Death Most Tragic

He found her lying next to a freshly filled grave. Kneeling, forehead pressed to the earth wet with her tears of soul wrenching grief, she kept one hand on the headstone always.

“What are you doing here Jen?”

“He’s afraid of the dark. He hates being outside after sunset.”

That’s when he noticed what she held in her other hand. A flashlight, the high powered kind that could bring a ship home to harbor on a stormy night.

“Oh honey. He doesn’t need a light where he is. He’s the one shining it for us now.”

The tears came fast and heavy then, because it was true. Their baby was gone to a better place, and all it took was to hear him say it for her to lose it completely.

“Then why can’t I see it?”

She sobbed, every inch the broken soul. A mother mourning her lost child. The tiny part of her that died three days earlier engulfing her suddenly and more effectively than any black hole.

Reviews

[Seren]

Oh wow!

When I started reading, the genre-geek in me was expecting some kind of zombie/vampire, rise from the crypt to kick whole short-blond-high-schooler arse, so this totally blind-sided me. Ouch.

[Also, I think this could be a good poem, if broken up with line-breaks. There's enough of a flow that I can hear it being, like, a performance piece or something].

This one just articulates one of those deepest-darkest type fears, don't it?

[selkietales]

The end surprised me and it's so sad! This is really good although I would change the first sentence. When you say, "He found her lying next to his freshly filled grave," it sounds like the 'he' and 'his' are the same person, not child and, I'm assuming, father.