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What is it to die?
To die is to live.
To say otherwise is to fall victim to the conceit that our value extends beyond those with whom we interact. This is a fallacy born of egotism and vanity.
The modern concept of death is a construct that represents nothing more than the personal loss of those left behind. To experience grief is to know what it means to lose a part of our own lives, be it in the form of another soul that has departed our presence or in the paths and habits we lay to rest with them.
But to benefit a poignant argument, I will only argue in regard to the loss of the individual themselves.
We could examine the loss of an individual and that weight upon our lives. Howsoever it may be a keener blade that cuts far deeper in truth, is not so spectacular in theory. It is better to save such a philosophical debate for another day, as it is also inevitably untreatable due to the fundamental and aforementioned vanity of mankind. It remains an intrinsic building block upon which all society is constructed, and its foundation, settled deep in the essence of our culture, is unlikely to be budged by a simple letter such as this.
But I digress.
Resume with me the examination of the passing of an individual past our observable plane of view and into what is colloquially referred to as being within a state of “death.” Let us examine how an individual may observe their own “end.”
Most ignore the inevitable shift in their being. They go through their lives believing, largely through what I believe is their own biology attempting to protect them from the existential dread that accompanies the recognition of such a thing, that their last breath shall never come.
But those who know the approach of their demise, by benefit of a predictive illness or time, find themselves in a unique situation. They understand their impending death, not as an abstract concept they wish to deny, but as fact. They often find themselves mourning their own lives by benefit of foresight. That we might see our impending end and look upon it with sadness and regret is not a gift, but a curse. Worse yet, we may come to fear our own passing. The elderly and the ill are often wont to mourn their own ends long before they come.
I say to you that such grief is a pointless endeavor.
To die is to live.
I say that those creatures who would shed tears over their own lives, once dead, do not weep over their own graves. For they have not lost. They have merely changed. We do not die. We merely feed life.
A corpse laid to rest beneath a tree gives fruit to the branch. The worms might eat the flesh and mingle it with the soil and allow the flowers to grow. Does the fetid corpse of a bird not feed the ants and insects, without which they themselves would starve? Does a cow, slaughtered and butchered by men with no care for its suffering or its own desire to live, not in turn feed their human family with the meat so that they might survive?
We do not die. We merely become food for life.
We mourn the flesh. We do not celebrate the change.
To die is to be alive.
Who is to say this rule is limited to the flesh alone?
Why not the soul?
-M. L. Harrow
Cora dreamt of falling.
Well, that wasn’t quite accurate. It wasn’t the falling that she was aware of—that weightless, seemingly endless sensation of little more than gravity and the rush of air moving past her. That wasn’t the issue.
No, it was the impact at the bottom that was the problem.
She wasn’t dreaming that she was falling. She was dreaming that she fell.
She hit the rock floor of some great black pit that stretched deep into the Earth. The immovable, unflinching surface won the war instantly and sent her scattering into a million pieces like she had been made of porcelain. The rock didn’t care. It wasn’t personal. It was simply physics.
She was impermanent.
It was immortal.
She was small.
It was big.
Physics.
She lay at the bottom, shattered. It was such a visceral sensation that it transcended pain. Pain would require having enough of a body left to feel and process it. She was broken.
And she wasn’t alone.
She felt a presence there around her—beneath her—everywhere in the air. Pressing close and skittering over her tortured flesh like spiders. If she could have done anything at all, she would have screamed at the sensation of a thousand little legs running all over her.
But as it was, she could do nothing but experience it.
She was broken. It had broken her. But now, it was rebuilding her.
She belonged to it now. Didn’t she?
The sensation wasn’t just on her skin—it was inside her. Crawling inside her veins, her bones, her marrow, and everywhere it could possibly reach. She would have cried if she could.
But it wasn’t unkind. It wasn’t cruel. There was no goading laughter in the void, no sinister smile. No hint of the malice she saw in Simon’s dark smirk. Nor was it kind or gentle. It simply was.
It was the rock beneath her. It was the darkness around her. It was a force of nature, and she belonged to it.
It wasn’t just changing her. It was consuming her. She could feel herself becoming part of the stone at her back. Together, and yet unique. She had a chance to escape this fate. She could have destroyed all those she now sensed beside her in the rockwork. She could have torn down the walls and sent them skittering into oblivion.
But all hope of ever being free was gone now, dashed into a billion molecules as she had been when she hit the bottom of the well. The time for screaming, for pleading, was over. There was no emerging from the rock.
She was part of it, a thread in a tapestry. If she tried to pull herself free, she’d become meaningless and destroy the whole of the image in the process. She was useless as a thread—but woven into the fabric, she could see herself within it.
She could only hear one word in her mind through all the silence and sensation.
Family.
She woke up with a start, thrashing and kicking at the spiders she could still feel on the remnants of her skin. But they weren’t there, and she wasn’t some mutilated corpse lying at the bottom of a deep, dark cave. She was in bed.
Her bed.
She could admit that was what it was now. This was her bed. This was her boxcar. This was her life.
This was her home.
She was the Contortionist, and she was part of Harrow Faire.
With a long sigh, she stretched out on top of the covers. She hadn’t even had the emotional strength to crawl under them last night. She was still in yesterday’s clothes. Her shoes were off. Simon had seen to that much.
What an odd man. He was cruel and caring, sweet and sadistic, gentle and harsh, and he managed it all in the same breath. And if he had insisted on curling up in bed at her side, she would have welcomed the comfort of his arms.
I have problems. A lot of goddamn problems. She needed a shower. She needed to change and to put on some makeup and feel like she was a functional human being. If she even was still human. She wasn’t quite sure.
Somebody should write a manual.
The bed was surrounded by walls on all sides that touched the king-size mattress. Three sides were windows, and the fourth had a door in the center that could slide out to partition the bed away from the rest of the boxcar. It left a portion of wall on either side which had a few little shelves that functioned like nightstands. An old-school circular clock, complete with its cartoonish bells on top, ticked away from where it sat on one of the shelves. The clock said it was ten.