Digging in with a single finger, I can feel the release before it happens. A bit moist in the middle, tender, but with the promise of a perfectly dried edge. Like rust upturning metal, waiting to be lifted. Walking out of the house, I gently prod at the crust like an exposed tile on a decayed bathroom floor. There, where the humidity lingered long after it had seen its last working shower. Before the rot.

  I cannot stop picking. And like everything else, it doesn’t matter if I do. The scales will come. They will cover; they will feast. They will become you. You become them and so the cycle continues until we are as soft as the peat and muck between the toes and the gray matter between our ears. Smelly viscous piles of, once, people. Without purpose. Poisonous to the ground we walk upon as the scales overtake us.

  In the years before, a challenged immune system did little to protect me from bad governance. My body not mine, my body hated, my body belittled, my pain…ignored. Non-existent to them when that bill came due. No bills of health, only promissory notes of pain. Suffering at a going rate, ever-rising, attached to the tag on your toe. And even then, you could not escape it. Death was guaranteed to us all, but it was never free. We were never free.

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  And yet, here I still am.

  And there, they are. Graves strewn across the marshes. Lovely rows of, once, loved ones. The hated ones, too, save for a special few. Granted, the graves are mostly empty. Depending on the resurrection time, the marshes decay the body for you, or the body rose decaying. One just had to be faster than the other. So, it seems, most prophecies go.

  Shovel in hand, the handle felt dry and smooth. The coating is still fresh and…

  

  “Hmm. No one’s used this.”

  Picking at the coating on the handle, I set out to the marsh to find them.

  

  “Maybe today,” I thought. “I will find you.”