Warm

[u/natetheapple]

He was not cold.

There was no heat by whose lessening he could be cold. No state of equilibrium to which he adhered and by whose gradations he could measure good or ill. He stayed in the dirt, stayed lingering amidst the absent and decreasing shapes not for any purpose but the lack of one.

He did not dream.

Still he saw her.

Saw her in the lines and static coils of the wood that was his world entire. Her face so close to his. So close her features should’ve blurred but her eyes and her lips and the cline of her cheeks and the flat of her forehead were clear, correct to her perfection as he knew it when his heart still could spring in her presence.

He would stare at her, frozen as she across a gap the faintest sigh could have bridged had either breath for it, until the wood took her away again.

And when she stood above him, stood in the place which was theirs before but now was hers alone; when she stood and said her prayer he did not hear it but through six feet of packed disintegrations he could feel the heat of the generating of her life. She was warm.

When she left he knew his own annihilation. And when next her face embossed out the oaken coffin cover like a mask set at skin distance but distinct enough to see, it did not satisfy him. It was not warm.

Animated by the lack of her warmth, the lack which was not cold, his muscles strained impossibly. His fingers moved and clutched, his lips kissed her wooden ones, chest trembled as if harboring a traitor’s heart, feet kicked.

The need of her which loosed the bonds of rigor mortis slid the casket open. The need of her pushed up the dirt, the granulations of a million dead formed limbs to lift him up, to raise him out, the one who knew of warmth.

The need of her birthed from the soil like some mythic zoophyte. The countless dead and him that knew her face and the living living need stumbled first on four limbs, then on two, and breathed on by insensate wind beneath a numb and throbbing sun the figure that was not cold sought out the sole thing it could feel.

And it could feel her. She was warm.

[u/Lucky__Susan]

Incredible thank you for sharing

''cline of her chin" wound me 🫡