My Heart-Shaped Soul

I can smell my soul - the one single, succinct thought that every last being now yearns to have.

A voice asking me if I was okay was far away.

I couldn’t conjure the breath to reply. I gagged, under the bodies. It was my own fault though. I went into the open grave, and the ones at the top – frying in the sunlight – started falling on me. At first I thought Riley and Sander were joking around, pushing them down, making my task even more challenging, but no, there were just more piling up by the minute, forcing the earlier ones into new territory, down into my position.

I knew I had to escape the drop zone, so I burrowed further, wherever there seemed like a suitable gap. I had to refind the scent, my scent. That’s why I had jumped straight in here in the first place. They all said when you catch the scent of your soul you’ll know right away, and not to hesitate to go straight after it.

I pushed through the warren of corpses, leading with my nose, being poked in the eye by dead fingers with dirty, unclipped nails, brushing away hair that hung like cobwebs, feeling the stickiness every time the parts of my exposed forearm rubbed against rotting skin, of which there was in abundance.

I was walking on padded bones, unsteady and spongy; a black carpet down here in the darkness, where light just about reached, but took longer to get to than anywhere else on this now desolate planet.

It was easier to not think of them as bodies, to forget they were once happy and healthy, with an ability to move of their own accord, rather than me momentarily impeding their gravity with my every surge forward.

Apart from being lifeless, they all had one other thing in common - their lockets. Around the neck of every greying, squashed-in body with the head still intact was a locket, a heart-shaped locket. Some were charred, or scratched, or both, but all remained fastened, for each could only be opened by its owner. Each gave off a scent that only the owner could detect, which came from the soul locked inside, the soul that had been securely stored prior to the disaster.

I remembered dying. It was just like how they prophesied, how they said it would all work out. The sky turned white, from a starry night to blinding brightness in less than the blink of an eye, and at that point I knew this was it, not exactly when they prophesied, but close enough.

I woke up facing the sun. It was impossible not to, considering how close it now was to the planet’s surface, and found myself sweating. A spirit with the ability to sweat, I’d have found that quite funny if I was able to, but I no longer had my soul, so could I even feel anything? Certainly not satisfied, never satisfied, until I’d located my locket, pried it open, and collected what was mine.

All those people who had refused to do it, who rolled their eyes and called it crazy. The amount of eternal life now lost. It didn’t bear thinking about, but I couldn’t feel sad, not until I had my soul back.

I caught the scent again, my scent. I can’t describe it. I’d only be able to if I had my soul. I knew I was getting closer.

I considered myself fortunate, having only been searching for two weeks. Riley told me he’d been with someone previously who had been searching for eight months. Eight months of this, in this heat, damn. But you couldn’t give up, you didn’t have a choice. The entire purpose of your existence was to now find your soul, to find your heart-shaped locket.

I stopped. The scent was overpowering, more on my right than my left, and sure enough there I was, my human shell, embedded at head-height in the bobbly, black side of this tunnel of death; eyes and mouth closed, like I had just nodded off. I didn’t look too disheveled, compared to some of the others at least, but what did that matter when you were dead?

I grabbed the sides of my lifeless head and wrestled it out from the surrounding torsos and limbs.

My neck began to emerge, my bare neck; I had the almost immediate realisation that there was no locket dangling down like on the hundreds of others that I had passed.

I continued pulling in a state of denial, in the absurd hope the locket was actually there and had just somehow slipped further down, but I couldn’t budge myself any further from my shoulders. Not that it mattered anymore; if the locket was there I would have it by now.

I let go of the head I once inhabited, which flopped backwards. I didn’t understand. The scent had been there, was still there, so powerful, so conclusive. I couldn’t feel disheartened because I didn’t have my soul.

My locket was lost, and that was all I was existing for. This wasn’t just bad luck, it was the worst luck, hindering… no, preventing my destiny being fulfilled.

How much of a fool would I look going back to Riley and Sander empty-handed? No, I wasn’t going back. I was going to wrench my decaying body out of that squalid corpse cocktail of a wall if it took me all day, all week even. I wasn’t leaving until I was absolutely certain my old body was clear.

I fixed my hands around my head, and pulled. A brief worrying thought of actually pulling my own head off to leave myself with an even more difficult task of extracting my body was soon discarded when I felt some movement in my dead shoulders. Slowly, but surely, this was working.

Sweat from my forehead streamed into my eyes as I persevered, gritting my teeth, and no longer caring about the embarrassing, involuntary loud grunts and groans radiating from my dry mouth.

The shoulders were sliding away from their grimy counterparts, millimetre by millimetre. One last good yank would do it. I readjusted my grip, and with a reinvigorated heave completely lost my footing on the terrain of skin and toppled backwards, landing between two heads preset to shocked expressions by my sudden presence.

Directly above me my old head - mouth now wide open - drooped at an unusual angle from what must have been a now-broken neck. The shoulders had come out, but that wasn’t what grabbed my attention.

Off to the side, weaved between a battered ribcage, reflecting a tiny beam of sunlight that had somehow found a way to these depths, was the locket, my heart-shaped locket. My heart-shaped soul.

Had it been in my mouth? Why? And how? It didn’t matter, all that mattered was I had it.

I wiped my forehead with my forearm, reached over, and unhooked the chain from a cracked rib. It was like being reacquainted with an old friend, a best friend, the only friend I’d ever need.

Fighting the urge to shiver, I popped open the miniscule side catch, and dug one fingernail into the gap where the locket front became the back. Should I be doing this here? Should I go back to the surface? No, after everything, I was doing this here.

A glow was emanating from the inside as the locket began to open.

A feeling then encompassed me, like every raw fibre of my being fired up into what I once knew I felt before, when I was a human, knotted within the complexities of emotion, and what it meant to be human, what it means to exist, in peace, forever. It was spectacular.

My soul-searching is done - the final, succinct thought that every being now yearns to have.