Buckeye

by Patrick Ryan

The things that we love tell us what we are.

Over and over, she’d learned that what the dead most often conveyed was love and forgiveness. She could only conclude that these were the two most important things in the world—so important that people carried them into the afterlife for the sole purpose of being able to hand them back to the living. And then the living prayed to have them bestowed upon the dead. Throughout all the joy and bickering and betrayal and abandonment, all the wars around the world and in America, all the human hardship, messages of love and forgiveness were being sent back and forth, across the divide between the living and the dead. Those messages meant everything; they counterbalanced the world.