“Kindred Spirits”

You should have seen me in my prime. I was the feather in the duke’s cap, his prized possession. The beau monde, princes, even foreign dignitaries flocked to me in grand carriages, eager to seek out my many hidden pleasures: the sumptuous banquets, the illustrious balls, the secret trysts, the endless pleasure seeking.

Ah, those were the days.

Now look at me. The Odd Fellows Home for Orphans, Indigent, and Aged. A setting for a horror film if I’ve ever seen one. Mewling infants cry for parents they’ll never have. The older ones are no better, shuffling along my hallways, eyes vacant as if focused on days gone by. All reeking of poverty and loss, nothing like the blithe beauties and dashing rogues of yesteryear.

Even my magnificent fountain, once the welcoming centerpiece of my masterful estate, lies dormant, covered in hideous netting in order to keep these idiots out. “For their own protection,” I hear.

How did it come to this? I am a shell of my former self. An eyesore, some say. A visual reminder of all that society wants to ignore, to obscure, to forget.

My cement eye sees the fear in their faces as they are led through my doors, doors that used to signify One Had Arrived. Doors that now open only to lost opportunities, lost selves, lost lives.

I listen to the young girl whispering confidences to me from her bed, telling of tragedies I can only imagine. I smell the fear on the sick and the dying, who know they have already come to their final resting place. I feel the pain of those abandoned, clinging to the meager comforts I offer because I am all they have in the world.

Now they are all that I have.

We are the things that nobody wants.

Perhaps these are my glory days after all.

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Let me know what you think of my entry in this week’s Flash Friday Fiction contest! And come join the fun – it’s so fascinating to read everyone’s entries and see how varied the stories are based upon the same visual prompt.

Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust.

The preacher had spoken those words at grandma’s funeral. He’d liked it at the time, the image of being nothing. No more mama crying as she darned the same pair of socks for the tenth time. No more brother stealing his bread, the only food they had all day besides the ever-present pot of onion soup. Onion water, really. No more da sleeping off the moonshine he distilled himself. “Keeps me sane,” his da had claimed. “Man can’t stay sane with no work and all you yappin’ kids.” Bruises on his mama’s arms and the welts on his own back proved otherwise. There was no sanity here.

When the cloud had appeared on the horizon, he’d fantasized it would whisk him off to a new life, like Dorothy in that wizard story. It hadn’t, of course. The dust had settled. Life had gone painfully on. Escape hadn’t come until his 18th birthday, and it’d come in the form of Uncle Sam, not some little old man behind a curtain. War was hell, they said, but he’d thought any place was better than Texas.

He watched the skeletons shuffling by him. Empty eyes. Walking zombies. He looked at the metal sign hanging over his head. “Arbeit Macht Frei,” it said. “Work will make you free.”

His captain pulled him over to a small building. “Gaskammer” read the placard. “Gas chamber”. “Look,” said the captain, chewing on his cigarette. “Claw marks where they tried to get out.”

He ran back outside and vomited.

There was no freedom here.

He watched a young boy with a hollowed-out belly holding hands with his emaciated mother. Pain echoed in every step she took, but a fierce smile broke out over her face as they walked through the barbed wired front gate. She looked to the sky and blew a kiss from her hand to the heavens.

He knew now that he’d known nothing of starvation, nothing of suffering.

Clicking his boots together, he chanted, “There’s no place like home. There’s no place like home. There’s no place like home.”

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