Caoimhin sat There. He liked it There because There is simply the best place to think. He could slip away while sitting There. It was somewhat like a designated spot where thinking was easily accomplished. He sometimes fancied that he could receive the thoughts of others who had sat There before him, hear their desires and lusts, feel their loves as they passed before him in a forgotten history.

           One time he became suspicious that souls were imprisoned in this diverse place. He did not care if cynically retributive spirits cried here as long as he never heard or saw one. It was just one more thing to think about. The thought frightened him once because he had seen one of them before.

           It had appeared and disappeared in the same instant, yet it had lasted for hours on end in the short palaver. Strong feeling of static surrounded him as if a lightning bolt had cut through the sky above and ripped its way through the ground, not some seven yards from where he sat. The spirit materialized in front of him like a leather bag had spilled ashes through the air and they gathered in the shape of this thing. The Vision wavered before him and then became solid.

           Peeling skin hung in thin strips across the now gray rotting skull. The eyes were deeply shadowed for they rested in large canyons of slanting skin and had long sense lost color.

           You are a frequent visitor here, my boy. You must have much to think about.

           The mouth had not moved. It could not; there was no longer a lower jaw bone to support speech, only loose skin flapping in soft wind as bloody struggles of speech were summoned from a collapsing esophagus.

           I have plead for help before, Boy, I will not this time. I am simply a prisoner of my past, for one can never shake his past, Boy. Our past clings to us and drags us down and eventually ruins us. If we loose it, it will eventually catch up with us as our lives progress. It is a tiring cliché‚ of everyone's life. We are dead and alive here, it is a constant pain we can no longer feel. I am here for eternity as all evil punishment lasts... an eternity of punishment that will soon lead me into insanity, although the sick grasp of derangement have begun to surround me. Even while insane this knowledge of my punishment will remain, leaving me to think about it. I will be here after Heaven collapses and Hell explodes with it's many new-comers. I will be here after this world rots away as I am now. Someday I will no longer hold this physical form any longer but I will travel through an infinite number of worlds to begin anew in each. It has been so since my judgment at the Gates and will be so until the Tower collapses and all that we know becomes nothing. I do not have much time left to wait, for the disintegration of the Tower has already begun, the axis of everything, all of these galaxies will "die" as I will too.

           The spirit had reached out and then collapsed unto itself and disappeared yet again to wait for its own independent extinction and reincarnation.



© 2000 Kevin O'Leary, all rights reserved
 appears here by permission

Author Notes            This is pretty much just a short story that isn't all that great, and won't be understood by most people who read it.