The heralding sound of death is unpleasant. Repelling. Described with many more miserable words. Yet, only the living say so. Not the dead.

On the night tragedy rocked my little town, all of us who died heard the banshee's song. Maybe we all could have danced to it, if we weren't so held down by our resignation. If we weren't all so willing to accept the dread of death over the spite of nature. I was sixty five and retired. I knew nowhere beyond the town which was the nest and I, the baby bird. On the other hand was the father of my daughter. The coming storm would render his grave uncertain and everlastingly unmarked. I wanted to watch over him.

“Everybody is leaving!” my daughter had screamed at me. “Let the dead bury their dead. We are living. That's why we are leaving.”

Before her father's death, I used to animatedly throw words with her. Now, I could hardly be bothered. Only her father understood me whenever I acted without feeling the self validating need to explain myself.

“There is a safe house for all of us who are staying. We will all be safe there.” That was the end of it. My daughter hugged me before she left with her last failed attempt to save me. She had kept me away from her twins as a failsafe to lure me out of my comfy town but whenever I closed my eyes, I could see them. And that was nearly enough.

The storm came many hours earlier. So early that none of us who stayed were prepared. I myself was at my daughter's father's grave. The afternoon sky suddenly darkened and the intensity of the winds increased. Heavy drops of water began to fall like craters in space. Lightening brightened my path; thunder roared. I scrambled for the safehouse which was actually a bunker underground.

“Stop your screeching and come!” I scolded a beautiful woman who was at the cemetery with me. I had never seen her before or at least the panic made me unable to recall her. I yanked on her wrist to lead her. Her unpleasant wailing somehow cut through the thunder.

“Who's singing?” I heard a querulous voice in the distance, from someone also trying to make it to the safehouse.

“Death blows the light of your life lamp out.”

“Are you singing?”

“What do you think?”

“You are bad at it, but you're still young. If you don't die out in this storm, maybe you'll improve.”

“Only the dead understand my song.”

“What?”

“You will soon understand my song.”

Her grating voice stabbed through the heavy air. It raised to the heavens and merged with the thunder. The sounds made my ears bleed, yet I felt the flowers of spring budding in my heart. Her wailing began to waft an uncanny melody that matched the rhythm of flying  trees and cars and rooftops uprooted by the wind.

“STOP! STOP SINGING!” I wrestled her to the ground, and tried to cover her mouth. Against my palm, I felt the upward curve of her lips. Her suppressed laughter vibrating through me. Her song dying into little rumble in her throat. Her deed being done.

“Death blows the light of your life lamp out,” she whispered, before she disintegrated under me. Carried away by the unforgiving winds.

We all heard her song. For none of us had made it to the trapdoor of that safehouse. An uprooted tree had nestled upon it and refused to be dislodged in time. 

Back when we were all still living, if I had said: “Stop screaming!” instead of: “Stop singing!”, maybe there could have been a different outcome.

My daughter escorts me to the guess of where her father's now unmarked grave would be. I can remember the banshee's song and I try to sing it now even though the storm rendered me deaf and mute.

My daughter scowls at me. Her mouth moves and I read her lips.

“You are screaming,” she says.

Because she is living. And I am dead.