Flowing tears of above and below

The ghost watches as the rain falls about it. Watches with sadness in its heart. It drifts above the earth, caught in the ethereal winds, adrift, loose and free. It thinks in great sweeps of meaning, it is an oddity, a loop in the grand equations. It hangs as if lighter than air despite its heavy heart.

For it time slows. All the raindrops pass through it, random scatterings that pierce him like bullets. A single rain drop passes through its eye, time slows for it as it watches, fascinated as all the world is captured inside that raindrop, all magnified, all held within.

It is so fascinated that time almost stops. Time is more fluid for it anyway. Time is elastic, bending around it as it concentrates. Ghosts are the stuff of the universe, stretched out across onto another brane, an x dimensional object that lies an inch away from ours. It is the stuff of dreams, the stuff of hope, the stuff of death, the stuff of infinite possibilities that has all collapsed into one dark shadow in the end.

So the earth in the raindrop hangs there, like life in a teardrop.

The traffic runs below. The buildings reach up. The living cram the corners. Cables are tied around everything. Concrete stretches everywhere. The garish Technicolor scattering of colored cars are all in lines, like orderly cake topping. Lampposts thrust up. Giant screens flicker their garish adverts out onto the streets.

The the living march like zombies. Time stalks them like a shadow. Even as it is stopped for the the ghost, it is relative, and marches relentlessly amongst them. Then the drop falls away, and the ghost resumes its sad flight.

By Gregory Alter