The Cliff

As ironic as it may be, Macie's funeral was the first place that Death did not stalk me. Not a second of a day has passed without the ghostly presence of the reaper close behind me or sometimes, even, within my line of sight. I am not a spiritual or superstitious man. I know these are visions - conjurations of my twisted conscience and the embodiment of the obsession with the afterlife my life has so revolved around since Macie was shot - but I've come to accept Death as my permanent companion. He is to me what an imaginary friend is to a child, the difference being that my friend does naught but silently wait. For what? I do not know. But what I do know, is that for the first time in weeks, I could not feel his chilling, ever-present breath down the back of my neck.

Now, it's awfully strange to say so, but... Her funeral felt like home. That isn't to say that it did not hurt, but that said pain was, at least, comfortable and familiar. Now, I don't intend to claim that the circumstances of my grief were something I'd experienced before. However, in the spirit of seeing the ultimate half-fullness of my life's glass in that moment, I determined within myself that I was, if nothing, comfortable where I was.

As cousins of cousins and uncle's aunts and great great great great great grandmothers made their way up to her coffin, I came to be intensely aware of just how great the distance was between I and them. I was the lonesome, deadbeat father of a corpse, and they were the grieving family of a victim of neglect. Not a single glance between us managed to slip past the wall of ice that so subtly, slowly erected itself around me. Again, though, this was not a foreign sensation. I've been here before. I've always been here.

Carrying on my back the weight of my tiny, isolated pocket dimension to which I'd seemingly been exiled, I went to see for myself the fruit of my failures in the flesh - the cold, empty flesh.

They say that the dead look peaceful - blissful, even. Thus, imagine my confusion and disappointment when I came to find that peace missing in my daughter's dead, empty, unforgiving eyes. I expected to feel the pain of my loss, but that agony was made pitifully dull by the tolling of a bell that only I could hear from deep within my chest - the same ominous din that has haunted me since the day Macie was killed.

I drifted away, shaking and holding my head. I do not belong here. I should be anywhere but here...

As inconspicuously as possible, I slipped out of the procession, head hung low, and made for my car and climbed inside. Turning the keys in the ignition and making a quick glance up at the rear view mirror, I saw him seated there behind, patiently waiting.

I really shouldn't be surprised.

They're visions. Ignore them. Stupid, stupid hallucinations.

I opened the windows and blasted the radio as loud as it would go as I pulled out into the nearest freeway back home. Death did not stir; he only sat and waited, and waited, and waited.

What is he waiting for?

I couldn't keep myself from glancing back at him, and managed to take a wrong turn off the freeway.

"Damn it!" I shouted, slamming my hand against the wheel. I drove until I could pull over. It was something straight out of a movie. You've seen it before, I'm sure: the picturesque cliff by the sea where there's a perfect view of the evening's first blood, and the every gasping, lunging ocean's breath comes, shoulders braced, crashing up against the well-weathered limestone. Pulling off into a clearing, where the trees hung like weeping widows, crying eyes veiled by their rivers of hair, I whipped around in my seat.

"What the fuck do you want from me?!"

The apparition was not seated behind me anymore. In fact, craning my neck out the window, I couldn't find so much as a trace of his presence. And to be honest, it was infuriating.