‘THE LISTENER’

James T. Cunningham is a New York-based writer and visual artist who has been creating digital art and photography for over 15 years. His work explores the intersection of image and narrative, blending visual storytelling with a strong literary voice. In addition to his extensive background in visual arts, James is a published author and poet, bringing a multidisciplinary approach to his creative practice.

THE LISTENER 

After the last cannon coughed out its final smoke ring and the last soldier slumped, still clutching whatever charm, locket, or half-eaten ration had outlived his luck, it rained. Only a whisper of weather, misting finely over broken fields and blood-soaked hills. The ground drank it eagerly, earth darkening at the seams, veins of black slowly spreading through the churned soil. The dead lay where they’d dropped, face-up or face-down, alone or tangled with others, and let it wash over them like stones in a soft current. 

Then it grew serious. Sheets of it poured from the sky, cold and relentless. Valleys filled and flooded. Rivers overran their banks, twisting through the lowlands in veins of silver and silt. Roads dissolved. Bridges vanished. Whole hillsides shed their boulders like loose teeth and sent them smashing through villages that once smelled of fresh laundry and old livestock. 

The towering trees, having survived centuries of wind and wood rot, wet years and dry years, went soft at the knees. Their roots, loosened by the endless shudder of bombardment and now drowned to pulp, gave way. They toppled with weary groans, landing with the wet slap of giants belly-flopping into their graves. 

And the rain did not stop. 

Villagers lost track of the days, or maybe the days lost track of them. The sun took its leave. The moon declined comment. All that remained was the percussion of rain on tin, rain on bone, rain on ruin. Survivors – those too stubborn, too unlucky, or too far from the epicenter to die properly – huddled in the hollowed leftovers of barns and outbuildings, beneath the meager shelter of rocky outcroppings. 

They did not pray. They recited inventory: potatoes going soft in the bin, boots going soft on the feet, neighbors going soft in the head. They crouched in the half-light, the never-dryness, and measured time not by minutes but by things lost. That was when Anna went missing. That was the morning Jacob never woke up. That was the stretch where the well started belching up frogs. 

When the rain finally stopped, it stopped all at once. The silence that followed was almost worse. 

They could taste its lulling deceit in the air, the gentle pitter-patter from shattered eaves thundering in their ears. A few summoned the courage to crawl out of their hidey-holes, only to find the receded floodwaters had left behind a most malevolent kind of mud. Thick and clogging, it oozed over shattered roads and once-fertile fields. Hidden dangers lurked under every hesitant step: broken beams, twisted metal, split posts. The muck would just as easily claim a boot from a foot as a lost goat from its herd, and the mud would only yawn, unsatisfied. 

The sun did return, and it scorched. It peeled. It cracked the earth open, splitting the land into plates and wedges. The rot came up with the heat: the stink of mold, of wet wool and sour milk and something sickly sweet. Bodies of men and beasts, their faces dried to masks, lay half-swallowed beneath the thickening crust. The wind avoided them. The crows refused to come. 

There were declarations in the days that followed. “The war is over,” said men in coats and medals, standing on hills that bore no resemblance to the hills that wore their names. “Peace has returned to the land,” they wrote in pamphlets and parish letters that no one could read. “Long may it last,” they toasted, with wine gone to vinegar and hands that still trembled. But those who remained in the valleys below – those who had buried their children in flower beds, who had eaten bark when the stores ran empty, who had seen what came floating in on the third day of the flood – knew better. The war had not ended. It had transmuted. Like water to poison, it had seeped into the groundwater, the root systems, the inheritance of the land. The war had gone native. 

Grain refused to rise. Wells went brackish. Villages were dead, in name and in fact, reduced to little parenthetical ruins on a map. 

And yet, in those hourless hours between grief and forgetting, when no one thought to look, it happened. Green shoots appeared. Delicately, and suspiciously, they grew from cracks in the earth to curl between wagon wheels and water barrels, alongside rusted sabers and broken crockery. 

Patiently, at first, but persistent. 

Flooded valleys hardened into barren scars, and life, such as it was, resumed. In a village that hardly deserved the word – two roads, one of them more aspirational than usable, a leaning chapel that doubled as a grain store, and a population that could sit comfortably at one long table – a young boy tended sheep. His name was Ewan. Ewan had a sheepdog called Dog, feet like leather, and a crown of hair that made him look as if he’d recently lost a fight with a wheat thresher. He was neither notably clever nor notably strong, but there was a man-shaped gravity to his watchfulness of the world. 

Each morning, with the first patch of light, Ewan would lead his flock out beyond the village proper, past the collapsed mill wheel and the place where the blackberries had turned to bramble, to the remnants of a once-green pasture. Now it was a field only in the sense that it had edges. 

And it was there, on the way to not-quite-a-field, that he saw it. 

The arm. 

It stuck out of the earth at an unnatural angle, stiff and strange, human fingers halfway curled as if caught mid-greeting. The hand was darkened from sun and storm, the flesh growing thin and leathery over bone. A soldier’s arm, Ewan thought, or rather hoped. The floods had taken so much, and left behind only fragments. Not everything, his mother once told him, could be gathered. 

He ran all the way home the first time he saw it, trailing sheep and dust and a kind of shame he couldn’t quite name. His mother had only shaken her head, not even looking up as she kneaded dough at the table. 

“Leave it be,” she said. “The earth claims what it wants.” 

So Ewan left it be. 

But it did not leave him. Every day on his way to the pasture, he saw it. And every day, he tried not to. At first he was afraid, and disgusted, and ashamed at his disgust. Then uneasy as he would lead his flock closer. 

Now I’m walking on its head, he couldn’t stop himself from thinking. Now its chest. Now its legs. 

But as time went on, and things continued to die around Ewan, the sharpness of his fear dulled. In comparison to the slow-rot deaths of the village elders, and the newborns who barely had enough time on this earth to drag in their first lungfuls of acrid air, the horror of the arm had softened into something almost familiar.

Eventually, the horrid little branch became something of a landmark, a fixture of his daily path. Like the diseased apple orchards he passed through each morning, shriveling up where the hillsides rolled reluctantly into pasture. Or the three giant moss-covered boulders at the edge of

the valley that meant he was almost there. Or that devilish white goat with one horn who patrolled the hillsides and hated everyone equally, but Ewan in particular. Without really meaning to, he started talking to it. 

“Good morning,” he’d say as he passed, tugging a straggling lamb along behind him. “Quiet day, isn’t it?” 

Later, he’d offer more. 

“Terrible luck today. One of the lambs got caught in the brambles. Took me nearly an hour to free it.” 

“The miller’s daughter looked at me this morning,” he said once, his cheeks burning. “She smiled. Think that means something?” 

He would tell the arm when it rained. When the dog limped. When the flock misbehaved. He told it what he remembered of his father, which wasn’t much. He told it what he dreamed. He knew, or thought he knew, that the arm would not reply. But it became easier, somehow, to believe it might be listening. And once that belief took root, it did not easily loosen. He found he preferred its silence to the measured numbness of the village. It felt more honest. 

Years passed in this way. The arm went from skin to bone, the flesh falling away until only pale ivory remained. It never shifted, not from time or weather, the finger bones stuck in their curled position. Ewan took care that Dog never mistook it for something to chew on. And always, it waved to him. 

Ewan grew tall. His voice deepened. He took over the flock from his uncle and learned the quiet language of the fields; the way to sense the coming of rain in the air, the subtle shift of the wind that meant the sheep were nervous. His mother grew thinner, more brittle, like a figure carved out of old bark. Dog died. The flock shrank. The pasture grew less green with every passing season. 

But still he greeted the arm, and told it about his day. About the new lambs born in spring, and how the village festival felt smaller each year, lonelier somehow, with fewer lanterns and more silences. And always, eventually, the quiet ache that curled in his chest when he thought of the father who never came home from the war. How he recalled his smell of soap and iron, and the leather of well-oiled boots, polished by his mother before he walked out the door. 

Then one evening, as twilight hung low and purplish on the hills, the arm was not alone. Ewan thought it must be a trick of the fading light. A shadow, maybe. A fallen log. But as he drew closer, his feet slowing in the rutted path, he saw it plainly: a body. A soldier’s body. The rest of him had risen. 

Still buried waist-deep in the earth, but the torso was there now, visible and terrible: ribs like twisted fence posts beneath the rotted tatters of a uniform; a skull mottled and crusted in dirt, tilted slightly in his direction. A few lingering hairs on the crown of his head stirred in the evening breeze. And the arm – the same arm that had waved to him for so long – was attached, the fingers frozen mid-curl. 

Ewan stopped short. The sheep bleated somewhere behind him, tasting his terror in the air. 

Then the head moved. 

A dry, scraping sound like brittle leaves shifting in the wind. The skull turned toward him, slow and deliberate. Its eye sockets were empty, but they regarded him anyway. Its jaw unhinged.

“You have been speaking to me,” said the skeleton. The voice came muffled, as if filtered through cloth and bone, and not entirely displeased by its own return to usefulness. Dry as dust, heavy as dirt. 

Ewan’s heart climbed into his throat. He felt unsteady on his feet. But he did not flee. “Yes,” he finally rasped. 

The head inclined. “I listened.” 

Ewan swallowed against a mouthful of saliva. “You heard me?” 

“All of it.” A slight unhinging of the jaw bone, a short tug to the side, as if he were chewing on the words. “You gave me shape.” 

Ewan stared. The sheep rustled behind him, uneasy. “I thought you were… gone.” “I was,” said the soldier. “I am.” 

Years of secrets and stories, all the idle nothings of a young boy he had shared with this dead man’s hand flooded Ewan’s mind, and he felt his face burn even as his vision swam. “I didn’t mean to disturb you.” 

“It was… kind of you.” The hand twitched, bony fingers curling slightly. “I’ve waited a long time.” 

“For what?” 

“To answer,” The sockets tilted toward Ewan, fathomless. “And now I have.” Ewan’s mouth worked. The sheep were getting restless. 

“I…” He hesitated, then took a breath. “Do you… have a name?” 

“I think I did, once.” The soldier’s jaw shifted again, bone rasping against bone. “But I have forgotten it.” 

“Well,” Ewan paused. “I could give you one?” 

Empty eye holes studied him. Something with many legs was crawling up the dead man’s neck bone. Ewan’s stomach rolled as he watched. 

“What would you call me?” 

Ewan shifted his gaze, relieved to look away. He regarded the trees behind him, the leaves turning from fiery reds and oranges to a dull brown. “Ash?” 

The soldier seemed to consider that. 

“Ash,” he said. “Yes. That’s… nice.” 

Ewan stood there a long time. The twilight deepened, and the stars began to fill the sky. Finally, he turned to go. 

“Good night, Ash,” he said softly. 

The soldier raised his hand, the bony fingers curling into that same half-wave that accompanied Ewan’s every turn from boyhood to manhood. 

“Good night, Ewan,” the soldier said. 

Ewan walked home with his flock. He did not look back. 

Ewan was certain it had only been a dream. 

The kind of fevered dream that comes after too much sun and too little water. That had to be it. Dead men did not sit up from their earthen graves and speak. Dead men did not raise their hollow skulls toward the dying light and answer you when you spoke to them. That was the kind of story the old women told around the fire when winter closed its grip over the village and the fields lay sleeping beneath frost. 

And yet… 

When Ewan returned to the pasture the next morning, Ash was still there.

The skeletal man sat half-buried in the earth at the edge of the path, where the brambles met the sparse, sun-baked grass. His ribs jutted out through the remains of his rotting uniform, arms resting on the ground, bones gleaming pale in the morning sun. But it was the skull that faced Ewan directly, jaw slack and slightly parted. The empty sockets fixed. Unmoving. Waiting. 

Ewan stopped so suddenly the youngest sheep bumped into the backs of his knees. The dream had not ended. It had followed him here. No – worse – it had begun again. The hard light of day sharpening every bone and brittle edge. 

He stood there for too long, heart thudding in his chest like a prisoner behind a locked door, fists against the wood. The fields stretched around him in shades of dull gold and sun-bleached scrub. The world should have felt real. Solid. But it felt thinner somehow, like canvas pulled too tight. 

He should go, he thought. Just turn away. Leave the sheep to wander and let the village wonder when neither of them came home. 

And then Ash moved. Only a little, barely more than a twitch. A tilt of his skull to the left, the scrape of vertebrae like a match being struck. His hand lifted from the dirt and curled in that old, familiar half-wave. Not quite a greeting. Not quite farewell. 

“Morning,” Ash rasped. 

Ewan stared. Swallowed hard. Then, with a steadiness he did not feel, he said, “Good morning.” 

Ash said nothing else. Ewan kept walking. The sheep were restless that day. They nosed nervously at the patchy grass and bleated when the wind shifted. They scattered more easily, needing more corralling. Ewan kept his eyes fixed on theground, on the sky, on the sheep. Anything but the figure buried just beyond the tall grass, watching him. Ewan felt the stare like a rope tugging gently at the base of his spine. 

He lingered longer than usual before leading the flock back to the village. Something in him didn’t want to pass that spot again. Something in him wanted to see if Ash was still there. He was. 

Ewan paused a dozen paces away. 

“Sleep well,” he said finally, absurdly, only because it felt wrong not to. 

There was a pause. Then, from the unmoving mouth, “I won’t.” 

Ewan started to ask him why, but the words tangled. Whatever answer might come, he was not sure he could carry it. Instead, he walked on. His shadow was long in front of him, the sun at his back too hot for the evening hour. 

Sleep did not come for Ewan either. 

Ash remained. 

Days passed. Weeks. 

Ewan did not speak of it. He could not. What would he say? That the dead man whose arm had waved at him for years was now sitting up, speaking, waiting? His mother already watched him carefully, her eyes dark-ringed and worried beneath her shawl. His uncle would scoff and send him back to the fields, calling him soft-headed. 

So Ewan said nothing. Not to them. 

But he still spoke to Ash. 

It did not take long to fall back into their old rhythm, though it felt strange at first, speaking to someone who answered. Ash’s responses were sparse, dry things – short

observations, quiet affirmations – but they were replies. And after so many years of speaking into the air, Ewan found himself craving them. 

“It’s going to rain,” Ewan said one afternoon, glancing at the low clouds clustering in the west. 

“I know,” Ash said. He turned his skull toward the sky. “I can feel it in the ground.” Ewan frowned. “How?” 

There was a long pause. Ash’s hands curled against the earth, dragging clumps of dirt beneath the tips of his finger bones. “Suppose it’s because I am the ground. Parts of me, at least.” Ewan thought of roots and earthworms, of rotting things in the dark. 

Other times, Ash would say nothing at all. He would simply sit there, buried up to the waist in the edge of a field like an old scarecrow, motionless as the boy talked about the sheep, the village, the miller’s daughter, the new fence his uncle was building. His mother’s cough that felt like it rattled the whole house at night. 

Ewan found himself looking forward to these quiet stretches of the day with Ash. Not silence – the kind that clawed at him in the dark with all the things left unsaid, hungry and full of teeth – but quiet: this open space between them, existing without judgment or consequence. Ash was the steady stone Ewan had always spoken against, the one that made his words echo, gave them weight. 

Sometimes, in the last moments of night before the first lights of day, Ewan would lie awake and wonder what a dead man wanted. 

He didn’t know. He didn’t dare ask. 

✶✶✶ 

The sheep were penned for the evening, their bleats fading into the low mutter of settling things. Smoke drifted from the village chimneys, threadbare and sour. Ewan lingered by the path, as he often did now, drawing out his time with Ash before he had to return home. 

Ash was waiting, as he always was, bones slouched in their shallow cradle of earth. His skull was turned toward the horizon, the sky bruised in shades of purple and rust. “Have I told you about the river?” Ash said. 

Ewan blinked. “No.” 

Ash’s sockets swiveled toward him, the hollows seeming deeper than before. “It was wide. Fast. I was young.” His jaw creaked on the words. “There was a girl. I loved her, I think.” “You think?” 

Ash’s fingers stirred, brittle twigs over dust. “Can’t remember her name. Only her laugh.” Something pulled at Ewan then, a kind of tether as Ash spoke. Tender, and terrible. He stepped closer without meaning to. The shadows stretched long over the field. “We swam in it every summer,” Ash went on. “Until the war came. After that, it changed.” 

Ewan swallowed. “What happened?” 

“The river wasn’t so blue anymore,” Ash pressed one bony hand to the soil beside him, as if remembering the touch of water. “It was red.” 

The words landed hard in Ewan’s gut, heavy and wet. He felt himself shivering and he could not look away. 

Ash stared up at him. “I think I died there, and washed up here.” 

Then his fingers flexed – an insect twitch – and slowly, he raised his hand. Palm open. Inviting. Expectant. 

“Come closer,” Ash murmured.

Ewan’s instincts flared. His skin went tight across his back. Ash’s sockets were dark and hollow. But there was something in them. Something vast and cold and endless. “I… I should go,” Ewan said. 

Ash’s hand lifted higher, curling in that comforting half-wave. 

“Closer,” Ash said again. 

And Ewan – helpless, foolish, bewitched – obeyed. One step. Then another. Cold bloomed through his feet and crept up his spine. 

Ash’s hand brushed his sleeve. A feather-touch, a breath. Then closed around his wrist. Ewan’s breath hitched. Cold. 

“I don’t know what you want,” Ewan whispered, teeth chattering. 

Ash’s grip tightened. The bones dug in. 

“I’ve been waiting,” Ash whispered back. “You’re the only one who ever stayed.” The sky above them darkened. Heart hammering against his ribs, Ewan tried to pull away, but the skeleton’s fingers locked like shackles. Earth shifted beneath his feet. “You’ve been kind,” Ash said. “Now it’s time for me to be kind to you.” 

“What –” 

Ash pulled. The ground beneath Ewan’s feet gave. 

There was no warning, no quake, no thunder. Just a sudden slackness underfoot. Like a sigh. And then Ewan was sinking. The soil dragged at him like hungry hands. He dropped to his knees, scrabbling. The wetness clung. The cold was inside him now, slicking his bones. “You’ll understand,” Ash said. “It’s not so bad, once you let go.” 

The earth climbed higher. Waist. Chest. Ewan gasped, tasted rot and copper. His arms flailed, dirt crumbling in his fists. 

“Ash –” he choked, dirt filling his mouth. 

The skull leaned forward. 

“I’ve been waiting for you,” Ash said. 

Ewan’s face tilted skyward one last time. Then slipped beneath. Mud sealed his lips and drowned his cry. A skeletal hand lingered above the surface, resting lightly atop his head. Fingers combed through his hair. 

“It’s alright,” Ash said gently. “You’ll see.” 

The hand sank. The earth closed over them both. 

And silence returned to the field. 

Some weeks after Ewan up and ran off, the village appointed a new boy to the flock. He was even smaller than Ewan had been at his age, and jumpier, with hands that never stopped fiddling with twine or the hem of his sleeve. They said his name was Thomas, but without a blood relation to call his own, no one ever said it with much conviction. 

On his fourth or fifth outing, long enough that the novelty of sheep dung and independence had worn off, but not long enough to know which trees told lies about the wind, Thomas paused at a bend in the trail. He squinted at a spot near the edge of the field, where the brambles thinned and the ground seemed a little too smooth for a landscape otherwise marred by hoofprints and runoff. A little too soft. 

Thomas took a few steps closer. The sheep behind him bunched and bleated, suddenly anxious. He ignored them. And then frowned. 

There, half-sunk in the soil, was a hand.

Pale. Fleshy. Fingers curled half-way, as if caught mid-wave. Earth clung beneath the nails in dark crescents, and there was something disturbingly fresh about the knuckles; like they might knock, politely, if given the chance. 

Thomas stared at it for a long while, his face not so much horrified as perplexed. A breeze passed over the field, stirring the weeds, and the boy could feel the press of the moment stretching, but nothing happened. 

He raised his shepherd’s crook and tapped the earth beside it as he thought. The thud was dull. The ground gave a little. He frowned again. Then, after another moment of indecision, he turned, and began the walk back toward the village. His crook swung low against his boots, the flock following in his wake as he rehearsed how not to mention what he’d just seen. Behind him, the hand stayed where it was. Curled. 

Patiently, at first, but persistent.

Georgia Prints is a fiction writer whose work explores the quiet dread beneath memory, myth, and the everyday. Her stories often blur the line between the natural and the uncanny, drawing on themes of history, grief, and transformation. She lives in California.