It started when I was five years old. I was playing in my grandparents’ backyard when I saw a small creature run across the grass. In that first fleeting sighting, I only noted its green, mushroom-shaped head covered in what I assumed to be fur. Later, after other encounters with more such creatures, I saw their small humanoid body, the size of an adult’s ring finger, including the head.
But all this I discovered much later. In that first encounter, when I saw something run in front of me, crossing the lawn my grandfather had so much trouble keeping trimmed and pleasant, I fell back and screamed. Then, I ran home to grandma’s arms. I cried, but no one believed what I described. They reassured me it was just a bug and that everything was fine. I soon forgot it.
The next day, grandma’s older sister died.
The next time I saw one, I was ten years old. I had placed that first creature in a place in my mind reserved only for weird dreams and monsters I imagined I had under my bed. So I was startled when I looked up from my homework and saw a pink-furred creature run across my room and disappear under my bed. I didn’t cry this time. I didn’t even fall out of my chair. And I was only trembling slightly when, flashlight in hand, I knelt on the ground and looked under my bed. But there was nothing there to greet me except a few dusty shoe boxes containing old toys and games.
The next day, great-grandpa died.
By the time I was fifteen, I had seen them three more times and had begun calling them Akhos - a Greek word that conveys the feelings of intense grief, sorrow and pain. I discovered the word while reading about Achilles (I had a great love for Greek Mythology at the time) since the term is habitually connected with the hero. I called them that because, whenever I saw one of them, those feelings were sure to follow. I connected them to the deaths when it became too obvious to deny anymore.
The Akhos didn’t only appear before someone in my family passed. I saw one run across the road the night before my friend’s grandma died. Another day a purple-furred Akhos crossed my classroom, under everyone’s noses, nearly brushing my teacher’s shoes. No one even blinked. The next day one of my dad’s childhood friends died in a car accident.
I didn’t know how to feel about them. I dreaded their appearances of foreboding nature, especially as I became more sure of what was to follow them. Yet, in a way, it also prepared me for what was to come.
There was only one time I loathed the Akhos. I was sitting by a lake, thinking about my parents, especially my mom, who was very sick. As I gazed at the water, a blue-furred Akhos, the same colour as the water, ran across its surface so fast and lightly that it hardly caused any disturbance in the lake. I sat there, following the creature with my eyes, watching it disappear on the other shore, letting the dread settle like poison in my veins. Then I ran home.
The next day, my mother died.
I cursed the Akhos after that, cursed them for all of eternity. I cursed the knowledge they gave me, this burden I had to carry. I cursed the little feet that brought the angel of death to my door. I cursed my loneliness in this twisted gift imposed upon me at an age when innocence was the sole queen on my heart. I wished to never see them again, to be rid of them once and for all.
They did not grant my wish. I kept seeing the Akhos throughout my life. My lonely, cursed, life. Sometimes I saw them more than once in a single year. Other times I would not see them for ten years. It got worse after I turned seventy.
I never learned to like them. How could I? Who is fond of death and its dark hold? But I became resigned to their existence and their role in my life. I await my little Akhos, the day it will stop and look at me, and I'll see the light behind him.
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