Soul Keeper — Supernatural Thailand 15

If you listen to my heart you will hear its irregularity, its struggle. And if you were a doctor, you would likely tell me I’m sick, or that my reluctant beats are due to the exhaustion of old age, that I should seek treatment or alleviate my stress by resting, and possibly outright retirement from my profession.

But mine isn’t a conventional job.

What I do, what my father did and what his father did before that is simply too important. Together now we have harbored more than a thousand souls, ghosts whose bodies were taken from them prematurely, dying in their infancy or adolescence, bodies that cannot be cremated, allowed only a burial.

I myself adhere to no religion, no belief. I’m simply the person who helps carry the dead into the crematorium, the one who pushes the button to start the flames that will fire the body and soul out of this realm. And if they died too young I dig the ground, place their corpse and securely blanket them with warm mud from Mother Earth hoping some of it seeps into their cold, little shells.

And that’s when I see them, their ephemeral confused and lost forms trying to re-enter their bodies, their despair when they finally realize what has happened, that they can neither ascend to a new plane or go back to the way things were. I see that their burning, desperate need if…