Fiction
Friends Who Are Dead
To those who fought and fell in the everlasting battle of life
Obituaries are for the living.
For those left behind to gather the pieces, trying to make sense of the empty spaces where people used to be.
So here I am, with a half-empty bottle of Glenlivet and a blank sheet of paper, staring down the ghosts of the only people who ever really mattered.
I don’t even know where to start. I figure I’ll begin with the one who always had my back.
Bear
The biggest guy you’d ever meet, with a laugh that could shake the walls.
We called him Bear because of his size, but the name fit in other ways, too — loyal, fierce, and damn near unstoppable when it came to protecting those he cared about.
Bear wasn’t just muscle, though.
He was the kind of guy who’d stay up all night to help you out of a jam, no questions asked.
He fought like hell to keep the darkness at bay, even when it started to creep into his own soul.
When he finally went down, it wasn’t in some glorious battle or blaze of heroics. It was by his own hand, in a world none of us knew about.
