The Longing

An outsider in a world with no place for him. No kin, no blood to call his own. His wife was gone, cold in the ground, and his son absent on purpose, leaving him hollow.

Old now, his bones creaked with the weight of years, and he wondered how to slip free of it all.

“How do you die when the heart keeps beating stubbornly against the ribs?” he thought.

A man’s got no people, no reason to stay. He’s just a shell waiting to crack. Suicide was a coward’s game, too quick, too sharp. Starvation gnawed slowly, and it hurt, and he’d had enough of hurt.

So he turned inward, willing the spark to fade, to let the dark take him quiet. For weeks and months, he hunted for a way out.

Something clean, something soft, he told himself, and I’m tired of its company. He found nothing to ease him.

The French had a name for it—l’appel du vide, the call of the void. It was a pull to step off the edge.

The Native Americans spoke of Ghost Sickness, a wasting away when the spirit broke.

“That’s me,” he thought, “broken, wasting.”

But still, no answer came.

Then, on the flickering screen of his phone, a stranger’s words caught him. Sencide.

An old rite, elders stepping aside for the young, for the tribe. A name, he thought, for this ache I carry.

Maybe.

And it steadied him, like a hand on his shoulder. Others felt it, too.

“I ain’t alone in this,” he thought.

The weight lifted, just a hair, but enough. The man woke with a flicker of something—life, maybe—and stepped outside.

The lawn stretched wild, a tangle of neglect. The man gripped the mower, its rumble a pulse in his hands, and cut through the mess.

Sweat stung his eyes, but he kept on, alive in the motion. Neighbors peered from their windows, shadows behind glass, watching him move like he hadn’t in years.

They see me now, he thought, not just a ghost in a house. The mower growled, and he felt the sun sharp on his neck. Then came the roar of a car–wild, tearing down the street.

Tires screamed, the curb buckled, and it leaped toward him. No time to run, no time to think.

It struck, and he was gone, a crumpled heap in the grass. The neighbors stood still, witnesses to the end of a man who’d found a name for his pain, only to lose it in a breath.

From the car poured his son–he had come home after all.