I heard the rooster crow from its perch on the fence outside. The morning was warm and the sun had just risen, dew covering the grass like the tears of the sky. I sat on the rafters of the farm house, well more like hovered over them, but that doesn't matter. Another day, just the same as yesterday, all alone wandering around this farm. I floated down toward the bottom of the barn strewn with old hay from who knows when.
I walked through the doorway of the barn while looking past the sunlight to the farm I had called home for thirty years. The barns red paint was old, peeling and so sunbleached that it appeared to be a rusty orange color. I walked through the tall grass towards the woods. How I missed the feeling of the grass brushing against my legs. The last time I was able to feel anything was about four-hundred years ago. I was going in the forest to repeat the tradition I had done everyday since the day I had died.
When I got to the edge of the forest I could see the raspberry bush, droplets of dew on the leaves. The last thing I had wanted in my life was the taste of a raspberry. I had died with my sister pressing the sweet fruit at my dry cracked lips. I walked up to the bush memories flowing through my head. I reached out to touch one and my hand passed straight through the soft red fruit. At least I had remembered them being soft, but I could be remembering wrong.
I plunged my hand deep into the raspberry bush trying to grab onto anything I could find, but it was no use. Even though I had been trying everyday for as long as I had been a ghost my hope had never faded. Just like the hope that I could one day move on and go to be reunited with the rest of my slaughtered village. I hated remembering that night, and how they had stormed in with guns demanding the land of our people and any girl eighteen winters old or older. That night was my eighteenth winter.
