His Voice Ended
Emotions of dread stormed through the old man’s brain as a shrill voice screamed. The screams echoed in the cold room with draped windows, and a foul, ignoble atmosphere. Haunting visions of something evil streamed through the corridors of an old man’s fearful mind as the sinking moon flowed into the darkness of the unforgiving night. To escape the malevolent voice, the old man waded into the icy ocean in his mind overflowing with fear. He strived to extinguish the absurdity of the haunting voices in his brain by slashing at the vein in his neck. The hot blood soothed his fears, and as it drained out of his body and then, his voice ended.
Ghosts Are Everywhere
An icy wind whistled across graves in the abandoned weed-filled graveyard as ghosts weaved in and out of tombstones searching for themselves. They floated restlessly in shadowy places, places to satisfy their need to know that something existed before death. Even though the ghosts only whispered, the shiver heard them. Its red eyes shown like candles glowing through broken windows. The ghosts lived where the needles of lifelessness sang into bones and told dark stories from sad, twisted mouths, agape with grief. They at one time sat like wisps of mist on wooden benches in bus stations going to places called Nowhere. Their voices echoed an emptiness as they held on to the wounds of dying inflicted by philosophers and poets who scratched symbols of death on their future tombstones. After the night hours had fallen into icy waves of misfortunes, the moral imperative of death arrived and the ghosts draped in ebony spiderwebs, with moans turning to shrieks, voiced the reality of every human’s fear, the creeping death, which will entomb everyone. Have you heard them?
Tortured Memories
The old, homeless woman waited for the exact moment in the grayness of ebony-tarnished hours to release her pain and find reality, which had gone missing in the scarlet haze of yesterday’s hopelessness. Her unleashed fears, begging for relief, floated in the enigma of death; Time faded, and memories passed into the unknown. Silence screamed inside emptiness as her emotions crawled across through long-submerged memories of need, fear, and dread. Dark-clad ghosts hid behind broken promises, their breath was cold, and worn, their voices causing her to scream in agony as a river of blood filled with the coarse reality of death covered her mind. The night’s hours bled into darkness as she attempted to escape from her fears to a safe place called Somewhere. But she now knew that such a place could never be reached, and she could never escape her tortured world until she died.
Then There Was Only Silence
In the ebony hours in an abandoned cemetery, a strange voice stirred in the mind of a fearful man. It was like a whisper echoing through cobwebs. Creatures of the night screeched and moaned, and the humming of mosquitos crammed the noxious atmosphere with the scent of blood. Night birds became silent as the man stumbled toward a broken tombstone etched in grief. His mind was sated with foreboding, and he begged for the termination of his dark, painful, and eerie memories. In the foggy hours covered in darkness, he searched through bones and ashes and sobbed with tears filled with horror. He wandered through dark earthen paths in the cemetery, following a strange whispering voice in his mind. His feelings of dread and apprehension flowed as deep as layers of briny water in the ocean deep, and his mind struggled to the outer edge of sanity. The steady monotonous drone of autos traveling on a lonely road miles away bled into the muted warbling of a loon screeching about terrible memories that overflowed like oozing blood from the top of gravestones, leaving them tinted in scarlet. Then, a voice that caresses death screeched into the coldness of the empty night. Hidden memories were uncovered and illuminated in the old man’s terrified mind by a voice of profound evil. It painted the man’s mind with blood-colored misgivings that thirsted for forgiveness. Dry mouths of charred stone idols wailed at the man, as haunting voices of the dead trod through his madness. The dead cackled. His pleas for mercy imploded inside his tortured brain, and a fiend’s voice urged him to pull the trigger, to end his grief. It laughed as the man fired a bullet into his brain and then fell into an open grave above a tombstone with his name engraved on the face. Then there was only silence.
A Tombstone Etched in Blood
Night birds became silent as an old man crept toward old tombstones etched in eerie symbols. Listening to the haunting sound of a ghost train resonating in the gap between life and death, his mind sated with pathological fear, begged for the termination of the rotting darkness in his brain. And in the dense foggy night, he searched through bones and ashes, sobbing in fear from the strange screeching sounds of a demon. He retreated through dark paths in the graveyard, attempting to escape from the otherworldly reality piercing his sanity, which was struggling on the outer edge of nonexistence. Then the steady monotonous drone of cars, like giant metallic snails, coming and going on the highway miles away, bled into the muted voice of a witch screeching about visions of death that overflowed down from the top of gravestones. A night bird, with a voice that caressed terror, perched high on a broken limb in a tree reaching for sky, cackled as its scrabbled talons held onto the wounded ego that inhabited the man’s mind. Eerie voices of charred stone idols wailed at the man, and haunting voices of victims of the past trod through his madness. The unanswered pleas for a safe sanctuary echoed in his tortured brain, and lead to a massive aneurysm that caused his brain to implode. The chilling laughter of a sinister beast exec hoed in his brain, as he fell into an open grave hollow under a tombstone with his name etched in blood.
James G. Piatt is a twice Best of Net nominee and four-time Pushcart nominee. He has had five poetry books, The Silent Pond, Ancient Rhythms, LIGHT, Solace Between the Lines, and Serenity, over 1770 poems, five novels, and thirty-five short stories published in scores of national and international magazines, anthologies and books, He earned his doctorate from BYU, and his BS and MA from California State Polytechnic University, SLO.
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