I'm In Your Mind

All these people strolling by, stopping to gawk at my mottled skin, and filled in eye sockets, clueless as to who they are actually looking at. The placard explains to the reader that I was a victim of the great Vesuvius eruption of 79AD, but that is only part of the story. What the so-called scholars have left out is why I am still here and so many others have crumbled into ash.

When I was living in the physical world, many of my fellow Pompeians would come to me for ethereal guidance. My mind has the ability to leave my physical body and explore the future, and the afterlife. I’m capable of connecting with the recently departed, and many of those entities we call gods. People wanted to know if their relatives and friends were sent to The Elysium Fields, a place for heroes (few rarely were sent here), The Asphodel Meadows, an afterlife for the common man and woman, or the dreaded Tartarus, what you call hell. I was paid well by the Patricians and Plebians alike to gather this information.

It was during one such excursion into the ethos that the great eruption occurred. My essence was not in its dormant body, but I was still tethered to it. I felt the hot ash blanket my body, forming an especially thick protective coating around my head, but leaving the rest of me minimally protected. The lava flow oozed through every window, door, crack, and crevasse, encapsulating much of the city and burning the rest of it to the ground. I watched in terror as the flames consumed the unprotected parts of my torso, leaving only my head encased in the cooling lava. With no living person to connect with, this is where I remained for several thousand years, not dead but certainly not alive.

My period of exclusion ended during the mid-seventeen hundreds when archeologists slowly recovered the city from its ashen grave. The excavation was painstakingly slow, and it wasn’t until the mid-eighteen hundreds before my head was unearthed. A feeling of freedom was quickly quashed when I was positioned in a box and placed on a warehouse shelf for the next seventy-five years. I had accepted my fate while buried in the ash, but this was different. Now I was being deliberately ignored, isolated from both a living and ethereal world that had left me behind. Time continued to abandon me causing my thoughts to grow darker by the hour.

One day without warning, I felt my fortress of solitude move off the shelf and it was set on a table. Two men removed me from the box and thoroughly examined my encrusted head. After a short discussion with a third person, it was decided that I would be included in a traveling museum exhibit. I should have been ecstatic to be finally given my freedom, but all I could feel was an overwhelming thirst for revenge against this new world that had kept me in restraints for hundreds of years.

As the exhibit moved from city to city my special abilities slowly increased in power. By the time we reached our third stop on the tour, I could feel that my mental abilities far surpassed what they were in Pompeii. It was time to go for a test run. A well-dressed man in his forties passed by my pedestal and stopped to read the plaque. He looked over to a companion and joked, “This is what happens when you fail to pay attention to your surroundings.”

Both men laughed and turned to continue on, but something strange happened. Both men’s feet behaved like they were mired in quicksand. Their expressions morphed from surprise, to disbelief, to sheer terror. I smiled to my ethereal self while tightening my mental grip on their minds and said, “You failed to pay attention to your surroundings,” then I snapped their legs.

The tour continued and my hunger for revenge only grew larger. I found I had the ability to enter minds and travel home with them. After causing them whatever harm I felt they deserved, I was a simple matter of exiting their mind and returning to my waiting head. All was going swimmingly, until once again fate stepped in. A young child, running through the exhibit as children sometimes do, crashed into my pedestal and my head toppled to the concrete floor, smashing to pieces. I was now Humpty Dumpty. My broken head was swept up, placed in a box, and burned. What should have happened to me centuries before had finally caught up to me. Fate wins again.