Imagine, for a moment, that you could see someone who had died. Imagine that you could see them, not as your decaying memory reconstructs, but as they were, perfectly, in the moments you last saw them. Imagine that they could speak to you, and remember your memories, and exist in the darkness when you were most alone. Would you push them away?

There was no saying, really, how long it had been happening before anyone became aware; how many weeping fools had clutched at their departed loved ones in the darkness of a sweaty room and died with their secret on their lips. It was all by nature so private that the problem went undiscovered for the longest time, slipping unsaid between black-clad mourners crying in the rain; it was a shark in the water, pulling people down silently and effortlessly one at a time. The world was too far gone before anyone noticed a thing.

The word might be ‘epidemic,’ but that takes on definition, and there is no definition here to be found. A disease is concrete, and spreads like it, in obvious leaps that destroy but at least can be plotted. The floaters erupted in incongruous clumps: dead parents fitting themselves inside their children like misguided puppeteers, lovers rattling restlessly about in bodies that they had known, once, and now inhabited like empty drawers. I would say epidemic, but that would imply that there is an explanation for what occurred, and it just so happens that there’s not.

A FRANTIC BURST OF COLOR
(just some more of Sho’s original ramblings)