Sweet Nightmares

Fall

In the end we all fall. We abandon friends and family, deserting them with dark and macabre thoughts. This plagues us with a period of grief, which ensues after any depressing occurrence, to every living being whether flora or fauna. Everything appears to darken and droop; like a tretchous nothingness, washing over an area, blanketing it. That's what I experienced, every time they moped around with the cognition of death encompassing and suffocating them until they implode and die. That's the curse they must suffer, knowledge of their own deaths.

I perceived what befell; our master, my master, impaled with the shattered remains of a rum bottle, gouging out his innards after blundering home sloshed, victim to an algific rock. Our young mistress anticipated his arrival, patiently awaiting for the master to return, the three of us perched by her feet anxiously circling between her, the door and the windows.

What wasn't predicted was the lack of his presence in the house early the next morning. We knew what this implied, it happened countless times in our previous reincarnations; the strong bond of loyalty and respect innately burning inside us. We were sent out with the eldest child of this generation to discover where our master was.

When our masters body was located a crippiling onslaught of entangled emotions  overcame us. We each let out a cry of anguish, one by one, weeping over another loss of life. He was far too young. It was too early for another to be stolen away from us, snatched from the world of the living.

Mistress heard our calls, she heard the music, a whisper on the wind symbolising what had happened. The five young of the family glumly dragged their feet towards the mangled corpse that was once their father, their mother trudged behind deprefed, the sled that will become master's hearse trailed limply behind her.

The bloodied bottle was extracted with care as to not create more lacerations on the mutlaited body. Everyone had frozen tears plastered to their rosy, frosty cheeks. Observing our fractured family distraughtly heaving their father in from the bitter wind was a heart wrenching scene. Watching children secure the corpse every minute to ensure there was no trade of master left.

We promised that nothing torturous like that incident would occur again. We couldn't behold young children draging limp, decaying parents home. We couldn't stand by and let another master be lost at a young age.

I remember watching mistress's frail figure hobble out the door, we knew it was the last time. We accompanied her like the loyal companions we were forever born to be. We watched her stagger and fall towards the bleak road as her final breath escaped her pale, cracked lips, once again calling out, our cry, our music.

Young master Calum shuffled out towards the music that follows the family, examining the mistress as we lay depressed beside her, our human friend,  crying. Calum walked towards the edge of the cliff, teetering back and forth, before he too collapsed and left us alone. We knew we couldn't escape, trapped eternally in an endless cycle of remembrance and death. We all wish we could forget, because in the end, we all fall.