Day 305 - Muertos Story

Muertos Story

Matthew Ryan Fischer

The candles cast a flickering shadow against the wall. He paused for a moment to consider it, among his many other thoughts. It was an especially warm night for the season. He didn’t feel hot, but normally he felt cold. Not tonight. He didn’t feel cold tonight.

It was a calm night. No wind. Hardly any clouds. The stars were bright and the moon was hardly there. He normally didn’t think about those sorts of things, but tonight it caught his attention. Tonight the moon was almost gone. In a day or two it would disappear and then start all over again. He didn’t know what he thought that meant. He didn’t know if it meant anything. Certainly there must be some legend or myth somewhere about the waning moon, but he didn’t know any. The whole subject made him melancholy. The disappearance of something so bright, so seemingly permanent must have been incredibly frightening at one point in man’s development. It was a little like watching a loved one grow old and die. They just disappeared slowly in front of you, wasting away, until they weren’t there any longer. Death in the sky, death below on the ground. Winter was on its way and the earth would soon be bare.

The shadow on the wall reminded him of what he used to be. He was a shell of his former self. He felt empty inside. Time had passed him by and he was nothing but failure and regret. The shadow knew his secrets. The shadow knew what all he could have been. The shadow still held all the promise in the world, the promise of potential and greatness. It was all that he could have been and still might be.

But it was just a shadow on a wall. What could it really do? He was beyond changing and beyond hope. A shadow wasn’t going to change any of that.

He wasn’t home, but someone had gone to great lengths to make him feel at home. There were marigolds in a vase on the nightstand and a dish of mixed dried fruits and nuts left for him in case he was hungry when he woke. His favorite clothes were hung up for him and waiting. There were pictures of his life on the walls – his family, his friends, his children, his wife. His favorite chair was in the corner of the room and his father’s clock sat atop a bookshelf that his grandfather had made. The room was laid out meticulously like a shrine.

It was a trap. He knew what it meant. He was old. He was being taken care of. Someone had taken his entire life and tried to pare it down into a few key moments and items. It looked like they had tried hard. It looked like they put in a great deal of thought. But they didn’t know him. They didn’t understand him as a person. They only understood him as a caricature of himself – the version that was captured in photos and at family gatherings and during a few key interactions and anecdotes. The real him, that wasn’t here. That was somewhere else. Somewhere gone, lost in the past.

The present was barely his and the future would never come. All he was was the past now. He had his time. He used his fair share. Now he was just a faint memory, captured in these few choice items, and soon he would be gone altogether, washed away in the flow of things.

He wasn’t bitter. He wasn’t upset. It happened to everyone. He was no fool. He understood things.

Outside he could hear the sounds of celebration. There was live music and people cheering. Perhaps there was dancing. He missed dancing. He missed his wife. But that was another story. He wished his family had come to visit. Maybe they had and he had missed them. Maybe. He wasn’t sure. Too many things passed by like a blur now. He could never be sure of everything anymore.

He looked at the shadow on the wall and the shadow looked back at him. He was terribly saddened by the room around him. It was all gone and things would never be again.

The tribute had been nice. It had been generous even. Still, he would have rather had none of it and gotten to see his family one last time. But that wasn’t the way it worked, he supposed. He leaned over and blew out the candles and faded into the darkness of time forgotten.