There they go. Departing the kindling flames of finite, spiralling up the staircase of fortune and misfortune as they exit; exit our spiteful world forever. Their spirit wavers in the air as specks of dust and drab ash, that partially conceal the sun with its smokescreen of moments and memories contained in their past, their life, their all.

These dehydrated and dusty airs might be misleading in appearance to you, yet to myself they emerge; arresting themselves to me with the tempers and sensations they possess. Such bereavements pain me like a shrill and piercing thrust through my heart would. Souls are carved in segregation. The ashes of their existence now flirt with the spider web of question and answer to determine a course of destiny.

Will it be a bottomless pit of ever-scolding fire?
Will it be hell?

After being a cremator of human corpses for little more than a year, the whole diversity and complexity of these, almost concrete, emotions and feelings that provoke themselves into motion in front of my very eyes astounds me. Everyone tells me it’s not real; these hallucinations of every inch of deceased lives from their birth, their first steps, and even to their death, in all its gruesomeness. They are fake. No. They jump out, leap out, shine out of the dust and flame that forms a cloudy smog of doom over this little sub-city crematory; an incinerator of human fate.

They jump out at me.

These visions comprise of occurrences that I would never contemplate, some of the vilest, most treacherous and deformed deeds have been seen with these eyes; now scarred with the flawed marks of mankind. I cannot sleep, I cannot dream this night, nor any night I wish for that matter. Nightmares infiltrate any manner of slumber, lifting me from my bed so cosy and propelling me into a world of insecurity and secrecy. These people are now dust and flame. Dust and flame still unable to break out and crack through this terrible barrier of suffering I have subjected them to.

Insanity has an unyielding grasp over my mind and soul. Everywhere I go, every facet of my life that confronts me with its problematic ways, causes my emotions to hurl up another offering of confusion and disorientation. Such sensations burrow their way deeper and deeper into my existence with every visualisation that I behold.

I can’t hold anything back anymore. These twisted spiritual remains that I drew out of such corpses; people, that were fit for an afterlife have crept back to me, the provoker, in seek of retribution. They are pulling me under, feasting on my equally foul character.

Little Sue and Little Johnny gaze at me when I lie in my bed, ogling me with their sweet eyes and innocently shaped faces. They are the definition of future. How could I? How could I, or anyone, be so malicious, so deformed as to reduce such beautiful creations to a burning blaze of discrimination. Instantly transforming them into a sea of flame; dust and flame. Its like taking a prized piece of art work, worth vast magnitudes in both money and reputation, stripping it from its frame, its owner, and sealing its fate in a fire, that will incarcerated it for eternity. Never to be seen again.

Delicacy removed.

My conscience cannot withstand any more self-torture. I thought I was a good man, a man with morals, a man with dignity, a man who could stand up and voice out if something wasn’t right. An open man. I am nothing of the sort.

I’m a weak man, and I don’t just suspect such a notion.

This blade of justice tells the story; spilling my fiery blood over the ashes left dwelling on the floor in this crematory will be a welcome change, a fitting end.

Now I’ll be the one doing the haunting. Now I’ll be the one existing as dust and flame.

Dust and flame.