"The Ghost of Hamlet" by Jessica Lyn Thurber

Hamlet weeps.

            The darkness moves in now, closer, closer.  Walls of impenetrable black wrap around me, muffling my silent screams.  I can feel it, slowly suffocating in the infinity.  Oblivion is waiting for me.  If the dead can fear, I do.  My once beating heart quails and shrinks from the long reaching arm of death.

            Hamlet weeps.

            Each unseen tear he cries in his special madness burns like fire as what is left of my mortal body slowly dissolves away into memory.  And fifty thousand years my bones shall wait beneath the damp earth, hearing the echoes of living feet on the grass above, whose roots reach down to wave and taunt until my bones become nothing but dust and become part of the earth.

            Hamlet weeps.  But his tears mean nothing.

            Rivers pour from his eyes, but his face is cold as stone.  He weeps as one who must let no one know of his pain.  Friends have deserted him and he has no one left to help him.  The dead are alone as well.

            Fingers, bloody fingers reaching for me, to pull me down and swallow me.  If they reach me, I shall not come back.  My words beyond death will echo in Hamlet’s mind alone until it drives him truly mad and he joins his frozen lover, a corpse floating facedown in the stream, the flesh turning to whitened jelly that slides off his once solid frame like melted butter.  Bloated and swelling with the corruption of death, his very substance will become nothing more than rotting smell that the groundskeepers have to dispose of.  But when they touch his waterlogged body, they will not grasp it, the skin will fall off in their hand, white and slimy, all that is left of the noble Prince of Denmark, and he will become no more.  That is all that awaits those who die.

            Hamlet weeps.

            Indeed, the very fabric of his soul is torn, his father lay foully murdered and he does nothing.  Delay, Hamlet, oh cursed delay.  Every passing moment the hands creep nearer leaving bloody streaks behind them, clutching, stretching, straining for me.

            Hamlet, I beg of thee, abandon these womanly tears!  The father for whom thou weeps will soon be no more, not even a ghost!  Hell reaches to claim me, but if I go I will go beyond Lucifer’s gate into the nothingness beyond and be nothing.  Hamlet, hear the cry of a desperate soul!  Every moment lost is another failure.  Set me to rest.  Snatch me from the unholy touch of the crimson grip of hell!

            It grows quiet.  Hamlet weeps no more.  The silence comforts me for a moment and I have my mind, but it cannot last!  Soon I must vanish like I never was.  This is far beyond the reach of men, here where lost souls forever dance, never-ending, until claimed by those bloody fingers.

            Sometimes I fear that I am going blind.  But that which has no body has no eyes and that which has no eyes does not go blind.  Perhaps blindness would be a kindness here.  Then I would not have to watch the perpetual dark.  There is no kindness here.  This is my curse, I who refuse to die.  I leave in my son’s heart a burning taste for vengeance, but I am bound until the deed is complete.  When he whose hand deprived me of my earthly shell lies watching his own lifeblood seep out onto the floor of his brother’s home, his brother’s wife crying hot tears over his cold form, then do I rest.

            But they are always watching me, those wicked beings from beyond.  They think to pull me from my safe perch and drag my to their pits, and soon I must give way.  I cannot hold forever.  Hamlet, turn thy heart to stone and let thy eyes be as dry.  Hamlet, free me from the awful prison in which I am forever chained!