Page 5 of All That Has Flown Beyond
This was his pack, his land. He was an Amanati. This is where he belonged. To these people, to this earth.
There was something pulling at his ribs. At his lungs, at his heart.
He was dying. There was no breath left inside.
“Please. Wait, please.”
He was being emptied of something. Mehdi’s voice was a claw in his chest, emptying him out.
“Please,please.”
This was all he had. This was all he was.
Kaiyo clutched at his chest. There were tears on his cheeks. The world was disappearing from around him. He was dying with it.
Kaiyo hunched forward. The sudden pain went beyond the physical. It was the desperation of the lost, the loneliness of a dark night, the helplessness of the untethered. It was the slow draining away of hope.
“Stop. Stop, stop, stop,” Kaiyo choked out.
Please, he said, or thought, or felt, clawing at his shirt. He couldn’t be left alone, not again.
He was dying. God, he was dying.
And then it stopped. It was as if something caved in. A final tug, and Kaiyo was empty. He gasped, but the breath did nothing to fill the sudden hollowness.
“Oh God. Oh God.” Kaiyo was trembling. Sweat trickled down the side of his face.
There was nothing inside. There was nothing, nothing, nothing.
He couldn’t feel the Ousía of the pack. Of the land. For the first time in his life, he was completely alone inside.
He looked up. The world was distorted for a moment before his tears fell. On the other side of them were the ashen faces of his pack. No, no, not his pack. Not anymore.
“Please. Please,” he said.
The nothingness expanded into darkness.
**********
The pack funeral had taken place on a sunny Tuesday. It had been spring. Everything flourished around them as they lay dead inside.
Kaiyo remembered accompanying his mom to the grocery store to get some last-minute provisions for the wake. He had walked through the anaesthetic fog seeping out of him, following his mother’s shadow.
Inside the shop, the world was oblivious. There was the beeping of scanned items. Two small girls fought over which cereal to pick. A man looked harried, pushing a large cart. It was like seeing right through the gossamer veil and into another dimension.
These people didn’t know. The world had ended, and they just didn’t know.
It had been incomprehensible to Kaiyo. How were they still smiling? How could their faces still emote, their heads think, their limbs coordinate into movement?
How was Kaiyo still moving with all that weight pressing him down?
They held the parting ritual in the forest. Grave upon grave upon fresh grave. The blue sky looked down into the rectangular holes. The darkness inside them, as his family’s bodies were lowered, was endless.
Kaiyo stood beside Ahmik, surrounded by members of visiting packs. Their allies, supposedly. They were strangers to Kaiyo. Almost everybody was a stranger now.
Kaiyo wanted to lace his fingers with Ahmik’s. To anchor himself in the storm. But they could show no sign of weakness. Ahmik stared ahead, looking at the thin caskets which would disintegrate so the bodies inside could join the earth they had belonged to in life.
Death was strange in its endlessness.
