograph.

No one's said how it happened; supernatural occurence, anagogic manifestation, quantum nonsense. I say it was the pictures: you kept thinking about Good Old Uncle Chike, kept looking at his picture every year. Such a good nephew you are, good niece, good intersexual metrosexual. So he - the memory of him - ate your brain and now you're looking to share the experience.

Do you think you are real?

The ground shook a bit there. A plane just fell on ... hmm, by the distance, I'd have to say somewhere between Polo Park and SPAR. Boom. I can see the smoke from here. There'll be more of course; who looks at pictures of their family more than pilots?

10/31, baby.

Truth is, nothing could have stopped this. It's impossible to always look at the future or always live in the moment; the same impulse that doomed Lot's wife and Eurydice is embedded in all of us.

I'm looking back now. My uncle's shuffling around in the bathroom and somehow, I don't think him wiping his ass is in the cards. As for his head, who knows? Maybe my sister's in there.

... I've always wanted to die with my head through a computer screen.

Send.

Not entirely clear on what Steem-O-Ween is about or even who all is running it but @limabeing thought I should do something so here's this not-quite-zombie-apocalypse fiction thing. Thanks for reading?

Oh and Happy Halloween!

---

@edumurphy