A Ghost Story.

“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.’ “