The Very Last Ghosts
The past, the present and the future are all one and the same
We have lived for a very long time clinging onto grand narratives we knew to be false. But we clung on to them nonetheless. And then the grand narratives were snatched away. And we were shocked. Even though we knew them to be false. We were still shocked, preferring to embrace our dwindling fantasies than face ever growing reality. We are mythical creatures standing on the foundations of our imagination.
This week on The Crow I found myself writing something completely different than I set out to write. It became a kind of parable or fable, coaxing me away from where I was heading. I didn’t resist. I wanted to hear what was being whispered.
These tumultuous days have kidnapped me. I shall escape. To where I do not know.
1.
The day of the fight had been a beautiful day, even though by the late afternoon the sky had darkened and yet another rain storm burst upon us. But it had been a beautiful day. Except for the fight. And the ghosts.
The fight started, as they often do, because an argument got out of hand. A promise had been broken. An accusation of injustice. The denial of injustice. The usual trite back and forth that was both hugely important and utterly ridiculous.
As the rain and the shouting got heavier and everything got increasingly drenched, I realised I’d always preferred my flimsy illusions and petty certainties to actually paying attention. I should have noticed the world signalling me, warning me, but I wasn’t paying attention. Instead I continued storming blindly onward, ignoring all the signs, imagining that the world and I could withstand anything we threw at each other.
Turns out that wasn’t true.
Anyway, the fight started over a cow and a calf and a broken promise. At least on the surface. The calf should have been handed over but wasn’t. People then came up with explanations. They made excuses. Then they fell into accusations.
In the end I had to walk over the hill to pay the man a visit. That’s when the ghosts got involved and fucked up everything. Again.
2.
They used to say that history was cyclical, but no one says that anymore. Not since The Rains came. The brutality and the wickedness of The Time Of Ravage are in the past. Now, is the time of Community and Trust because without Community and Trust, there is nothing.
For thousands of miles around the land is barren. There are odd pockets where the top soil is still able to carry a crop, where the goodness hasn’t yet been washed away by The Rains. These last remnants of fertile land are carefully protected and nurtured because room for error is so very slim. Land no longer nurtures. The promise the land held has been broken by the ghosts.
In these trying times a person’s word is sacred. It’s a matter of life and death. No one breaks their word. If they do The Keeper of The Balance is summoned. The Keeper is supposed to be an arbitrator. Someone who negotiates conflict and keeps the peace. Not someone who starts fights.
I am supposed to be The Keeper of The Balance. At the time of my appointment people said I was perfect for the role, but they said that because they thought it didn’t really matter who The Keeper was. Plus it didn’t work out so well for the last Keeper and only I was fool enough to take the role. I am not a good Keeper. I have poor self-reflection and I don’t really pay attention. It makes no sense for me to be The Keeper. But I am.
Even though The Time Of Ravage is over we will live in the shadow of those days forever. We are slaves to the dead. The ghosts rule over us. But even as slaves we have learnt to never again abandon our humanity like they did. Not like The Shopkeeper Kings did in The Time Of Ravage.
That much I thought I knew. But of course I wasn’t really paying attention.
3.
“The calf belongs with her mother.”
“You made an agreement.”
“I don’t care,” he said, “things have changed,” then he said, “our entire lives are spent bearing the weight of decisions made by the dead. We can’t change the idiocy of the past, but we can make a new past starting right now.”
He wasn’t making sense. “You can’t make a new past,” I said.
I should have listened. I should have paid attention.
“You’re wrong, we can,” he said, “We in the present create the past, just as the past forms the future. That’s exactly what the ghosts did. They become the future in their present and now they are our past and we are their future. We still live with them, the ghosts, but the world is not linear, it’s forever weaving into and through itself. Our present will become the past, which will then create the conditions for the future, don’t you see? We can create a new past right now, for those in the future, right here and right now.”
I laughed, “You’re saying that refusing to give up this calf will make a difference to the past, the present and the future?”
“Yes,” he cried, “Everything makes a difference. Nothing goes unnoticed. When we are ghosts the future will live in our shadow. We need to be good ghosts. Our descendants are begging us to be the best ghosts we can be. They are calling from the future. If we’ve learnt only one thing from The Time Of Ravage it is surely that.”
He was obviously insane and making no sense. I knew I’d have to force him to give up the calf. I told him that he was just being naive and selfish. I told him no one could change the past. I couldn’t help myself.
I should have paid attention but I’m not a good Keeper. No single person has ever been a good Keeper. Keeping The Balance travels through time from the dead to the living. The balance is not just confined to the present. The Now is just a peak in time from which everything falls, one way or another, into the past or into the future, maybe both ways. That’s what this man was trying to tell me, but of course I wasn’t really paying attention. I am not a good Keeper. I will be a bad ghost.
The cow and the calf looked drenched and vulnerable standing there in the pouring rain, their fate in the hands of two future ghosts projecting their own simple realities onto the complexity of life.
4.
After the The Time Of Ravage came the Age of Survival. A precarious and desperate time. All that was once magical and beautiful had been vanquished and replaced with struggle. Imagination retreated. Compassion shrunk. Brutality became mundane. The Shopkeeper Kings had created a Hell on Earth in The Time Of Ravage. But they didn’t care. They were thrilled with themselves, their glassy eyes squinting with joy and self-satisfaction as everything disintegrated around them. Cold eyes that saw everything and saw nothing.
Those idiotic and cruel fools are the ghosts that haunt us. And we too shall be ghosts. How shall our shadow fall?
As the rain grew heavier and the water rose I started thinking that life, Life itself, is a whirlpool of energy flowing along on the winds of time, a ceaseless pouring of new information into the universe. A delicate cycle of fragile impermanence. And, eventually, the winds of time will abate, and this delicate cycle of fragile impermanence will cease and then nothing but the fizzing vacuum will remain. And maybe the shadow of the last ghosts. The very last ghosts that will reign forever.
These thoughts did not help. I continued flinging facts, as if facts were a substitute for diplomacy and compromise. As if there were an objective world made of facts to which I could appeal. I kept flinging facts that piled up higher and higher until our exits were completely blocked and there was nowhere left to turn but on each other.
My voice was shouting through the deluge, trying to force this man into my reality, trying to force him see my point, trying to force some advantage.
And his voice, rising in pitch, getting increasingly irate, refusing to be forced, heading toward a tipping point.
Then I heard my voice again, unleashed and bolting through the stable door.
5.
Once upon a time there lived the very last person to ever create a cave painting. The very last hand to paint a lion or a deer or an aurochs. I hope they didn’t know they were the last cave painter. I hope the last cave painter was joyful, weaved into their world, covered in red ochre and charcoal and laughing at the wonder of it all.
But it is our fate to know.
The water is rising. The ghosts are clawing, reaching, refusing to let go.
The calf was swept away first, being that it was lighter and smaller, and then the cow, engulfed by the rising waters, only their heads barely bobbing along, and then they too folded into the flood water and disappeared.
The man and I were still fighting when we should have being paying attention.
And finally I cried out for help but there was no reply for there was no one left. Just the ghosts pulling at me.
Your writing was like someone switched on a movie in front of my eyes. It's a hallmark of great writing. It echoed what we have all been feeling in these turbulent times. Whether it is in the U.S., or Europe, or the Middle East. And I do not want this comment to devolve into politics, but this story does tug on the general chaos of our times. Things that command our attention vs. things that should.
I love the layers of struggle and meaning in this story, Jonathan. A deep and contemplative, read.
This piece gripped me with its eerie, aching inevitability—a story that unspools like a flood itself, rising in slow, creeping waves before sweeping everything away. It moved me in the way only great writing does: by making me feel both small and complicit, caught in the current of history, of power, of regret. The narrator’s blindness, their failure to pay attention, is our own—our human tendency to cling to illusions, to mistake argument for action, to build walls of facts instead of listening. And then there are the ghosts, the weight of the past bearing down on the present, demanding reckoning. The final image—cows swallowed by the water, voices drowned out, the ghosts reaching—left me breathless. It’s not just a haunting story; it’s a reckoning, a warning, a lament for what has already been lost and what is still slipping away.
I think I’ll go cry now.