The prompt is called “Great Minds Think” and it’s the brainstorm of fellow bloggers Sarah and Rohini. The two of them will alternate weeks. This week’s challenge is all about Impossible Situations. Rohini asks us to write about what happens when, for just one day, everyone hears their ancestors’ voices.
The voices rolled in with the morning fog, low, grainy, like a bad radio signal drifting through the alleys. By noon the whole city sounded haunted. People leaned against brick walls, eyes wet, whispering to ghosts only they could hear. They said their ancestors had come calling for a day.
I didn’t buy it. I don’t believe in spirits, souls, or any of the sentimental scaffolding people cling to when they’re afraid of the dark. When you die, you vanish. Whatever’s left is whatever someone remembers, and memories are cheap currency in this town.
But then I heard her. My grandmother’s voice cut through the static like a knife through velvet. Not soft. Not gentle. Sharp enough to stop me cold in the middle of a rain‑slick street.
“You still pretending you don’t miss me?” she asked.
I didn’t answer. Couldn’t. A cab skidded around me, horn blaring, but I barely heard it over the sound of her. Too clear, too familiar, too impossible.
“You’re not real,” I muttered.
“I’m whatever you kept,” she said. “Whatever you wouldn’t let die.”
She didn’t sound like a ghost. She sounded like a memory I’d locked in a back room and forgotten to feed. And now it was hungry.
All day and onto the night she shadowed me through the city’s underbelly, past neon signs flickering like broken promises, past bars where the air tasted like regret. She didn’t offer wisdom from beyond the grave. She just reminded me of things I’d buried. Like the way she tapped her fingers when she lied, the smell of her coat after a storm, the lullaby she hummed when she thought no one was listening.
By dusk, the voices around me thinned out, fading like cigarette smoke in the wind. People clutched at them, desperate to keep their dead from slipping away again.
Not me.
Because I finally understood that no one had actually come back. No spirits. No afterlife. Just memories rising from the depths, louder than guilt, sharper than grief.
When her voice finally dissolved into the night, it didn’t feel like losing her again. It felt like I’d finally admitted she’d never really left.
Image conjured using Copilot.
Facts, Fictions & Fantasies 