My contribution to Sue Vincent’s weekly #writephoto prompt challenge.

Luna looked through the trees at the moon and thought about death. Death, she decided, was the unbroken space of silence. Where words disintegrated before they could form sound in the black expanse of no-time. Would it feel, cold, she wondered, as she shivered her body under the night sky, or would there be no feeling?

When she was a young child, she would lie in bed and think about death before she slept. She couldn’t help it. Her mind would pull her into that place of fear, and the thought of nonexistence would race her heart into panic until she pushed the terror back into the darkness. Now she found the idea of infinity equally terrifying. How exhausting, to be endlessly cycling through lifetimes, or to be forever hovering in the void of space.

Heaven, her grandfather once told her, was the dream of the hopeful. Hell, a threat to the guilty. “When you die, you die,” he said. “Your body goes back to Earth, and that’s it.” Yet, Luna had seen the ghosts of lives past. Even her grandfather had appeared years after his death, hovering above her bed in an aura of light.

The spirits never her told her what happens after the breath stills inside the body. They never talked about what infinity really means, or how many lifetimes you have to live to get there. In fact, they never said anything at all. They just watched her live.

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