Member-only story
Love Beyond the Afterlife
Flash Fiction Prompt | May 2025
Every evening at dusk, lantern in hand, Elias roams the crooked paths of the old cemetery, whispering to the stones as though serenading lost lovers. The mist coils around his boots like smoke from an ancient offering, and his voice low, mournful seems to echo.
They say Elias has tended these graves since the town’s founding, over a century ago. He hasn’t aged. In the chapel, an old sepia photograph shows him exactly the same, standing beside a woman in lace. Her name….Isolde.
She died on their wedding night.
Children dare each other to ask his secret, but he only smiles and returns to his vigil. When the mayor died last winter, Elias had already prepared the grave, the soil turned before the man had even drawn his last breath.
“The earth tells me,” he murmurs. But some say it’s not the earth at all — it’s her. Isolde, whispering from beneath the roots, calling him home, night after night.
And at midnight, if you dare to listen… you’ll hear the dead whispering. Not to each other, but to him.
And among them, her voice lingers — soft, sorrowful, and endlessly in love.
