Page 62 - HEF Pen & Ink 2023

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ancestors who had been waiting for him.
A smile broke my tough face. The feeling of my face bending into a smile made me smile more, it felt nice. But my smile was cut in half when I fel and heard the cry of a newborn child in another room.
I slowly walked into the room and saw that the mother was crying as she held her newborn child. I looked at the spirit floating gently above the infant’s body. The women looked at the soul shocked, she tried to force the soul into the body, but it only cried out in pain. I grabbed her hands gently and lifted them from the soul.
“You can’t take it; she was meant for greatness!” The women said to me beginning to cry.
“I’m sorry, but I can’t choose when someone dies, it’s just my job to make sure they’re comfy in the afterlife” I picked up the soul and began to carry it to the barrier. Tears streamed down my face, and I began to audibly cry as I carried the infant’s soul. I looked at the soul. My soul pieced together what her future would look like. She was destined to solve
so much for this world, she would stop wars, find a cure for humanities horrible gluttony, and even invent space travel. I stood at the barrier holding the soul. “I’m sorry,” I whispered.
The women cried by the mother. The mother refused to let her baby go. The women held the blankets crying into them. Then the mothers’ cries changed. They became up lifting, happy, joyed. The women looked up to see me holding the soul in the child’s body.
I watched as my arm began to change. It changed colors, from a black color to a vibrant green. It hurt, bad, I was in pain, but I wasn’t going to let go of the soul until it had settled in its body, until the soul had fused with the infants heart. When the baby began to scream and cry I knew I could let go. When I did the body rejected my hand, it threw out my hand with such violence it had broken it. I fell on the ground grasping my arm.
I looked at my hand and saw it looked like the women in the room with me. The women didn’t say anything she just got up and hugged me. “Thank you” She said.
“I couldn’t do it, she was destined to save this world, I couldn’t let her die without helping the world,” I looked down and saw her hand and it had changed. Her hand looked like mine and my hand looked like hers.
By Gage Harne