Otherworldly

She was beautiful, but nobody saw her.

Well, except the barista, Adam, who happened to catch a glimpse of her out of the corner of his eye and nearly commented on her rather unfashionable dress before he realized that someone had walked through her to pick up his non-fat-extra-hot-triple-shot-no-foam-whipped-cream-hazelnut-latte.

Not figuratively. Literally walked through her.

Which was about the time Adam decided he shouldn’t say anything at all about the woman until they were alone and he could figure out what exactly was going on.

It happened on a Wednesday, the dull day in the middle of the week when he closed the shop and mopped the floor and listened to his manager moaning about Starbucks and the downfall of existence in the back room.

She was sitting… standing… floating?… near the stools on the edge of the bar, neatly tucking the folds in her skirts. Adam watched as she flicked her hands over the nearly-transparent fabric and sighed.

And then she looked up.

***

She was beautiful, but nobody saw her.

Well, not anymore, at least.

That’s the trouble, she often thought to herself, with being a ghost. And it was particularly troubling, if she might say so, when one was an attractive ghost. Not that she would say she was beautiful, but there was a kind of otherworldly beauty about her.

Of course, she usually put that down to being, well, otherworldly.

The tragedy was that even now, with her dress nearly two hundred years out of date and an especially gruesome blood spatter bloomed across her chest like some sort of morbid peony, she was quite lovely.

And quite lonely.

So now she spent her time sitting… standing… floating?… in this coffee shop built on the site of her death, spending every day gazing out at the life she could have experienced.

Alright, not this exact life, considering iPhones hadn’t even been thought of at the time of her demise. Had phones been in existence? She couldn’t remember. Honestly, it had been so many years of watching people calling and texting and — what was the latest craze? — snapping each other with one phone or another that she couldn’t actually remember a time without phones.

That was what happened when you’d been dead for this long.

Most days, she was content to watch the goings-on in the coffee shop, occasionally tapping someone on the shoulder when they were being rude to the handsome young barista, just to see the discomfort when the chill of a spectral hand sent shivers down their spines. Most days, she enjoyed hanging about until the store closed so that she could watch the workers clean and chat and laugh with each other.

But today was not most days, and she had decided to feel sorry for herself.

She straightened the creases on her skirts and sighed. Afterlife was a misery.

And then she looked up.