The Ghost

This is Girl speaking. It has been a while. The next story I would write was supposed to be called "The Mourning of the Sun". It is coming. Just not yet. Since then, I have been intrigued by this idea, quantum immortality. This story is inspired by that, as well as some other things. 

"The Ghost, collecting dust from souls already departed. She has been wandering for some time now, but there are no footprints in the sand, only pieces of them on her skin. If you ask her what it was all for, she will not have an answer.

But she can tell you about her friend, the one from childhood years. Amanda she was called. Long hair, orange in the sun, brown by dawn, and always braided in pigtails. This friend of hers was often told she had a peculiar look, but it turned bland whenever she opened her mind, something she rarely did with most.

The Ghost was an exception, though. 

“I believe we all die every morning we still stand. I know I have made a sacrifice every time I looked death in the face and escaped, a piece of flesh I left behind to go somewhere I was always meant to live.

But there are parts of us which decay on the way, and eventually… one day you will realize that you were never meant to stay.”

The Ghost still remembers those words, the ones which struck her as wise, but incomprehensible… inaccessible, which really, made them rather foolish in the end. 

The very same day, The Ghost walked into a roadway without looking. She would have been run over by a drunk, if it wasn’t for Amanda’s cries over a torn hairband. A cry which would make any man shudder. The Ghost knelt in front of the unmoving headlights, when Amanda ran all she could, terror in her eyes, and yelled:

“Now you can never leave!”

The Ghost never found out what she meant by that. She was gone the next day.

But somehow, she was still everywhere, the branches of a tree braided before her eyes. The wind never called her name, but it did put in motion everything which reminded of a girl never uncovered, the ringing of her last words. 

Whenever The Ghost would slip on soap, forget to turn the oven off, go for a swim, cross a bridge, or look down the cliffside, there would be this unsettling sensation, this knowledge that no matter how deep the knife slit, she would never leave. 

She got especially mournful when the metal spike pressed against her throat, but skin still never impaled. 

Every night from there on out, she would huddle up in a fetus position and run her finger from her chin to her sternum, caress the part of her which should be full of holes. She recognized the lightness her body contained, how empty it had gotten. And bit by bit, the shell of her was replaced by something much more rotten, a shimmer rubbing off. 

So now, now that all is gone and everyone has left, she looks up to a sky always full, and she waits, waits for the wind to bring her a leaf, from a faraway tree, the one which chose to stay. 

And in the sun, it will have an orange glow, but always turn brown before dawn."