Possession

Who is to decide?

Whether we leave the body at the blow of a candle on a cake or the press of a button in a hospital bed, in a blink or a confession…
Whether or not we were ever truly here…
Whether it is the second life, the last, or ever only the same on and on…

                        Rattling like a cage.
            His soul flew through a torrent of memories, each vibrating and repeating over itself. A look back and there was Deia, his wife, images of her walking towards him on the beach overlapping endlessly. To reach would be to disturb. She’s laughing at him, the way he’s afraid of entering the cold water. “Don’t worry, we’ll go together…” Bumps of fear rise to the skin’s surface. She reaches out. He cannot reach back.

            Ripping away, turning with violence to face another. Flashes of Mena and Violet running from him around the house. He’s a monster, chasing after his daughters with craggly fingers that seek their prey! But they keep running. Images, flickering and dancing and layering, moving faster than him. “Catch us! You have to catch us!” He would like to hold them again. Forever. Keep them small, keep them safe. But they are now too far ahead to keep up with. Mena suddenly stands still at the end of the chase, looking back at him. Did she always know he would fail her? He’s pushed away with the light close of her eyes. His question fades unanswered.

            He was once the little one. The baby, the boy, tiny on his fathers neck. “Can you see it from here?” His hands are full of Daddy’s hair. Ahead is the sun, setting. His mother reaches up to hold his hand. “Look, look, Bren! Look at them soar!” He tries to call her name, but he babbles softly. The night is warm. So warm. Fireworks break out over distant waves like stars newly born. His eyes are blinded, bleached by the incoming streams of light. They whiz by so bright that his parents are but silhouettes casting shadows on the sand. Their penumbras stretch into his vision until he’s stretched again himself towards that next place.

            Mommy and Violet and Eric and Deia and Daddy and…
            Mena. Alone in a dim place. She’s not raining through his memories. The glimpses of earlier become vision. In a black dress, this is her — older and more pale than when he last saw her. His vision presses against the moment for clarity. On a windowsill she’s sitting and smoking. It is night outside. The sky is rid of stars. “I don’t know why you left me.” She looks down to the open air. He could perceive the years of pain in her hair. “ You told me you’d find me in another life, that you’d hold me again like always.” Her voice faltered. “That’s what you said in your final moments. But, you’ve lied before, right? Since I was young.” The cigarette sunk down with a flick.
            “What about this was not enough for you? What did you know,” she looked back at him, in the emptiness of the same room, “that I do not?” Her eyes were dry and glassy. Exhausted from tears. A million thoughts surrounded her. They mean to confuse her and show her the end of the chase. “I hope you told me the truth then. I wish you did.” It’s like that flickering memory of her where he can’t keep up. It plays before him. When she turns away from him to view the black beyond the window, he disappears as she takes fli—

            Spun like a threat, splitting apart at the threads, submitting to the light just before the dark, every memory of Brennan's scratches against the walls of these depths. Nothing, nothing clings onto him except the branding guilt of seeing his daughter in final moments of her own.

            He feels the complete break. Then, the limitless black absorbs him.

            The black flows down a soft stranger’s nose. It surrounds and coats the eyelids with grace. Ever gently, the staining smothers his lips.

            There are rustling leaves. Fires. Smoke in heavy lungs. Bodies shiver out sweet songs of ecstasy. Animals in the darkness look on with crescent iris eyes, big as jewels. Against them all, the outline of a face in the ground being bathed by the essences of darkness. Wind howls along the rhythm of the sailing bodies, stretching their arms as wings, skins of reef creatures sticking to sweated flesh.

            A shape rises from the dirt. Gasping. Roaring. Claws aiming for the spiraled heavens above. Blood. Blood! Painting his bare ribs. Younglings watch on from the cooked branches in the canopy. They are cheering. Chanting. Crying out. They begin the throwing of the tears as he falls face-first into a crawl.

            “Rihsan!”
            His eardrums are buried in soil, rumbling with every crash of vocal power. On his surface splash powders and fluids and jewelry.

            “Rihsan!”
            The waves of feet go around his struggling figure. They are hitting the ground so hard as to beat it to a drum. Fire blazes above, spat from a mouth and singing the hairs on his head.

            “Rihsan!”
            His eyes of heavy weight opened to see hundreds of people around. They stand parallel to the trunks of the endless jungle, arching and posing naked in front of the ritual. Silently, inaudibly, many open their mouths and whisper out at him.

            “Outsider.” He turns over on his elbows to see a demon made of antlers and the heads of birds. Dozens of eyes and wings stare longingly at the boy. They urge him. “Rise…Outsider.”

            His head splits down the middle to his chin. The wings, the arms gilded by them, raise up the pain in the boy.

            “Rihsan, you will be whole!”
            Shivering amidst the embers, the boy named Rihsan rises from the ground as commanded.

            “Rihsan.” The boy’s face stares expressionless into the void that is the demon’s mask. On the cheeks of the villagers, many praying in various tongues, is cradled the shape of Rihsan.
            “Are you with us?”

            Bringing his fingers down from the top of his head and tearing with nails down to the rest of his body, Rihsan cries into the stars in deathly pain. Blood of his own soaks the weathered skin. Tears blend with the black. A soul takes control, killing the one before it.

            Moans of satisfaction echo at the cosmos.

            The people around him put out the fires.

            Rihsan passes into a most dreamless night.

***

            What the day brought was a fever, endless and hippodromic. Clashing between the seams of the young puppet’s flesh, boiling packs of blood met with a native nervous system. Brennan was invading another body with his soul and its construction. The boy’s body had seizures of the tormenting type. It was a wonder, a true wonder, from the perspective of the warlock of the village, that a boy of ten years could make it through more than five hours of sweat and wrath.
             When five turned to ten, and ten to twenty, the witches and warlocks of neighboring villages began to take extreme interest. And the day brought dreams. Come the night of the first day, the boy was the last candidate to survive an ancestral summon. Or, so they spoke as he listened in his nightmare state, their statements of apprehension drowning him in fear.

            Dreams between the clashes of genetic material, dreams between the deepened folds of time and space. The weight of them bent reality towards a will of dark power. It is the covert cabal, the star chamber, the council of the monsters of all worlds-under. Dreams and their parasitic hold on the human existence, they exerted a power over the sweat-bathed boy as much as on any other soul before. Dreams are what drove the last of the human resistance to attempt summoning in the first place.

            Not yet Rihsan — but further slipping from Brennan — the wandering soul of that midnight ritual let the fever dream carry him further and further. In the boy’s mind lay the universe within all humanity, still pristine, still connected to the whole in its youth. It took form as a cove, a bay inundated with the cosmic essence of his species’s feelings. He, the soul, dipped the tip of his finger at the sound of ringing bells into a sea of stars. They felt warm but dim in an unfathomable sensation. The voices of all he left behind can could heard from this far out in the beyond. They gasped before every sob. They inhaled before bouts of laughter. They held their breath in death.
            Like a wind sucking in, commanding in the shape of chimes and bells, each voice stirred the stars to coalesce.

            Into the sea fell the entire finger, or to the finger rose the sea. Stars kited around the ridges of the surface. They hugged this part of a soul because of a familiarity. And so too did the sea, retreating from the walls of this captivating realm.

            And it cloaked him gradually in flashing pearls. Frequencies that communicated the beauty of life itself, of feeling and losing generation after generation, in a constant cycle of human existence in this expansive dimension. They did communicate to him the significance of the moment.

            In a glimmer at the tip of his palm could be felt the presence of ancestors long gone from here. They made themselves known, as if alien to the soul, with an introduction in human vocals. Then came the words to guide the soul to their thoughts. Stunning to behold, yes. Stunning. Secrets of the human sphere. As if reading from history, or from the privacy of individual minds from all the eras the species had the pleasure of existing, the ancestors flashed through this tiny soul the dreams of many more people than he could ever hope to enjoy becoming. Mistakes. Loves. Self-doubts. Tears, tears in floods between every life. And the secret. Over and over, that secret of humanity shining past all things known to humankind.

            The secret kept him alive.

            The foam coats the edges of his persona. Rising from the dark liquid is a soul gilded in stars, blanketed in fair light. Draped in darkness, dream becoming, Rihsan berthed anew from the great deposit of human energy as a whole. The body of the boy finally surrendered to the entity of ancestral origin. Among constellations could be drawn the lovers of the past. Family, children, friends, and enemies all. Stuck as stars, they held on to his soul as attachments. And they tore at him. Exploding, raging, these familiar sounds and chimes pulled Rihsan at his limits.

            Then they let him go softly. As if holding him down with a baby’s grip on a thumb, they let him journey on.

***

            Smoke and leaves. Heavy air. This must be a dream, or so Rihsan perceived. This next experience could be like all other things since his death. The balance of his eardrums made him feel the rock of a vessel at sea. There was an unavoidable swinging in his limbs that did not seem to pass in reality. There must be a disconnect of some sort, the kind that only occurs in real life.

            In bed.

            He could feel eyes on him. With a bit of fear, and a bit of longing for the next world, he opened his swollen pair in a claim for awareness. Rihsan could see it was the middle of the night from between stuck eyelashes. The way they twisted and bent must have reflected the past shedding of tears while he was sleeping. But he had no time to discern his condition. Ahead of him lay the shape of a woman. A small fire blew in front of her. It was light, but he could hear her lips moving. Or maybe the embers were making human noises.

            There was a prayer, nevertheless. A prayer of longing in the night. Whoever was in front of him, she was crying in the present. The boy took his time to eye her and the rest of the room they shared. Dead stems, dead plants were suspended from what seemed to be a wooden ceiling of some kind. It was makeshift, and it looked temporary. In the corners of his mind, the boy remembered his past life and the stories archaeologists would piece together about human ancestors.
             At some time, there was an age before buildings, before streets, and before the collection of people. In that stretch, human culture was centered around small settlements or nomadic movement. Houses like these, like the one in which he found himself, were reserved for the peasantry working the lands of a higher lord. Various meats and root vegetables hung from the ceiling too. On the ground lay leaves and bleached reeds. It was all piecing together in Rihsan’s mind that he might have been transmitted to the past.

              She turned to him in a cut of the dark, making him close his eyes. He pretended to sleep and, in playing pretend, felt the warm gaze lull him into the mortal night.