The Floor

For Sanaa’s prompt over at Real Toads. During the war between the states, bodies were stacked up like cordwood. People did the best they could with the wounded, the dying, the dead.  “Werewolves, sirens, mermaids and creatures who devour blood, for centuries these myths and tales have continued to fascinate us. ”  I don’t know if this fits the bill but it is certainly dark, bloody, and full of death.  These tales of the long past dead…

The Floor
“War means fighting, and fighting means killing.” ― General Nathan Bedford Forrest

Here in some of the old buildings
in Richmond in Shockoe Bottom,
where they stored the dead, the dying,
the steadily bleeding…
drip drip dripping on the floors,
From the gurneys, the beds, the operating tables,
from the long gone wounded.
And still the bloodstains keep re-appearing.
Covered over with bricks,
with wood, with tiles,
with cement.
Nothing can make the bloodstains disappear,
the ghosts of soldiers and their blood
are forever imprinted on the building.
they are covered and…they re-appear.
In the 1860’s the building was a hospital.
People say they can see the long dead wounded
walking the halls, the grounds outside,
hear them moaning.
People walk over the bloodstains now.
Most have stopped seeing them long ago.

Richmond Times Dispatch photo