Afterlife: Richard: Watching Leaves Fall

[k_a_webb]

Written for lj user ysabetwordsmith’s prompt: Richard watching dead leaves falling. It kind of wandered off, like stories for prompts sometimes do.

Being Death made autumn an interesting season and one Richard avoided whenever he could. Sometimes he had no choice, because people died in autumn the same way they died every other season of the year. He never quite knew why, but his attention was always drawn to the dead leaves falling from the trees, and part of him felt like he should be guiding the leaves to the afterlife in the same way he guided people. Sighing, he watched a brown leaf travel from its branch to the ground, swirling in the wind, as he reminded himself that every leaf that fell would find its way safely to where it needed to be now that its short life was over.

Autumn felt like an uncomfortable item of clothing. Richard rubbed his hands down his arms as he tried, unsuccessfully, to get rid of at least some of the feeling. It was a season that was neither alive or dead, but both at the same time. Spring was the same in a way, and different, because then things were coming alive instead of slowly dying. As Death he felt the things that were dying and, even though he knew there were things coming to life, he couldn’t feel life. Spring, unless he was gathering someone, didn’t really feel of anything to him, because he was a part of the afterlife that was almost more dead than the dead.

Richard picked up one of the dead leaves. There was no spirit within it any longer, because it had moved on. Above him he could feel the spirits in all the other leaves, who all knew that soon, very soon, they would be travelling to the afterlife. It was different to the feeling he got from humans, different to the feeling he got from domestic animals, different to the feeling he got from wild animals, and different to the feeling he got from animals that were breed for food. Death was something unique for everyone and everything. Humans were his responsibility, as Death, the afterlife’s psychopomp, but that didn’t stop him from feeling everything else.

When Richard thought about it, he knew his favourite of all the feelings was the one he got from loved domestic animals. It didn’t matter who loved them, but if someone who had loved the animal was in the afterlife they automatically went to them. Unloved domestic animals needed help to get to the afterlife, where they would find someone who would help the recuperate from what had happened to them during their life. His job wasn’t to guide them, although he sometimes did if an animal spirit happened to be close to where he was gathering a human spirit, because he couldn’t leave them alone.

The leaf swirled back down to the ground when Richard dropped it. It was nothing more than the shell that had once housed the spirit of the leaf. Gathering up his courage he looked at the gravestone in front of him and told himself that the body that was decomposing in the ground beneath him was just the shell that had once housed his spirit. Instead of being within that body he was outside it, his spirit continuing the life he’d been living since before he was even in that body. He knew there were other bodies in other graves and he promised himself he would visit them all.

Mirrored from K. A. Webb Writing.

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[ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com]

>>animals that were breed for food.<<

That should say "bred" above.

Wow, this sure went deep and wide.

[natalief.livejournal.com]

Intriguing although, if a leaf has a spirit, does the tree? does one of a human's hairs?