The Haunted Traveler Vol. 2 Issue 1

after.
I think about death because every family member and friend
I’ve ever known is dead.
I think about death because I saw both my parents shot to death
by soldiers on our front doorstep moments before my brothers and sisters
were hunted down and killed by savage slices received from a blade
across their throats.
I think about death because the first time in my life that I was
confronted with it, when all I had to do was come out from under the
floorboards and die alongside my brethren, I remained hidden below.
I think about death as I toss another body in the hole.
The hole is where I hid as a scared six-year old child.
The hole is the one place where death was not able to grasp and
clutch me to its mysterious bosom.
The hole is where I make sure, for it is my life’s duty, that what
goes in to be buried truly is dead.
I think about death because the crow is black and the raven
hunts at night and the eagles have talons that can easily crunch the bones
of even the heaviest corpses I deal with.
I think about death because the world is a lonely place for a man
who can not sleep at night due to traumatically induced insomnia, and
so goes out into the graveyard guided only by the light of the moon, or
sometimes just the stars, or, if cloudy, with a flashlight in tow, and digs
graves for dead people.
I think about death a lot. For fifty-nine years I have considered
the subject in earnest. The first six, before the murder of my family, are
not spared in the calculations, for I was taught from my first days in the
crib about those in the world who hated us and wanted us dead simply for
who we were.
Dead? What does this word mean, I wondered at such a tender
age. Being the youngest child to parents that had raised five others
before I was even born meant that I received the gathered wisdom and
instruction they had accumulated about the awful things done to them
and my older siblings, and how those people in the world who hated us
would not spare me the rod, either.
I think about death because, years later, at fifteen, after escaping
my hometown, traveling through the country with hair and facial
disguises, upon reaching a recruiting station, I enlisted in the armed services.
I signed up to kill. I signed up to deliver death. I joined the very
people and forces that I’d been taught hated my kind. I fought alongside
them and murdered anyone that the general, sergeant, or high commander
ordered me to.
The same type of bullets that went into the brains of my parents
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