Aunt Ada's Recurrent Dream

He sat down beside me, uninvited, and said, "Things sure change around here, don't they?" Not in the mood for conversation, I mumbled, "Around here, change is the very definition of life." I looked at him out of the corner of my eye as he studied me out of the corner of his. I hoped the well-rehearsed hostility in my voice would make him move on. Instead he just made himself more comfortable.

And so we sat side by side, silently watching the great yearly migration of the ghosts. They were a ceaseless stream of the small and great, the historical and the forgotten: a vast herd relentlessly marching from dusk to dawn. Yet, being ghosts, they marched in utter silence, and all their countless steps did not bend a single blade of grass or raise a single dust mote.

"A pretty sight," he said. "This your first time seeing this?"

"No, I've observed them many times before."

"Oh? So where do they start and where do they end?"

I shrugged. "Can't say. I've yet to see the beginning or the end of the migration. Even though I try, I only ever see one phase, this one phase, of their journey. I always only see the middle."

We fell back into silence and watched the dead wandering by as the rising moon shone through them as if they were glass.

"So," he asked, "do you think they know where they're going? Like, are they migrating butterflies or stampeding cattle?"

I shrugged again. "Not my place to say. Maybe it's up to each individual ghost to decide."

"'Individual'? Hmm! It's hard to see them that way, isn't it? At least here and now. They're so transparent that all their neighbors' features mingle with their own. It makes it hard for someone like me to differentiate. To me, it's like they're some single endless, writhing creature always in flux, always changing. It's sort of like they're an infinite concatenation of innumerable imprecise parts that form an unformed whole, if you know what I mean."

"Maybe to you, maybe here and now. It's like I said though: it's not really my place to say. Still, I like to think there is a definite destination to their migration, and that at the end of it they will be individuals, distinct individuals formed by the paths they chose on their journey." I yawned. "But then again, maybe, or maybe not. Really, who am I to say?"

He shot me a severe glance out of the corner of his eye, but then broke into a smile. "Well," he said in a cheerful tone, "maybe someday you'll know, or maybe you won't. Maybe that's your path." He then stood up, nodded to me, and joined the migration. I watched him for a while until he dissolved, losing his identity in the throng. Then I laid back on the cool, wet grass and watched the moon slowly rise higher and higher in the sky.