Title: The Boy
Author: nike13
Summary: A memory can be a very powerful thing.
Rating: PG13
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In the sweltering heat of the summer sun, there stood a child; a young boy of ten standing for all to see but seeing nothing himself. He stared out upon the world but was not part of it, he was but an observer of what was.

He was an odd looking child, with a plain face and vacant eyes. His clothes were tattered and worn, his feet were bare on the harsh pavement. Most who saw him simply ignored him and continued with their fast paced lives. A few knew what he truly was and kept their distance. What he was was something most feared by the mundane, he was a ghost. Not transparent as all the stories say a ghost should be but solid and always staring at the same place in space.

The specter appeared regularly, always in the same place. Today, it was a small coffee shop he was in front of but back when he was alive, the building was much larger, a factory of thread.

The factory was what he saw, not the busy city clerks drinking their mocha lattes. Where his eyes stared had been a window, a window into the office of the factory, where the owner had once sat.

The boy saw the memory of the owner, fat, balding, and old, a man in his fifties bent over books of numbers while children toiled in the next room, while children died.

The boy watched the memory of the man who worked him to death. The man who the boy scared to death, simply by watching.

Ghosts are feared by the normal person because what we forget, what history forgets, they will remember and sometimes that memory is something we would rather forget. Sometimes, to remember is the most frightening thing a person can do