I look out my window across to the setting sun

coming down over the pine forest, the weather grows cool.

Her love grew cold, faster than the movement of the sun.

I stand in dread that we may have created something

That will forever haunt me

An innocent born from two people who cannot get along.

A knock comes at my door,  

A terrible smell fills my lungs, and I gasp,  

There stands before me Danwood,

A man dead six days now. I saw him buried.

His face collapsed, his eyes gone, his skin purple-grey.

I, in terror, step back into the house

He shuffles in, gently, terrifyingly softly

He sits at the kitchen table

keeping those black sockets fixed on me, staring, endless doom in his vision.

He motions with a purple-black hand for me to sit with him.

“Do,” he says in a growl that sounds like it came from underground.

I sit, moving my chair back from the table, out of his reach.

I say nothing, I shiver and nod, as if all the world had collapsed.

“Your misery and suffering, pleasure and joy are nothing,” he says, “it all comes to none in the grave.”

“What are you?” I ask.

“I was Danwood, now I am a part of the universe” he growls.

“How are you here?”

“I am here to see you, remember we spoke two weeks ago? You were my guest, you said

The young seem younger now that I grow old, and we all agreed that youth is a blessing.

I am here to tell you that we are all for the grave.”

He said nothing more, his mouth fallen open like cargo unfastened.

He reached with his right hand, took his left hand, broke it from his arm and put it on the table.

Those eyes, those empty black holes, kept me fixed, his teeth so white in his brown jaw.

‘Why such horror?” I screamed.

“I asked myself the same when I regained life,” he said, “the blackness was so soothing, so tranquil.

All forgotten, all silent, and now I again feel, I again see.”

With a low moan, he stood and shuffled again from the room,

he went into the blackening night, leaving me at the table, his left hand sitting where he left it.