Weekly Writing – December 2 2023

The last and only thing she had asked was for him to plant the seed over her grave. Instead, he had tucked it in his pocket and taken the bus, ticket already booked before she’d breathed her last request, halfway across the country.
To a place where the soil was already frozen for the season. The seed rode warm against his thigh, unlike any he’d ever seen before – a black, glossy teardrop as large as the end of his thumb, heavier than a stone that size would have been and hot as if it were the one warming him, not the other way around.
It was the only thing she’d left him. She had known he was leaving – had she really expected him to bury the only thing he had to remember her by in a grave he would never visit?
If ghosts were as real as she had always believed, then, wherever she was, she would have to understand. If he’d been right in all their late-night debates and life ended, everything ended, along with the body, then it wasn’t like she was anywhere to care.
He kept his hand in his pocket for most of the long miles, watching the landscape wear thin over an earlier and earlier winter. Telling himself the throb of heat against his palm was his heartbeat against the seed and not anything like the reverse.