One Bard to Another

Read time: 1 min.

Continuing, years later, with the speaker from “The Last Living Ghost on the River.”

The locket slips off my neck. I try to catch it, stagger, fall into an eagerly waiting hole.

I cough a single blooddrop as the locket snaps open. Manuscripts fly from its confines to flutter around me. I recognize the dust jackets I dusted, the wounds I bandaged. Some bear my handwriting, others the fingerprints of the hands that handed them to me.

No hand waits for them now. I watch them fall, unable to catch them. With each drop a bit of me fades, till I’m Nothing but two eyes and a smile.

As the eyes fade, just before the vision goes, I notice your feet. You’re a curious stranger wearing the clothes of a future I won’t see. All that I recognize is that pen in the hand you use to pick up the locket.

I whisper, “Don’t nobody want an old doodad like this.”

“I do,” you say.

My mouth smiles as it leaves. “I know you do, Girl.”

The manuscripts fly back to the locket as the chain clasps itself to your neck. Soon you’ll hear the knock from inside.

I hope you’ll open the locket wider than I did.