Short Story: The Visions

When the dance starts, there is no stopping it. It has to run its course. The feet stomp, the arms move with the purpose from the shoulder to the fingertips. Next to the dancer moves a wolf, shaping the world according to it. The pair of them barely visible behind the dust cloud lifted from the ground—the music, unheard. Then they are gone, and you and I are left.

So my grandmother told me the world came to be, saying that only the gifted see glimpses of the dancer and the wolf. I look for them in the stars. I look for them at the bottom of the clear sea. I look for them behind the tall trees. There is no glimpse; there are no shadows. I am not like her. I cannot see. When I was little, she said I had the gift. Now that she is gone, I cannot ask her why she would do this to me. Why leave me always half of what I am? She could read the signs. I can’t. The flying birds over my head tell me nothing of the future to come. Their flight is sweet and precise, one for each bird, but where is the secret in that?

Now I watch as the fog swallows the landscape; the frosty night has stepped aside for the warmth of the day, the sun having graced the land for a gone moment. The edges of what is and what could be blur, and I search for the meaning again. No dancer, no wolf. Nothing moves. 

…

Thank you for reading! Have a beautiful day ❤

P.S. I couldn’t complete this one. I just couldn’t wrack my brain, how the story should go, and what would be the right ending. Ghostly grandma didn’t seem right; neither did the dancer and the wolf showing up. I wondered if I should let the speaker know the secret about information, the connectedness of it all, and the holistic approach to the spirit of everything, but that didn’t feel right. Maybe it could be the right path later, but for now, I let the speaker rest.

On a personal note, I grew up in a household where my mother believed in ghosts and seeing the future and that my grandmother could actually do it. Throughout my childhood, I heard stories about spirits who had visited them or how they heard premotions. My mother still gets visited by ghosts, more seldom now. The whole concept is weird and fascinating. Maybe it is why I went to study Comparative Religion at the university. I don’t believe in ghosts, maybe in quantum ghosts. Those atomic imprints we leave behind us, going the same route repeatedly. The atomic-level walls aren’t as solid as we see them when we look at objects. But that is as far as I am willing to entertain the thought. Even then, they wouldn’t be real spirits, just energy and change left behind by a memory. Let me have this silly fantasy. It, for some reason, makes me happy, thinking I am shedding my atoms as I go. ^.^ (None of this is real, or scientific, just me having fun with the world, I mean the quantum ghost.)

© K.A. Ashcomb