The Etiolation

It had been happening awhile, how long he did not remember. He did not remember much some days.

He would, on occasion, stop by places of business and aquaintances, but they did not recall him. Such encounters were akward and embarassing, not to mention confusing for him at first. He talked to his Ghost counterpart regarding this, but the black-sheeted fellow had little to say of late, and came around less and less often.

One day the Ghost Spires stopped coming by altogether. His effects, such as they were, were gone. No one called, and the living version, if he could be still called that, seemed incapable of visiting his own carte de viste upon anyone. Spires was alone, as much as if he’d been the man on the moon.

Old records regarding him for the past year seemed to dissapear. The universe had been given an unequal equation and seemed to be correcting the problem. He no longer ate. Sometimes he just observed the world around him, another faceless body in a town that tremored more from machines than human might.He adored the site of the place, every mote of detail.

The town had become his lover, in its  way, sustaining him through this limbo of fading from the pages, from the recordbooks, from memories. Minutes were like summer days in the thrall of the brick and cobblestone city. She was the kind adoring one who took him in and kept her bedroom warm when the bars were shuttered and the hotels were full.

One day his building was gone. That was that. He wandered then, much like the Ghost had before his vanishing. At the end of the days, he journeyed down to where the Tjuana was docked in Clockhaven. She was still there, intractable for some reason he would never learn the cause of. The Universe always will provide one with mystery.

It was finally happening, now. His body was fading. He looked on his arms as the sun shone through opaque wool, flesh, and bone. No painful sensation erupted, just a dimming of all senses.

He reached into his waistcoat pocket and produced a small tintype of a friend, one that somehow suvived the unwriting of his home and was found fluttering along cobblestones where a house once stood.

It still seemed real enough. He sat it down on dock and put a nearby oyster shell fragment atop it to keep it from fluttering in the breeze.

An urchin walked past on the way to the pneumatic mail office and seemed to catch his eyes.

Spires looked at the small figure and pled quietly, “Remember I was here. Please.” he said, forcing words into the wind, and faded completely from view. “Remember me.”

And then he was gone.

And then he was somewhere. Somewhere wonderful. Indeed, it was the best place that any place could ever possibly  be.

The end.