only-blooms-at-night

I didn't know from the moment when carrion birds appeared, I'd endure as their shadows circled 'round me, always there among the entrails. Nothing officially confirmed, no out-of-body messages, even for those nonbelievers, till after the embrace of warm blood slipped away into slumber, and later, daylight terrors, with their unblinking glare of disenchanted nerve endings, like matchsticks that never burn out.

He was a translator and accomplished poet, a professor having been knighted by a king of Portugal, leaving two sons who survived him when he died... and he remembered none of it by then. Murmuring how "everything can be forgotten" when every memory had parted ways, except a few words marked as the poet's, in between long periods of bird calls as winds from beyond parted the branches of trees, the sentinels standing silent watch when the birds carried the poet away. And it came to me: the memories go on ahead, setting up camp for when it's time. Time to leave, filled with wanderlust. And a new journal.