The words immortalised in stone turned the world as I knew it into ash.

The sun had been beating down on my neck all day as I had scoured the graveyard for her name. Gravestones littered the barren hillside, decaying teeth twisting out of the gnarled dirt. No one else had been in the graveyard. No one else cared.

However, I can see what others can’t. I have an affliction. A curse you might say. I can see the final breath of the dead. A sea of broken promises and dead dreams. Dancing above the lifeless stones, the final words of lifeless people.

And finally I had found her. Her precious words.

My mother had been killed while I was out the country. A fatal accident they’d told me. A fall from the cliff. Nothing else to be done. Sorry old boy. Case closed.

But now the truth flickered before me. Five words burning into my eyes.

“Stephen please don’t hurt me.”

Only a vengeful wind howled in the graveyard. No voice to give life to the words before me. Yet, I could hear my mother’s voice. The thousand ways in which she might have screamed or pleaded those words to my father.

I will be reading his words soon.