He had been awake inside the coffin for some time. He tried to bend his legs but couldn’t. His arms were cramped and immobile, heavy as lead. And then, like vomit, an incorporeal thing spilled out of the casing, which he realized with horror was his soul. It had no age, no face, no body. It was a specter flying through hazy landscapes, like those vast marshlands shrouded in eternal mist. The morning air’s haze covered a sickly sun, which lingered on the nape of that world.
It drifted uncontrollably in random directions, searching for a Path. Along the way, it panicked, stopped, and heard voices calling. Like a thousand mouths of sighs wailing his name with lamentations: “Anelaos… Anelaos… come close to us… here is your road… come to the land of nonexistence to see the world that seeks you… the world you sought and imagined with fear…”
It shivered. If a soul could shiver. Its enormous eyes widened, unbelieving its own hearing. Then, colossal phantoms began to appear on the horizon, moving toward it like a vast cloud. Their forms filled it with horror. Clouds, clouds of ash and haze, an indeterminate mass of souls enlarging their substance in the eternal and uncreated world of nonexistence.
“Who are you that call me? Am I dreaming or in a nightmare?”
“Come with us, and we will show you your new world. Now that your body begins to dissolve down there on the earth—below or above, it matters not—you shall traverse the path of no return. But see there, is there no one you recognize?”
Then all the memories of his earthly life passed before the dead man’s eyes. He saw the women who had passed like stations through the fleeting course of life, like shadows drifting before him. For a moment, their faces turned and looked at him pleadingly, calling him near, but as he tried to touch them, they disintegrated like clouds of dust. He saw himself intoxicated with pain at times, with joy at others, and at others lost in the lukewarm soup of mediocrity.
A tear rolled from his wintery eyes, and the souls calling him lost their patience. “It is time to leave; we have a journey to complete again, until we reach Absolute Zero, the resolution of every illusion, our Lord, the Infinite.”
Then Anelaos ran with all the strength of his spectral form and rested in the cold of his grave. When dawn broke, his soul was once again inside his lifeless corpse, and though he felt worse than ever, he did not even make a call to offer an excuse. He rose from his damp bed, dressed in his black suit, put on the stiff pink tie, and went straight—without even his morning coffee, for it was half past eight and he was late—to the death office.
Another difficult day awaited him. Stacks of papers to process. But before diving into the world of documents, he took a deep breath and looked out the window. The fog covered everything, and no one could be seen on the opposite sidewalk. A perfect day to die, he thought. He smiled faintly and immediately vanished into the paperwork.
Constantinos N. Makris (b. 1982, Limassol, Cyprus) is a Cypriot writer and poet. He is the author of novels, poetry collections, and short story anthologies, including Extracts of Passion, Dominion of Networks, The Vampire’s Colony, Pentadromos, and the Cyprus Government Award-winning The Straw Killer and Other Stories. His work has appeared in literary journals and magazines in Europe and the United States. His latest poetry collection, Helleno-Roman Wrestling, was published in Athens.