The Retro Journals - Banshee

Some woman was wailing. She’d been wailing all night. It was a shrill un-worldly sound and it sent shivers down my spine. It was the deepest, saddest, heart-breaking sound I’d ever heard and it cut through your skin, right into your mind and touched something deep inside you. It made you feel like you were looking into a deep, wounded soul, like you could feel every pain it’d ever felt. It made you wonder about the evil that lives in our world, invincible from our human eyes. It scared me, gave me the willies and I wondered for how much longer I could bear to listen to her before I lost my mind as well. I’d never thought anything could beat the cackler’s voice, but this did hands down. I knew then that I don’t belong here, in this place of muddled realities and cruel illusions, in this place of deep pain. I wanted to go home, wanted to see mama and Eric and Ron. I didn’t want to be here, listening to some lost soul relieve some private horrors. I just wanted it to stop right now, this moment. I opened my mouth to yell at her to stop and another wail went up, right out of my lungs. Then I realised I was the wailing woman.

There’s a hole in my soul

that won’t heal,

There’s a rage, and a pain

even now I still feel,

Even though I’m a man,

still I don’t understand!

But that’s what happens

When you don’t have a Father…

                           Fred Hammond

                           (The Rebirth, K. Franklin)