“Tell me then, when was the last time you saw a ghost?” She laughed.

“They have a smell-”

“-a ghost has a smell?”

“It’s how I knew it was coming.” He ignored her interruption, “When it first started happening I didn’t notice it, the smell I mean. The door would bang…slam…then it would come for me.” He paused, faltered. His face took countenance of malevolent forces enchanting the shadow-stricken ribs of a torch-lit sepulcher. He drew his eyes tight. “You know the feeling when you can’t breathe? Like you’re stuck in a dream…drowning…only you never drown; you never drown, but you never taste breath again either…stuck…forever clawing for the surface but knowing you’ll never make it…suspended…waiting for your lungs to explode yet somehow knowing they never will? That’s what it was like…there was nothing I could do…trapped…able to only exist in a state of perpetual fear…a ghost in a bedsheet doesn’t sound like much to be frightened of until there’s one looking right at you…”  

He went quiet for some time and she began to think of how she might try to change the subject, lighten the mood. There was something in the way he spoke that made her want to cry, maybe hug him, maybe run away screaming. She was just about to say something when, “Grandma used to say that if you met a ghost perhaps you should listen…bullshit…that sometimes ghosts had the best stories to tell. Time has a funny way of being greedy, likes to swallow every detail and spit them out backwards…makes you feel like a spectator on the fringe of some strange world that belongs to someone else.”

Gravity pulled the weight of his words upon the room like a dropped anvil. She looked to run but the walls had suddenly closed themselves around her.

“I could feel it… knew it was there…shadows don’t breathe…shadows don’t smell like…like…”

She touched his hand. He flinched.“Grandma was wrong. The only thing that fucking ghost ever said to me was, ‘shhhh.’ “

She’d hardly glanced at him in the passing, but her hair had caught in the wind and tousled over her shoulders. It smelled like magnolia and her eyes had stung his heart with the haunting echo of deja-vu.

He thought about his parents. They’d advocated things like time and how love works in linear equations, no sex before marriage sort of values. It’s a sacred thing and marriage is forever. They’d divorced after 17 years and his father’d blown his brains out in the summer of ’97. He turned back, thought maybe he’d just caught the last sight of her taking a left on Washington, but the sun was high and bright and he’d never exactly seen the back of her head so he couldn’t quite be sure. It didn’t matter anyway. She was her and he was him and she was there and he was here and she’d disappeared into the blink of a million towering windows all gaping down upon the city with eyes that never closed. He hadn’t even known her name.

He was sure he didn’t need to take his shoes off, but he did anyway. Tucked them neatly side by side in the gap separating concrete from steel. He didn’t want anyone to trip on them.  

The wilderness of men roared behind him. The smell of hot rubber, the squeal of tapped brakes, the clang of steel upon steel; somewhere a siren howled. He did not see the man flash by, ashing his cigarette out a partly cracked window and wondering if his wife was going to smell the booze on his breath, or the woman behind him who was eating as she drove and had seen James standing there in only socks, supposed he was some vagrant hobo before forgetting about him altogether in the space of time it took to smack her lips.

He paused at the sight of his socks. The left was red and the right was black. He hadn’t even noticed.

He gripped the rail, thought again of the girl, half wondered if there might be an article in the paper tomorrow about some man who’d flung himself off the bridge and she’d remember having passed him, maybe she’d feel sad, think that he’d been handsome and in some silly wisp of girlish daydream picture them kissing. The steel was cold and somehow mocking, perfectly appropriate for the moment.

He heard a horn bleat above him as he fell. The sky seemed unnaturally blue, soft and striking, impervious to the sprawling stain of mankind that had raped the face of the earth beneath it. Beneath the ribs of the bridge he could see great grey lumps of feathers peppering every available space. He remembered his father once calling them rats with wings, but he thought the colony nestled there underneath the overpass somehow beautiful and suddenly the thought occurred to him that all of life could be beautiful in the exact same way if he only approached it from a different perspective.

He didn’t feel most his bones breaking as his body was introduced to Great Mud. He never knew that he was swept downstream a half mile before being caught by the fin of the outboard motor blade on a moored Newport, 27 footer. All the boats were supposed to be buoyed in the marina with motors up, but the owner had simply forgotten and it was the only thing that had stopped him from being swept out to sea and being forever classified as some unsolved mystery. His body would be discovered a week later, but he’d never know that either. The last thought to pass through his mind was the wonder over what her skin would have felt like against his own had they met during better times.

                                                                 *****

She made a habit of coming out here at least once a week. She liked the scents of mud and salt mingling together like awkward teenagers and how at sunset the bridge in the distance was silhouetted over the river like a black rainbow in some upside down universe. It somehow made her think of innocence and dreams and the beginning of great adventures. She liked the way the dock swayed slightly beneath the weight of her body and made her legs slightly question each step. She thought the rows and rows of sailboats and yachts surrounding her seemed like a great flock of giant, sleeping ducks.

She paused at the nose of a sailboat. It was a Newport, 27 footer. She knew it because her father had owned one just like it and she’d spent many Chesapeake afternoons daydreaming abaft. The vessel was sleek, white with a single, purple stripe running horizontally down the side. The window crowning the galley reminded her of an oblong, beady eye. It scrutinized her carefully. On its hull: Daisy.

She moved towards the stern, the river slapping the boat like some lazy dog lapping water. Something bobbed near the lowered motor. She stooped, she’d heard stories of poor manatees getting injured in motor blades left down like this, submerged her hand and free’d the object.

She stood, gasped. Her insides twisted. His skin was grey, sallow and taut where it was not. Swollen. Bloated. There seemed something familiar about him. It made her mind stutter for a name or a time or a place from which she might have known him but she could place nothing.

She turned her head to vomit. The wind tousled her hair over her shoulder, it smelled slightly of magnolia.  

He hadn’t heard what she’d said. The rain was coming down in grey mist, the air pregnant with clouds that hugged the rolling pine around them making the sky seem closer. He’d been staring at the earth that clung to his hands in sticky lumps. It was rich, dark brown, smelled of musk and dirt and life. There was something satisfying in peeling it from his fingers and rolling it into small, smooth balls.

“What made you think of it? The story?” She stood, paused from tilling the soil with her pitchfork. Burnt mahogany escaped her ponytail, bounced beside her eye, tickled her cheek. She smiled, looked at him expectantly.

He stopped rolling, flicked a ball of mud at her. She giggled. “Magic,” he said. He spied a speck of dirty orange peeking out from the broken soil, began trying to pry it free with two fingers. “Nah, I dunno. Just sat down and the thought hit me, what does it feel like to be in love with a girl who doesn’t love you back?” He loosed the carrot, held it up to her. It was deformed and runty, but remained unbroken, split at the bottom like a pair of legs. He made it waddle through the air like some sultry, slow-motion walk before tossing it at her. “In the end the main character throws himself off a bridge in surrender to the futility of life.”

She swatted the carrot, laughed. Her eyes matched the soil. They were profound, reminded him of the wilderness. “Wow, just like that?”

He faltered, wondered if she’d noticed, spotted another carrot, took to removing it gently from the soil. “Just like that.”

His mother was the only woman on the street who never tried to to kill the dandelions. Every season the neighbors would all be out in their yard on hands and knees, rumps in the air, huffing and puffing and pulling at great yellow lumps in handfuls. They’d stand and wave them about the sky, smiling at each other. After that they’d always brag about how their lawn was dandelion free, go through great lengths to explain how they’d made it so. But not mother. She said these days people were confused- used to be that folks would remove grass to make way for dandelions but now it was the other way around and she’d never quite been able to understand it. She said that dandelions where like flowers. They were friendly little weeds that just wanted to be loved. Once she told him that wilted dandelions made her sad, that they should be loved just like any other flower and anyway, she said, they were special. They knew secrets. They were silent little prophets and if you listened close they’d tell you all about the rain, might even tell you whether or not a girl loved you. Pluck one and hold it under a person’s chin, if they laugh it means they have a taste for butter.

Sometimes the wind would blow hard and they’d chase after the little seeds. “If you catch one, just one, in between your fingers, your wildest dreams’ll come true,” mother told him. He even spent a whole three days crawling on his belly through quilted patches of yellow. Mother told him that if he found the longest dandelion stalk she’d make a tea, it had special powers and it’d make him grow tall. The tea tasted terrible, but he smiled and told her it was the best dandelion tea he’d ever had. He could have sworn he grew an entire foot before summer'd even begun that year.

That was the last spring before the dandelions started dying. The season started like every other: the snow peeled itself back in layers of dripping water until the earth was finally satisfied and the first cherry blossoms began to flash cameo pink in Mrs. DIckens yard across the street. The hummingbirds came back to T.R. Enright’s down the way, began suckling nectar again from the feeding tubes he always hung about his patio. The neighbors began flashing their rumps in the air like little spring chicks saluting the sun. They’d peck madly at their lawns and there’d be mother, tiptoeing around her front yard and reading poetry to the budding dandelions.

He couldn’t say the day exactly, but it began with a whimper. It startled him from sleep and he followed the noise, found mother in the front yard, she was on her knees tickling a lone, wilted mane amongst a sad little pride of dandelion. He heard, “please be happy...come back...I know a joke...please...be happy again…” It broke his heart but he didn’t much know what to do so he went to the kitchen and made mother a bagel with cream cheese. Served it to her with orange juice from a box that said it’d been made with 25% real juice, asked mother what she thought the rest might be made of and they both looked at the label and didn’t speak a word of what he’d seen.

This scene repeated itself in exactly the same manner every morning without fail until the cold cough of old man winter came to cover everything in white. The only thing that changed was that he ran out of meaningless things to talk about. They knew where the cream cheese was farmed and what street it was made on and that Smith’s Bagels were handcrafted to perfection, a family recipe proudly passed down for 104 years. Mostly she’d just sit there crunching loudly and staring at the wall, hardly even bothering to suck the crumbs and he just staring blankly at the table and feeling quite awkward but also unsure of what to do.

No amount of tickling managed to save that little patch. Mother placed a cross made from popsicle sticks where they used to be. She said she was fine but a shock of her hair went gray and her eyes lacked luster.

Things got progressively worse each season. After the earth broke free from snow, the cherry blossoms flashed and the hummingbirds came back to T.R. Enright’s, another patch of dandelions in mother’s once-beautiful bouquet would begin to droop. She’d try something different each season. First she had a tea party with one little dying plot for 214 mornings. He knew exactly because he marked his calendar with little x’s. She even made him cut up her bagels into tiny bite-sized pieces so she could share with each one. The season after that she tried painting; painted exactly 336 different versions of the sun and sang Frere Jacques in her best French accent the entire time. After that it was stand up comedy and she would have been hilarious, had the whole thing not been heartbreaking. The lawn kept shrinking back to green, mother’s hair to gray, more popsicle sticks appeared.

Soon she became convinced that old man Woodrow was sneaking over and poisoning them. He’d strolled by once and remarked how they seemed to be taking over her yard. She’d always known he hated dandelions. She could hear it in the smug little way he said good morning. 

Then one morning mother stopped crunching her bagel, “you….”  she said, and like a whipped-shy dog beaten by it’s master, it was the last time she ever looked him in the eye. She began to linger over the bagels he placed in front of her every morning with terror. Would smell the orange juice before sipping, if sipping at all, and when he’d ask if everything was ok she’d only swallow loudly and look at the floor.

A few days later, mother told him to go play in the front yard and that everything was going to be ok, then she went into the bathroom with the toaster, a thing he thought peculiar but those days most things were. He sat there for some time. Just sat there on the front porch in front of a field full of popsicle-stick crosses all darkened by long shadows of retreating sun and trying to remember the last time he didn't hate dandelions. Maybe if he’d been able to catch one of the seeds between his fingers none of this would have ever happened.

He heard a crack. The lights flashed off and then back on behind him. Something might have been burning. He looked down to the yard and giggled, the last dandelion had finally died. As he wondered what the smell was, part of him couldn’t wait to run upstairs and tell mother.