Week 7 Story: Dead or Alive

My name is Drona and I didn’t realize that I was dead, at first. The battle still raged around me, the bodies and blood of many spread across the soil. 

People had been shouting next to me, arrows flying across the battleground quickly, but I had trouble registering the locus of it all. The noises were suppressed, almost as if they were traveling through water, and I was at the bottom of the lake listening. 

I sat there for a few moments, trying to get my bearings and cement myself back to the present. Meditating always did make me feel as if I were somewhere else, somewhere that wasn’t quite on the plane we lived. 

It wasn’t until then when I tried to stand once again, that I realized things weren’t quite what they seemed. I felt like I was somehow outside of my body, floating in the air and unable to feel the ground hard beneath me. 

“What?” I said aloud, not quite to myself, but to anyone who would listen. “What’s happening?” I looked down at my hands and feet, and realized they were almost translucent; I could see the world through them as if looking through a piece of foggy glass. 

Just as I was about to panic, another arrow whizzed by. This time it floated right through me, stuttering only for a moment as it crossed through my body, piercing the area where my heart should have been. Except it didn’t hurt in the slightest, didn’t even cause me to flinch. That’s when I realized something was horribly wrong. 

I turned abruptly, looking at the shooter of the arrow, who didn’t seem to notice me at all. I heard a scream from the other direction, as the weapon presumably hit its target. That’s when I saw the familiar body on the ground, a pool of blood around like a halo, where the head should have been. 

“No,” I said, falling to my knees next to my own body. My saliva caught in my throat; I hadn’t even realized that I hadn’t taken a breath for nearly two minutes, that I hadn’t needed to. 

As I stared down at my beaten body, I realized that I was still stuck amidst the battle, almost as if I hadn’t died at all. I wasn’t sure that was much better than disappearing altogether. 

Author's Note: Since it's October, I wanted to do something that revolved around ghosts or something spooky. At the end of the Mahabharata, many of the characters died, but a lot of them moved on to the afterlife. I wanted to write about a character getting stuck as a ghost since they died in a really gruesome way. For this, I chose Drona, as I thought he would have a reason for sticking around until he was able to move on to the afterlife.

Drona

Reference. PDE Mahabharata by Arnold, Besant, Devee, Dutt, Ganguli, Kincaid, Macfie, Mackenzie, Nivedita, Seeger, and Tagore., from SOURCE.