The ghoulish figure sat, grinning his lipless smile with a vacant stare, upon a stony bench under the flowering cherry whose dark trunk and branches held high the heartrendingly beautiful blossoms. A breeze, and a gentle rain of pink kisses meandering through the crisp, mountain air, caused the ghoul’s faded eyes, for a moment, to lift from his shadowed musings toward heaven.
He watched the petals fall in their gentle death, and envied each one as it lay itself down to sleep, to rejoin the earth, to dissolve into the ground by its rooted trunk. There, he dreamed, to become again, after a long decay, part of the tree, part of the dark and twisted wood, and once more, a flower, a promise of fruitfulness. Weary, he sighed, his eyes once more gazing in inattention as dark thoughts troubled him. As winter came, the tree lost all its color and stood as a dead—or was it merely sleeping?—monument to the beauty of a faded memory. Then came spring and summer and fall again, and the ghoul still sitting under the tree, watching, year to year, the death and life of the cherry blossoms. Slowly, as the earth pirouetted around the sun, the dark internal musings of his hopeless state fell away and his eyes saw more and more of the world.
Mirrorless there upon the mountain, he could not see himself, nor feel the cold release of death when it came. The undeath he had cursed himself with was forgotten, and when a springtime breeze rustled the gay, expectant buds, it caught up his happy soul as it passed and carried it up to heaven.
Tale Told 