The Poppy Field

 She wakes me up and calls for me to attend to her.

I’m laying in something viscous, of which I promptly get away from by pushing myself until I stand up. A bone crackles beneath my foot as I move forward. It must be an ulna, or perhaps a radius due to its length and brittleness at shattering in two.

Ahead of me stretches a poppy field beyond what the eye can see, a mix of grass green with diverse violets of the flowers, interrupted by many white and red dots. These are the human remains splattered over the terrain. Holed skulls, tendons exposed to the flies, femurs sharpened to the point of being stalagmites surfacing from the earth, soldier’s vests waving like white flags in the wind. Pieces of men became a whole in part of the idyllic landscape.

In the center of it all, there’s a lone figure kneeling over a cut of meat, mourning. It’s Ada, my mistress and lady, dressed all in black with a large veil that reaches her feet standing up and now that she’s sitting down spreads all over the dirty floor alongside the thin edges of her fine dress. She hides her face with both hands like butterfly wings, rubbing thumbs in her sphenoids and breaking into constant sobs.

“Why?” She asks me. “Why is this my cruel duty? I committed no sin, I’ve worked with nothing except kindness to those around me, and this is the battle God gives me? Having to veil over those who are no longer with us in the middle of this blood offering to blind massacre? My poor heart cannot withstand all this sadness!”

She bends her head back, and in that same moment I get closer to place a handkerchief on top, immaculately knit with the finest silks. My only purpose here is giving Ada napkins. She blows her nose, and continues:

“Perhaps it is due to my talent of speaking with the dead that this task has been sent upon me. Surely, they want me to reunite all the souls with unfinished business and bring them back to use as windmill fuel. But I cannot do that! It is far too cruel to ask me to see all this! It is a heartless and grisly sight!”

I try to say something, but nothing comes from my throat. I am a halfway-built human, without the capacity of expressing empathy for someone real. I envy, sincerely, the mistress almost as much as I admire her.

She keeps on crying while she locks her fingers in what’s left of the chest she has got on her knees, drawing invisible pentagrams over it. These lines soon explode in brightness until being revealed as portals to the deepest recesses of the body, from where Ada extracts a substance, liquid and white like seafoam.

“God, forgive me for such a perverse purpose.”

It’s a soul, the culmination of a being. Necromancers like my mistress can remove them from corpses to sell them to entrepreneurs from the big cities, who insert them in gray machinery. This is because haunting an engine makes it go at an accelerated pace, producing a greater energy output for each offered soul.

I take a gander at the removed soul, seeing how it writhes in sticky splashes while it tries to escape from Ada’s delicate hands. In its whole should be the accumulated memories of the fallen soldier through a lifetime of experience, translucid memories shining through its thin sheet. I wonder if it can think about the people that surrounded him in life, if he can even think now. A soul is but the echo of a life, it doesn’t have self consciousness beyond acting out remembrances. And even so, I have the sensation that it’s “thinking” of something or somebody in particular, seeing the image of a family captured over its surface.

With a shaking of her fingers, Ada commands the corpse to stand up. Attracted as if by a magnet, its parts join together and knit around him to get him on guard over the weeds. It’s flesh and bones, a golem of nerves sculpted with the only purpose of assisting Ada, identical to me.

Clumsily, it marches back to pick up even more corpses for my sobbing mistress, and leaves me wondering which part of the soldier is on that zombie and which is on the soul in Ada’s hands. Which part of me is in me and which is in my own soul, forgotten on the dirt crib from which I was born.