"periphery"
Feb. 8th, 2019 10:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sonreirGhost
The first person I ever haunted was an older lady named Edith.
I was new to the whole business then, still trying to figure out what exactly had happened to me. It was like one second I didn't exist, and the next I did. I woke up in a closet, squashed underneath a suffocating pile of patchwork quilts. When I went to knock them off me, I went through them instead, and that's when I realized that something was up.
I realized, after a few hours of racking my brain and trying to figure out just what was wrong with me, that I had to be a ghost. I had a lot of jumbled memories, most of which I wasn't sure were real, and no clue how I ended up in her apartment.
I tried to leave, after I realized what was going on. No sense in staying tied down somewhere if I was a ghost, I thought. I got halfway through the window, and something yanked me back inside. That was when I realized I was stuck, and I decided to make the best of a bad situation.
Edith wasn't a new tenant. As far as I could tell, she'd been living in the apartment for six or seven years, ever since her husband had died and she'd decided to sell the house. She was a nice lady -- white-haired but still active, baking cookies for the neighbors and going to swim aerobics twice a week.
I debated for a while about whether to let her know she had a ghost. I wasn't sure how she'd take it. She was nice, like I said, and I didn't want to upset her.
I decided that I needed to, if only so she could make up her own mind whether or not she wanted to stay in the apartment.
She had alphabet magnets on the fridge, for her grandkids. I was able to use them to spell out "YR HAUNTED". She believed in ghosts, and that helped, I think. When she saw the magnets on the fridge, she used them to spell back: "FRIENDLY?" and I replied promptly: "YES".
I tried to let her know, through the alphabet magnet medium, that I could hear her just fine, and there was no need for her to respond using them, but there was only one of each letter, and so our communication was limited. I don't think she ever knew that I could hear her. It was probably better that way -- she liked to sing, off-key, and talked to her cats a lot, about how she missed her husband, but being in a nice place, with friends that lived nearby, helped her.
She did ask, at one point, through the fridge door, whether or not I knew where her husband was.
I hated having to tell her no. I thought about lying -- maybe a nice little message, saying that he was on the Other Side and waiting for her -- but I didn't know, and I didn't want to get her hopes up. I didn't even know who I was, who I had been. I had vague memories, but nothing concrete. I didn't know why I was a ghost. The afterlife doesn't come with a manual. You're alive, and then you're dead, and that's it. You don't remember before -- or at least, I don't. I wasn't even sure who I was supposed to be the ghost of, a man or woman, a little boy or a little girl. I was pretty sure I was the ghost of a human being, but I couldn't be positive, because I couldn't remember my life before. I didn't remember dying, or being given a choice to come back as a ghost, or even what had happened before I'd woken up underneath that pile of quilts and realized just what had happened. Maybe other ghosts get a clue, but I don't.
The second tenant I haunted was a young man. His name was Greg, and I was never quite clear on what he did for a living. Something that kept him out of the house a lot, and kept him in great shape. I heard him refer to "clients" on the phone sometimes, and so I decided that he had to be a personal trainer.
I didn't talk to Greg. I tried to -- when Edith moved out, she left the magnets behind as a gift for the next tenant (with "BYE GHOST" spelled out in bright plastic letters stuck to the fridge), but he knocked them off the refrigerator door when he moved in, and never seemed to pay attention to how they moved from day to day. He wasn't there enough to notice that they did move, I think. I tried rearranging stuff a few times, but he never caught on.
Greg lived in the apartment for three years, and I don't think he ever realized I was there.
After a while, I gave up on haunting him. I stopped trying to move the magnets, I stopped watching the cleaning lady, I didn't mess with any of his stuff -- I hunkered down in the empty closet of the extra bedroom and did something like sleep. Hibernate, maybe, is the right word for it.
When I "woke up", it was because someone had opened the closet door. A young woman, with brown hair cut short, wearing a yellow sundress. She had a box in her arms -- is Greg storing something? I wondered.
She left the room, and I glided out after her, to find the living room full of boxes, and all of Greg's furniture gone.
New tenants, I thought. Must be moving in. I watched as they carried everything in -- sitting cross-legged on the kitchen counter, where I had a clear view of the front door. There were two of them, laughing and joking, that seemed to be the ones moving in, a young man and a young woman. I couldn't figure out their relationship. They didn't feel like they were married -- they were young and didn't treat each other like spouses. They didn't look like siblings, either. She was short, with dark hair and blue eyes, and he was tall and thin, redheaded and bespectacled -- but they had an easy camaraderie that indicated a long relationship.
I liked them immediately. They were funny and kind, and best of all, they believed in ghosts. When I accidentally knocked something off the counter (having been startled, during their move-in), she immediately began joking about ghosts, and he responded very seriously, saying he hoped they had a friendly one.
I learned, from watching them, the first few weeks they lived in the apartment, that her name was Stella and his was Kevin. They were best friends, had been since college, and had agreed to room together after they'd both moved from their small hometown into the city. Stella had a job lined up, something to do in some office, and Kevin was a web developer.
I thought a lot about whether or not to introduce myself to them, how to go about it if I landed on yes.
In the meantime, I watched them. I got to know both of them.
Stella was a perfectionist. High strung, a little neurotic, but with a good sense of humor, and a tendency to believe the best of people. She wore dresses to work every day, but at home, she had a pair of jeans with holes in the knees and a bunch of band t-shirts from when she was in college. She liked to bake, and often offered whatever she'd made to Kevin. She made most of their food. The first few weeks, they'd been awkward about it, but after a while, she had offered (after seeing that he was eating cereal for dinner for the third night in a row), and that was that. She planned all their meals, and he paid for the groceries. She felt guilty about it -- I could tell -- but he was so quietly fine with the arrangement that eventually she started to relax, too.
Kevin was more difficult to get a read on. He worked from home four days a week, but "from home" meant anywhere there was internet, and so more often than not he'd start his day by walking down to the local coffee place, ordering a latte, and working there for an hour or two before moving to the public library a couple of blocks away. He dressed more or less the same every day: jeans and a dress shirt, neither of which fit him well. On the weekends, when Stella was baking, he read mystery novels -- old ones, from the 1930s and before -- and watched weird television, comedies I didn't quite "get". Sometimes, when the mood was right (I was never able to figure out when that was), he would go into the kitchen, thump around for a while, and end up with a half-dozen jars of pickles fermenting quietly on the counter.
I noticed that they were falling in love with each other six months after they'd moved in.
It wasn't anything concrete -- it wasn't like, hey, I couldn't help but notice that whenever you leave in the morning, Kevin pines for you and mopes around the apartment wishing you'd stay, or Stella makes eyes at you every time you leave the room. It was more..
I noticed that she started planning meals to make all his favorite dinners.
I saw that, if he was doing laundry in the building's basement, he'd ask her if she wanted him to throw in a load for her, too -- and he'd pay attention to the care tags, so her stuff was laundered properly, something he didn't do for his own clothes.
They did a thousand small, kind things for each other, the kinds of things that could have been dismissed as they're best friends, nothing more, but there was something there. They listened and supported each other, and invented excuses to be around one another. Mostly, they looked at each other, and when they looked at each other, I could tell: there's something there. I, who couldn't leave the apartment, saw it all from the edges -- how they treated one another with kindness that went beyond what friends would do for one another, and how each of them looked, sort of forlornly, at the other when they thought it was safe.
Neither of them was willing to act on it. It got to the point where I thought about telling them they had a ghost, just so I could say, hey, you both love each other, why not act on that?
I tried to let them know the apartment was haunted. They didn't have alphabet magnets, but whenever Stella spilled flour on the counter, I wrote in it -- "hey, you have a ghost" in loopy handwriting. She never seemed to notice, though.
Once in a while she left a pen and paper out, something that she'd written a recipe down on, and I would try to write on it -- but the pen was always too heavy to move.
I kept practicing, kept trying to move it. Eventually I got to the point where I could write single letters, then single words.
Stella saw me at one point, writing. She watched it for a second, then yelled for Kevin.
Startled, I dropped it, leaving a long jagged line down the page. I had managed to write one word: HI.
I had wanted to write, "Hi, you have a friendly ghost", but "hi" was enough.
Kevin came out and saw the paper. I watched his face, as he examined it: "This isn't your handwriting, Stel?"
"No!"
"Guess we're haunted, then," he teased her. "Must be a friendly ghost, though -- 'hi' isn't exactly threatening. I bet these old apartments are hella haunted."
"Don't tease me," Stella told him, a little annoyed. "If you don't believe me..."
"Nah," he said quickly. "It's fun to think that we're haunted."
After the pen incident, Stella started talking to me.
"Hey ghost, I don't know if you're a boy ghost or a girl ghost, but I'd prefer privacy while I'm in the bathroom," she'd say, before shutting the door.
I'd never followed her in anyway, or watched her change, so this didn't bother me any.
"Hey ghost," she began saying, each morning. "Have a good day while I'm at work, okay? Keep an eye on Kev, make sure he doesn't eat all my Twinkies." As though I could somehow stop him, if he tried to.
The correspondence became more personal over time. On a night when Kevin was out with his friends, she might curl up on the sofa in the living room with a glass of wine and chat at me: "Ghost, do you think I should tell him how I feel before we renew our lease? I want to give him an out, if he needs one..."
Or: "Ghost, is this as good as it gets? I feel like I'm stuck. I want to say something, but I don't know how."
I wanted to say something, but I couldn't. She deliberately didn't leave the pen and paper out anymore, and there wasn't any other medium I could write in. I wanted to tell her: he loves you too. Tell him so you can be happy together. Everything is so fleeting, what do you really have to lose? Even if it doesn't last, won't you feel better?
I didn't feel comfortable putting it all down, though. Everything is so fleeting felt like a lie, when I couldn't remember my own life, who I'd been before, or even if I was a boy-ghost or a girl-ghost, just a ghost. A psychic remnant, as one of the internet searches Stella did said. An imprint of something, a strong emotion or feeling that had permanently impacted the space it had happened in.
"A positive emotion," Stella said, when she read it. "Because you're a nice ghost. Mean ghosts wouldn't say 'hi'."
I agreed with this assessment.
Kevin overheard Stella talk to me, sometimes. He rolled his eyes at first -- in a good-natured way, look what she's up to again -- but over time, he began talking to me, too.
"Hey ghost," he said, before he left for coffee in the morning. "Keep an eye on things, will you?"
He didn't confide in me, the way that she did, but he talked to me, and that was something.
Two weeks before they were due to renew their lease, both of them became suddenly awkward around one another.
I could tell what was going on -- how both of them were afraid of what was going to happen next, both afraid of being rejected, not wanting to rock the boat and ruin the friendship, and yet being unwilling to talk about their fears and feelings like adults.
Neither of you has been in this situation before, I wanted to reassure them. It's no wonder you're uncomfortable.
After watching for three days as they failed to talk about the elephant in the room, I decided to take matters into my own hands. I was sick of being stuck on the edges, able to watch and be addressed, but not able to say anything. Stella had never left a notepad out again -- afraid, I suppose, that I wasn't a nice ghost, or that she really was going crazy, that Kevin had simply humored her before -- but I'd seen, on one of the silly shows she watched on Netflix, a scene involving writing in the steam on a mirror.
I waited until she was showering, until she was in the shower (signified by the sound of the shower curtain sliding shut), and glided into the bathroom.
I wrote on the mirror, in the steam, using all my willpower to do it: KEVIN LOVES YOU. YOU LOVE HIM. TELL HIM AND THINGS WILL GET BETTER. LOVE, GHOST.
I didn't stick around to see her get out of the shower. I know she saw my note, though, because I heard her shout: "Goddammit, ghost!" from my place on top of the fridge.
When Stella didn't talk to Kevin, I waited until he, too, was in the shower, and I left a note for him in the steam of the mirror.
STELLA LOVES YOU. TELL HER YOU LOVE HER TOO. LOVE, GHOST.
I glided out when I was done, perched on top of the fridge, and waited for him to say something -- to shout at me, like Stella had.
He didn't. When I heard the bathroom door open, I glided over to him and watched what he did next.
He came out of the bathroom, fully clothed, walked across the hall to Stella's room, and knocked gently on her door.
"Yeah?"
"I think we need to talk. I have something to tell you."
She looked stricken. "Look, if you don't want to renew our lease together..."
"I have feelings for you," he blurted out. "I'm afraid of what this means for us -- for our friendship. If you don't return them, that's okay, but we can't live together anymore."
She looked up at the ceiling, tipped her head back. "Goddammit, ghost."
"What?"
"I love you," she told him, simply.
He blinked at her. "Oh."
"And I'm sorry about the weirdness lately. I've been stressed lately -- work, and...this."
"Yeah," he sympathized. "Okay. Do you want to, like...go out?"
"Are you asking me on a date?"
"Yes," he blurted. "Unless you don't want to."
"Okay, um. When?"
"Now?" she shrugged, and invited him into her room.
I made myself scarce.
The next morning, when Stella walked into the kitchen, she was humming, carrying something in her hands.
She placed it carefully on the kitchen counter. A notebook, and a lightweight pen.
She turned the cover, revealing a blank page.
"Hi, ghost," she said, simply. "If you're, um, real, and not an elaborate prank."
She hesitated for a moment.
"Thank you," she said quietly. "If you have anything else we need to know about, write us a little note, will you? I won't watch, if you're uncomfortable."
She turned and walked out of the room.
Once she was gone, I glided down from the top of the fridge, picked up the pen.
THANK YOU, I wrote. NOTHING TO REPORT YET. YOU SHOULD GET A CAT.
After thinking, I added: AND SOME HOUSEPLANTS. IF YOU'RE GOING TO LIVE HERE ANOTHER YEAR, IT SHOULD FEEL LIKE HOME.
Writing all that tired me out, and I curled up in the closet after I was finished -- the same closet I'd awoken in, all those years ago.
They still leave a notebook out for me. I report on the things I see during the day -- the mischief their cat gets into, and what the neighbors are doing.
I can go outside the apartment, now. I can't leave the building -- I'm working on it -- but I can go up or down floors and visit other apartments.
There are other ghosts out there, living on the edges. I've met them, and I've gotten some of my own questions answered.
I'm not going to share the answers, though.
~*~
When I read the prompt, my brain immediately went to ghosts: who else lives on the periphery, so to speak, unable to communicate with us directly, and probably incredibly frustrated about that fact?
I like the idea of a friendly ghost, and the ghost here is definitely that -- eventually emerging from the periphery to give their report and maybe fix things.
The first person I ever haunted was an older lady named Edith.
I was new to the whole business then, still trying to figure out what exactly had happened to me. It was like one second I didn't exist, and the next I did. I woke up in a closet, squashed underneath a suffocating pile of patchwork quilts. When I went to knock them off me, I went through them instead, and that's when I realized that something was up.
I realized, after a few hours of racking my brain and trying to figure out just what was wrong with me, that I had to be a ghost. I had a lot of jumbled memories, most of which I wasn't sure were real, and no clue how I ended up in her apartment.
I tried to leave, after I realized what was going on. No sense in staying tied down somewhere if I was a ghost, I thought. I got halfway through the window, and something yanked me back inside. That was when I realized I was stuck, and I decided to make the best of a bad situation.
Edith wasn't a new tenant. As far as I could tell, she'd been living in the apartment for six or seven years, ever since her husband had died and she'd decided to sell the house. She was a nice lady -- white-haired but still active, baking cookies for the neighbors and going to swim aerobics twice a week.
I debated for a while about whether to let her know she had a ghost. I wasn't sure how she'd take it. She was nice, like I said, and I didn't want to upset her.
I decided that I needed to, if only so she could make up her own mind whether or not she wanted to stay in the apartment.
She had alphabet magnets on the fridge, for her grandkids. I was able to use them to spell out "YR HAUNTED". She believed in ghosts, and that helped, I think. When she saw the magnets on the fridge, she used them to spell back: "FRIENDLY?" and I replied promptly: "YES".
I tried to let her know, through the alphabet magnet medium, that I could hear her just fine, and there was no need for her to respond using them, but there was only one of each letter, and so our communication was limited. I don't think she ever knew that I could hear her. It was probably better that way -- she liked to sing, off-key, and talked to her cats a lot, about how she missed her husband, but being in a nice place, with friends that lived nearby, helped her.
She did ask, at one point, through the fridge door, whether or not I knew where her husband was.
I hated having to tell her no. I thought about lying -- maybe a nice little message, saying that he was on the Other Side and waiting for her -- but I didn't know, and I didn't want to get her hopes up. I didn't even know who I was, who I had been. I had vague memories, but nothing concrete. I didn't know why I was a ghost. The afterlife doesn't come with a manual. You're alive, and then you're dead, and that's it. You don't remember before -- or at least, I don't. I wasn't even sure who I was supposed to be the ghost of, a man or woman, a little boy or a little girl. I was pretty sure I was the ghost of a human being, but I couldn't be positive, because I couldn't remember my life before. I didn't remember dying, or being given a choice to come back as a ghost, or even what had happened before I'd woken up underneath that pile of quilts and realized just what had happened. Maybe other ghosts get a clue, but I don't.
The second tenant I haunted was a young man. His name was Greg, and I was never quite clear on what he did for a living. Something that kept him out of the house a lot, and kept him in great shape. I heard him refer to "clients" on the phone sometimes, and so I decided that he had to be a personal trainer.
I didn't talk to Greg. I tried to -- when Edith moved out, she left the magnets behind as a gift for the next tenant (with "BYE GHOST" spelled out in bright plastic letters stuck to the fridge), but he knocked them off the refrigerator door when he moved in, and never seemed to pay attention to how they moved from day to day. He wasn't there enough to notice that they did move, I think. I tried rearranging stuff a few times, but he never caught on.
Greg lived in the apartment for three years, and I don't think he ever realized I was there.
After a while, I gave up on haunting him. I stopped trying to move the magnets, I stopped watching the cleaning lady, I didn't mess with any of his stuff -- I hunkered down in the empty closet of the extra bedroom and did something like sleep. Hibernate, maybe, is the right word for it.
When I "woke up", it was because someone had opened the closet door. A young woman, with brown hair cut short, wearing a yellow sundress. She had a box in her arms -- is Greg storing something? I wondered.
She left the room, and I glided out after her, to find the living room full of boxes, and all of Greg's furniture gone.
New tenants, I thought. Must be moving in. I watched as they carried everything in -- sitting cross-legged on the kitchen counter, where I had a clear view of the front door. There were two of them, laughing and joking, that seemed to be the ones moving in, a young man and a young woman. I couldn't figure out their relationship. They didn't feel like they were married -- they were young and didn't treat each other like spouses. They didn't look like siblings, either. She was short, with dark hair and blue eyes, and he was tall and thin, redheaded and bespectacled -- but they had an easy camaraderie that indicated a long relationship.
I liked them immediately. They were funny and kind, and best of all, they believed in ghosts. When I accidentally knocked something off the counter (having been startled, during their move-in), she immediately began joking about ghosts, and he responded very seriously, saying he hoped they had a friendly one.
I learned, from watching them, the first few weeks they lived in the apartment, that her name was Stella and his was Kevin. They were best friends, had been since college, and had agreed to room together after they'd both moved from their small hometown into the city. Stella had a job lined up, something to do in some office, and Kevin was a web developer.
I thought a lot about whether or not to introduce myself to them, how to go about it if I landed on yes.
In the meantime, I watched them. I got to know both of them.
Stella was a perfectionist. High strung, a little neurotic, but with a good sense of humor, and a tendency to believe the best of people. She wore dresses to work every day, but at home, she had a pair of jeans with holes in the knees and a bunch of band t-shirts from when she was in college. She liked to bake, and often offered whatever she'd made to Kevin. She made most of their food. The first few weeks, they'd been awkward about it, but after a while, she had offered (after seeing that he was eating cereal for dinner for the third night in a row), and that was that. She planned all their meals, and he paid for the groceries. She felt guilty about it -- I could tell -- but he was so quietly fine with the arrangement that eventually she started to relax, too.
Kevin was more difficult to get a read on. He worked from home four days a week, but "from home" meant anywhere there was internet, and so more often than not he'd start his day by walking down to the local coffee place, ordering a latte, and working there for an hour or two before moving to the public library a couple of blocks away. He dressed more or less the same every day: jeans and a dress shirt, neither of which fit him well. On the weekends, when Stella was baking, he read mystery novels -- old ones, from the 1930s and before -- and watched weird television, comedies I didn't quite "get". Sometimes, when the mood was right (I was never able to figure out when that was), he would go into the kitchen, thump around for a while, and end up with a half-dozen jars of pickles fermenting quietly on the counter.
I noticed that they were falling in love with each other six months after they'd moved in.
It wasn't anything concrete -- it wasn't like, hey, I couldn't help but notice that whenever you leave in the morning, Kevin pines for you and mopes around the apartment wishing you'd stay, or Stella makes eyes at you every time you leave the room. It was more..
I noticed that she started planning meals to make all his favorite dinners.
I saw that, if he was doing laundry in the building's basement, he'd ask her if she wanted him to throw in a load for her, too -- and he'd pay attention to the care tags, so her stuff was laundered properly, something he didn't do for his own clothes.
They did a thousand small, kind things for each other, the kinds of things that could have been dismissed as they're best friends, nothing more, but there was something there. They listened and supported each other, and invented excuses to be around one another. Mostly, they looked at each other, and when they looked at each other, I could tell: there's something there. I, who couldn't leave the apartment, saw it all from the edges -- how they treated one another with kindness that went beyond what friends would do for one another, and how each of them looked, sort of forlornly, at the other when they thought it was safe.
Neither of them was willing to act on it. It got to the point where I thought about telling them they had a ghost, just so I could say, hey, you both love each other, why not act on that?
I tried to let them know the apartment was haunted. They didn't have alphabet magnets, but whenever Stella spilled flour on the counter, I wrote in it -- "hey, you have a ghost" in loopy handwriting. She never seemed to notice, though.
Once in a while she left a pen and paper out, something that she'd written a recipe down on, and I would try to write on it -- but the pen was always too heavy to move.
I kept practicing, kept trying to move it. Eventually I got to the point where I could write single letters, then single words.
Stella saw me at one point, writing. She watched it for a second, then yelled for Kevin.
Startled, I dropped it, leaving a long jagged line down the page. I had managed to write one word: HI.
I had wanted to write, "Hi, you have a friendly ghost", but "hi" was enough.
Kevin came out and saw the paper. I watched his face, as he examined it: "This isn't your handwriting, Stel?"
"No!"
"Guess we're haunted, then," he teased her. "Must be a friendly ghost, though -- 'hi' isn't exactly threatening. I bet these old apartments are hella haunted."
"Don't tease me," Stella told him, a little annoyed. "If you don't believe me..."
"Nah," he said quickly. "It's fun to think that we're haunted."
After the pen incident, Stella started talking to me.
"Hey ghost, I don't know if you're a boy ghost or a girl ghost, but I'd prefer privacy while I'm in the bathroom," she'd say, before shutting the door.
I'd never followed her in anyway, or watched her change, so this didn't bother me any.
"Hey ghost," she began saying, each morning. "Have a good day while I'm at work, okay? Keep an eye on Kev, make sure he doesn't eat all my Twinkies." As though I could somehow stop him, if he tried to.
The correspondence became more personal over time. On a night when Kevin was out with his friends, she might curl up on the sofa in the living room with a glass of wine and chat at me: "Ghost, do you think I should tell him how I feel before we renew our lease? I want to give him an out, if he needs one..."
Or: "Ghost, is this as good as it gets? I feel like I'm stuck. I want to say something, but I don't know how."
I wanted to say something, but I couldn't. She deliberately didn't leave the pen and paper out anymore, and there wasn't any other medium I could write in. I wanted to tell her: he loves you too. Tell him so you can be happy together. Everything is so fleeting, what do you really have to lose? Even if it doesn't last, won't you feel better?
I didn't feel comfortable putting it all down, though. Everything is so fleeting felt like a lie, when I couldn't remember my own life, who I'd been before, or even if I was a boy-ghost or a girl-ghost, just a ghost. A psychic remnant, as one of the internet searches Stella did said. An imprint of something, a strong emotion or feeling that had permanently impacted the space it had happened in.
"A positive emotion," Stella said, when she read it. "Because you're a nice ghost. Mean ghosts wouldn't say 'hi'."
I agreed with this assessment.
Kevin overheard Stella talk to me, sometimes. He rolled his eyes at first -- in a good-natured way, look what she's up to again -- but over time, he began talking to me, too.
"Hey ghost," he said, before he left for coffee in the morning. "Keep an eye on things, will you?"
He didn't confide in me, the way that she did, but he talked to me, and that was something.
Two weeks before they were due to renew their lease, both of them became suddenly awkward around one another.
I could tell what was going on -- how both of them were afraid of what was going to happen next, both afraid of being rejected, not wanting to rock the boat and ruin the friendship, and yet being unwilling to talk about their fears and feelings like adults.
Neither of you has been in this situation before, I wanted to reassure them. It's no wonder you're uncomfortable.
After watching for three days as they failed to talk about the elephant in the room, I decided to take matters into my own hands. I was sick of being stuck on the edges, able to watch and be addressed, but not able to say anything. Stella had never left a notepad out again -- afraid, I suppose, that I wasn't a nice ghost, or that she really was going crazy, that Kevin had simply humored her before -- but I'd seen, on one of the silly shows she watched on Netflix, a scene involving writing in the steam on a mirror.
I waited until she was showering, until she was in the shower (signified by the sound of the shower curtain sliding shut), and glided into the bathroom.
I wrote on the mirror, in the steam, using all my willpower to do it: KEVIN LOVES YOU. YOU LOVE HIM. TELL HIM AND THINGS WILL GET BETTER. LOVE, GHOST.
I didn't stick around to see her get out of the shower. I know she saw my note, though, because I heard her shout: "Goddammit, ghost!" from my place on top of the fridge.
When Stella didn't talk to Kevin, I waited until he, too, was in the shower, and I left a note for him in the steam of the mirror.
STELLA LOVES YOU. TELL HER YOU LOVE HER TOO. LOVE, GHOST.
I glided out when I was done, perched on top of the fridge, and waited for him to say something -- to shout at me, like Stella had.
He didn't. When I heard the bathroom door open, I glided over to him and watched what he did next.
He came out of the bathroom, fully clothed, walked across the hall to Stella's room, and knocked gently on her door.
"Yeah?"
"I think we need to talk. I have something to tell you."
She looked stricken. "Look, if you don't want to renew our lease together..."
"I have feelings for you," he blurted out. "I'm afraid of what this means for us -- for our friendship. If you don't return them, that's okay, but we can't live together anymore."
She looked up at the ceiling, tipped her head back. "Goddammit, ghost."
"What?"
"I love you," she told him, simply.
He blinked at her. "Oh."
"And I'm sorry about the weirdness lately. I've been stressed lately -- work, and...this."
"Yeah," he sympathized. "Okay. Do you want to, like...go out?"
"Are you asking me on a date?"
"Yes," he blurted. "Unless you don't want to."
"Okay, um. When?"
"Now?" she shrugged, and invited him into her room.
I made myself scarce.
The next morning, when Stella walked into the kitchen, she was humming, carrying something in her hands.
She placed it carefully on the kitchen counter. A notebook, and a lightweight pen.
She turned the cover, revealing a blank page.
"Hi, ghost," she said, simply. "If you're, um, real, and not an elaborate prank."
She hesitated for a moment.
"Thank you," she said quietly. "If you have anything else we need to know about, write us a little note, will you? I won't watch, if you're uncomfortable."
She turned and walked out of the room.
Once she was gone, I glided down from the top of the fridge, picked up the pen.
THANK YOU, I wrote. NOTHING TO REPORT YET. YOU SHOULD GET A CAT.
After thinking, I added: AND SOME HOUSEPLANTS. IF YOU'RE GOING TO LIVE HERE ANOTHER YEAR, IT SHOULD FEEL LIKE HOME.
Writing all that tired me out, and I curled up in the closet after I was finished -- the same closet I'd awoken in, all those years ago.
They still leave a notebook out for me. I report on the things I see during the day -- the mischief their cat gets into, and what the neighbors are doing.
I can go outside the apartment, now. I can't leave the building -- I'm working on it -- but I can go up or down floors and visit other apartments.
There are other ghosts out there, living on the edges. I've met them, and I've gotten some of my own questions answered.
I'm not going to share the answers, though.
~*~
When I read the prompt, my brain immediately went to ghosts: who else lives on the periphery, so to speak, unable to communicate with us directly, and probably incredibly frustrated about that fact?
I like the idea of a friendly ghost, and the ghost here is definitely that -- eventually emerging from the periphery to give their report and maybe fix things.
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Date: 2019-02-10 02:05 am (UTC)I love the idea of a friendly ghost too and this was such an adorable ending. I'd love to read more about this ghost! <3
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Date: 2019-02-10 02:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-02-10 03:34 am (UTC)oooh, i really hope you do!
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Date: 2019-02-11 12:50 am (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2019-02-12 07:40 am (UTC)I've always liked the idea of ghosts not knowing they were ghosts, and despite the Beetlejuice "Handbook for the Recently Deceased" idea, I think manuals for ghosts are non-existent-- but would definitely be helpful!
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Date: 2019-02-12 11:34 pm (UTC)Manuals would probably help, for sure, but I don't think you get them, as a ghost. Honestly, I think you're lucky if you get any sort of indication that you're dead!
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Date: 2019-02-12 08:17 am (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2019-02-12 11:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-02-12 11:37 pm (UTC)The ghost doesn't know their name, so of course they're going to sign everything "Ghost". The "love", though...I think it would be hard to live with two nice people as a ghost and not feel some kind of affection toward them. :)
I'm glad you liked this!