Things are changing, and Nancy is restless.

She misses the old days, and she tells me so. We pass the time reminiscing while the landlord removes art from the walls. This hotel used to be colorful and vibrant in a slow-paced, Bohemian sort of way. It was the artistic heart of the city, a place where the broken and misunderstood were given a chance at survival without question or judgement.

Nancy and I used to live down the hall from one another. I would hole up in room 113 with two other girls, turning tricks for a few bucks, earning just enough to buy heroin from my supplier. When Nancy needed a hit, she’d come and see me. We would get high together, and it was in those moments we bonded behind a hazy curtain of carefree indifference.

Nancy and I weren’t always friends. This place, and our common interests, threw us together. You know...time and circumstance. She shared glimpses of her childhood with me; not at all intimate, but rather fragmented and disturbing shards of an incomplete puzzle. Words like suicide and schizophrenia peppered her conversations. She never asked me about my childhood, which was fine; I wouldn’t have been strong enough to relive the abuse my father put me through.

Nancy didn’t have to turn tricks to make money. Her boyfriend was famous, or at least he had been. They had enough money to live on, and party on, for a while. But when things got tight, they stole everything from food to drugs. She told her story like it was no big deal. It’s just the way things were.

She says she still runs into her boyfriend now and again. Every time I question Nancy about him, she immediately gets defensive. He’s harmless, she says dismissively with a wave of her hand, as if brushing away a thought she doesn’t want to be weighed down by.

Nancy’s agitated state has become more pronounced recently. She wanders the halls aimlessly, passing the time without direction or destination. It’s as if she’s trying to find her way through a dense fog, frustrated. She’s looking for something; she knows it’s right there in front of her, and she can’t see it...

And then it dawns on me.

We stroll through the hotel lobby, and I say to her, “You know, Nancy, it wasn’t Sid.”

Her head snaps in my direction, her eyes wide and focused, like someone has just stuck smelling salts under her nose. She accidentally bumps into a chair, and the few people in the lobby are startled by the action.

“What do you mean?” she asks me.

“Sid was falsely accused. It was an accident,” I reply.

Now Nancy is studying me, like I’m speaking in some sort of alien tongue.

“You don’t remember anything, do you,” I say.

She drops her head and stays like that for a moment, staring at the linoleum floor.

“I was so messed up that night, everything is still a blur.”

“Well, I wasn’t.”

Nancy lifts her head and is staring at me again, waiting to hear what I have to say.

“I came to see you that night. I knocked on the door and no one answered. It was unlocked, so I walked in. Sid was completely passed out on the bed, drunk I figured. As I called your name, I heard a noise from the bathroom.”

Nancy’s eyes got even wider, as if this was the first time she was hearing this story, her own story.

“I had just gotten some cocaine from a friend. I had the baggie and a knife in my hand when I found you leaning over the sink, already high as a kite. You turned around and lunged at me, trying to grab the baggie. I told you to stop, but you wouldn’t listen. You practically threw yourself at me, and onto my knife.”

As Nancy listened, I could tell it was all new to her. A mixture of sadness and relief seemed to envelop her, washing away any sense of doubt. Closure was the only gift I had left to give.

Nancy looked at me, nodded her head, and smiled. Without another word, she headed over to the lobby entrance and drifted through the wall.

She was finally free.

"Help," her words come out in a wheeze. Her deep blueberry eyes are hidden beneath her closed lids. A golden spread of hair lays across her pillow. Even in her sleep she can feel the sear of my hands that grip her throat. I curl my nails to add more pain. 

"Stop!" In a Jack-in-the-Box motion she springs up. I howl with demon hate as my form is forced backwards. When her eyes flutter and widen with a stare in my direction I pray she sees me. No, instead she puts a hand to her chest with a gasp that could be a sob. The gold hair falls to cover her face as her head lowers. 

"I. Hate. You." My words are enough to kick up a wind. 

Just. A. Wind. 

Another scream of rage; pure rage. She can't hear me, but she trembles. I freeze as her hands reach slowly to touch her neck. My own hands had left a dark, red mark. Now I allow a conner of my lip to twist slightly up.

"Macy, help me," She drops her hands to her lap and tilts her head to the ceiling. I long to go over to her; to dig my nails into her pretty little face. But now she is awake. Her force keeps me at bay. The living and dead do not mix. Never. 

"What is this?" She begs the ceiling for answers. Of course it gives her none. "Macy, please! I know your there! You can keep me safe from this....from him," 

I cringe. "Don't say his name. Go back to sleep and I will give you what you deserve! Do it!" I demanded. My words echo only to me. 

The tears come and they slip down her face. "Why does Trey hate me? I was just so scared.... Tell him I'm sorry!" 

I hate her. I hate her so much. I will tell Trey no such thing. My step-father hears his name. 

"What have you done?" his voice is hoarse with worry as his shape appears next to me. 

"I hate her." Now I have someone to tell. My sister's pale face is covered by her hair again. She is sobbing very quietly. 

"Her neck...." Trey sucks in a breath. He tries in vain to go to his daughter. He is dead. Doesn't he understand it's pointless to try?

"It's her fault. It's all her fault, but she can sit there and cry about being punished?" I shake my head disgusted. "She got us killed Trey!" I can see him trying to ignore me. "Your daughter called because she had a nightmare. A nightmare!!!  We got in that accident because she had a nightmare and had to be picked up! Its. Her. Fault!" I am to the point of screaming again. "Now she has to pay," 

"Macy, tell Trey I'm sorry," My sister was now almost chanting the sentence. 

"What does she mean?" Trey doesn't understand. I can't help but laugh bitterly. 

"Before.... I use to tell her that you hated her. I would whisper in her ear that she was nothing. Now she thinks you are the one hurting her," 

Trey shakes his head. He's an idiot. "No." he denies it. How could his precious little girl think he was the one causing her pain. It's all because of me. My laugh grows. 

"She killed us Trey." I repeat. "And now she has to pay," 

The real estate agent tells her to reconsider. She says she has some truly amazing houses to show before she makes a decision. But I’m watching Evelyn not listen to her, and I see how she looks at the place with that little half smile of hers, that twitch of the finest lines around her mouth, wrinkling and smoothing over in an instant, and I know that nothing is going to dissuade her from purchasing this shitty, dilapidated house.

Friends and family make their appeals. She tells them I know I’ve heard the rumors, that’s all they are, rumors raised from nothing, created for the sake of gossip and for scaring naive outsiders, do people talk of nothing else in this shitty little hick town.

I only want what Evelyn wants, it’s been so long since she's wanted anything. I think she'll finally be able to start over here, maybe this will make her forget and live. But people keep telling her things she doesn't want to hear and they all sounded like variations of a theme, so finally she stops answering calls altogether.

I’m worried about the amount of work needed to make this thing halfway livable and Evelyn looks so wan and lost all the time. Here she is alone with this monster derelict house and each day is spring cleaning and after that there is still more work to be done.

Evelyn works sunup until she collapses in bed at night.

I'm sick of these halfway places, she says to no one. 

Evelyn, pretty Evelyn, I’ll never forget the day I ran after you in the rain, barefoot in the park, with Caleb just beginning to jut out of your stomach, and I was running after you yelling for you to stop, scared but laughing because you were laughing and you were beautiful in the rain with your hair dripping down your face, you were so goddamned beautiful, it hurt to look at you.  

Now you walk around tired and quiet, with those sunken hungry eyes.

When was the last time you laughed?

Slowly the house becomes whole again. She polishes until every surface gleams, she puts in new windows, paints, organizes, reassembles. Her room upstairs overlooks the garden and pond in the back of the house. 

There are things here, hidden in the silence, that I don’t like to think about. And the force that drives Evelyn to fix this place—that scares me even more. 

Caleb was two years old. He was the perfect baby, quiet and uncomplaining. We worried that he was sleeping too much, too often and too deeply, and not eating enough. We were good at fretting—everything seemed like a potential disaster. 

You brought us here with you, didn’t you, I wanted to scream at her. I wanted to shake her, grip her by the shoulder so hard that she could feel my nails digging in her skin. You disturbed our baby's rest, how could you do it, Caleb just two years old and a barely visible lump underneath the blankets. You dug us up, God knows how you did it, you had to work with my decomposing weight and Caleb like a limp doll tucked under your arm. (They told you to cremate and you said no). Caleb he loved the color blue, he loved entwining his tiny perfect hands in his mother’s hair and pulling, he loved to sleep. A deep sleep, almost impossible to wake up. 

Sometimes at night after another exhausting day, I’ll keep watch over my wife’s sleeping form. She curls up in a fetal position with her hands protecting her stomach.

Evelyn, I heard a laugh I swear I heard it, last night it came from downstairs. I couldn’t tell where it could have come from, or if it were male or female or even human, but I know I’ve never heard it before, and you were asleep. And sometimes in that area she calls the living room, there’s voices and footfalls, the swish of clothing, things clattering to the floor.

Sometimes I hear her singing around the house. Once, I heard her laugh and that sound broke around the house, and all throughout it, and the silence was quieter afterwards.

She doesn't eat. Her sunken little face and the bruised sockets, the limp wrists, and sharp edges of her hip and ribs—I can't take it.

She is fading into the house. I'm helpless. She no longer has eyes I can recognize, those aren’t the hands I loved and held and promised to protect throughout life, death, world without end. She teeters up and down the halls, in and out of rooms. I hear her talk to things I can't see. She leaves me; she goes where I can’t follow. She’s so thin and translucent, sunlight streaming from the windows looks strong enough to hurt her, to melt her away. She floats on drafts throughout the house, and mirrors hide her passing.

The voices are so beautiful she says and I didn’t believe her but I see now. The whole house swells with their presence, with colors bursting and small ripples of light extending, and they are calling where are you and I say here I am here I am here—and they welcome me with voices raised and over the singing and the echoes of ringing colors I hear the voices of so many loved ones, I see Evelyn and she is holding in her arms our son and they are coming for me 

Time doesn't work the way it did when I was alive. The moment I'm not paying attention, days will slide by. Sometimes I have to find a newspaper or calendar to know how much life has passed since I left the physical world. Even then, I can't always decipher the letters and numbers. It's like trying to read something inside a dream. I get an impression of what I'm looking at, but if I try to focus too much on a word or character, it eludes me.

Time, space, observation, even memory--these are concepts for physical, temporal beings. I am losing the skill to keep track of them. Being dead is like suffering a steadily worsening case of dementia.

The living carry these ideas about ghosts, hazy shadows drifting spookily through graveyards, perhaps trying to deal with some "unfinished business". It is true I am at the cemetery often, lingering at the plot where my spoiled meat was buried, but only because, when someone comes to visit my stone, they sometimes talk to me. In those moments, I can almost feel alive again.

"Hi, baby."

The voice of my wife, a soft breeze through tall grasses. She always whispers when she visits my grave. She's embarrassed because she knows she might just be talking to a stone. Will it ever be possible for me to communicate to her that I'm listening?

She bends down to set a colourful spray of flowers at the base of the headstone.

"Your birthday came and went. Nan and I wondered if we should mark it in some way. We decided it would be too irreverent to have a party of some sort. Even a solemn gathering to remember you would just be too much. Like your funeral all over again. The only day worse than that was the day I got that call from the police."

I try to see her face clearly. I know she has begun to cry. I don't see her so much as I exist in her vicinity. I can make out the vague glint of tears on her cheeks, now and then.

I never know how to feel when someone cries over me. I don't want my loved ones to keep suffering, but to know I'm missed gives my existence some meaning. It assures me I was a positive force in someone's life, and therefore the too brief time I spent in my body couldn't have been a waste.

"I don't know if it's ever going to stop hurting."

Her soft voice. A bird's wings. I loved her.

"Baby... why were you taken from me? I keep trying to find the answer to that. None of it makes sense. But I know that answers aren't going to bring you back. People tell me I need to start trying to move forward... but I'm stuck. I'm in limbo."

You and me both, my love.

We are at home again. As always, I can't know how much time has passed. In the space of a blink, things leap ahead. Or perhaps they leap backward. I can't be sure time is even linear now.

My wife stands at a closed door. I can't remember which room it is. It isn't our bedroom, and I can't see inside. A study, perhaps. The place I settled down to do my reading and writing. Yes, I remember work was often an overwhelming pressure, and I often took work home with me. I needed a quiet place to get my work done. She remembers the nights I spent doing that instead of enjoying her as I ought to have been. Seeing her standing there at that door, never opening it, I have so many regrets.

She cries again as she tries to sleep. My half of the bed is empty, without even a pillow. Everything of mine has been removed. It was too much for her to bear. She remains trapped between trying to erase me from her life and trying to hold onto me. Stuck in limbo.

I cannot tell the time, but it's no longer night. She is sitting in numb silence with a cup of tea when they come to the door.

They--who are they? Youths--thirteen, maybe fourteen years old. I try to see their faces, to look for something familiar.

After quiet conversation with my wife, they ascend the stairs in reverent single file. She stands at the bottom landing, watching them, and then turns her back. They're going to that room with the closed door, and she cannot watch. I follow them instead of her, wanting to see, wanting to remember.

I know these kids. I think they have been to my grave. Why?

The room is not a study. It's a bedroom, decorated in pink and turquoise, stuffed animals, pop stars, fairy lights that haven't been plugged in for many months.

Two of the girls are crying now, hugging each other. A third gazes at photos tacked to the wall above a small desk.

"Angie," she whimpers, pulling down one of the photos.

Angie--that was my daughter's name. I had a daughter.

I can finally see. There is my daughter's face in the photos, smiling, carefree, posing with her friends.

One of the kids sets down an open folder on the desk. On top is a newspaper article. The words are so large and bold, I can actually read them:

SMALL TOWN TRAGEDY

DRUNK DRIVER AND DAUGHTER, 13,

KILLED IN HORRIFIC CRASH

I have seen this before. Every now and then, it comes back to me.

"Baby... why were you taken from me?"

My wife's voice, delicate as milkweed.

It was never my grave.

You plead to me, you plead to me

     muted tones and unheard words

     intimately, profanely, silently

     trumpet of declaration wails

     invisible train passes through station

See him, hear him, know he’s still here

     the ghost of O’Sullivan

     no tales from dead men

     rats gnawing on feet

     fleeting apparitions lost

Leaving no shadow, snaking between worlds

     watching life past from hidden shelf

     soul passing through walls to other side

     O’Sullivan arose and stood by my side

     “I have done my time and must depart”

Piercing eyes begin to fade from view

     squinting in the fog of time

     empty buckets, nothing inside

     for a decade, he’s been dead

     still I hear his step in my heartbeat.

Heather and I are friends. She likes to ignore me a lot, but that's okay. I play jokes on her to get her back. I don't think Heather likes my jokes very much. She always looks real worried when she finds them out.

But we play games together! Like tag or hide and go seek! Heather isn't very good at finding me, but she's a real fast runner in tag.

I try to play other games with her, like blocks or kick ball, but she never seems to like those.

Lately, Heather doesn't come upstairs very often to play with me. When she does, her parents are with her. They look in her closet and under the bed. But we're not playing hide and seek, so I don't know why they do that.

Heather goes to school everyday, and things are quite boring while she's gone.

Why don't I go to school? Well, I don't want to, so, I don't.

Anyway, while Heather is gone, I like to play with her toys. She has some really nice toys, Heather does. She has porcelain dolls and houses for them, and she has plenty of jacks- they're probably my favorite, and she has lots of pretty hats, but I don't think those are toys.

Heather's parents buy her lots of things. I think that's because they know she gets worried real easy, so they buy her toys to make her happy.

I know she gets worried real easy 'cause she always looks worried while we're playing.

Today, Heather came home and when she saw me playing, she started crying. I didn't want her to cry, so I tried to make her laugh with one of her dolls. Heather saw and started crying more.

"Get out!" she yelled. "Leave me alone!"

Get out? I wasn't going to leave, not when my friend was upset.

"Go away! Leave!"

I was not going to leave. No. No! This is my house!

"Get out!"

Heather's parents came in because of all of the yelling, but I didn't care.

I was mad. Heather was telling me to leave my house! My home! Anyone can look at the rock next to the house; it has my name! My parents dedicated it to me when I died in 1837!

That's my body there. Right there. Submerged in the overflowing bathtub. Pills stuck in my throat. Toaster floating aimlessly into my breasts.

My parents aren't home yet, but they'll see me. Somehow in a different way than I'm seeing myself. And it's strange because I'm having a literally outer-body experience. Standing over what was me in this new me. One that I can't touch or feel.

From this perspective, I can't help but to think how pretty I am. I like the way my hair flows in the water, intertwined with dissolving bubbles. And my legs are so relaxed, no hair on them. Naked and alone.

When I said I wanted this, I really did. But now I think that I don't.

I reach out and run my fingers across my face. Even when dead, my corpse erupts in goosebumps that I can't understand. Then I force my hand through the corpse, but it just sits there, still in it's own suicide. I want to be sucked back inside of the empty shell, but I'm not.

I want to cry. I feel like crying, but there's no tears streaming down my now-face. My heartless one. It hurts because, staring at my prone and exposed shell, I realize that I just gave up so much. The world. My family. My friends. Myself. Everything that I held dear is gone and I can't go back.

©SelfTitled, 2017