Deirdre: A Ghostly Romance

All seven chapters of this story are posted below. I wrote it based on a client-provided brief ("Write a romantic short story featuring a ghost"), but it was never published. I was rather fond of this piece and thought it deserved to be out there. Please enjoy!

Chapter 1: Housewarming

On a rainy Tuesday afternoon, he moved in. His boxes of stuff had preceded him. They filled the apartment like silent masters, as if they had signed the lease themselves.

That night, he’d slept on top of a towel he’d laid flat on the wooden floor, surrounded by towers of cardboard and newly settled dust. His forearm ached the next morning from the weight of his head, and the pain in his neck crippled him for at least ten minutes before he’d managed to get out of “bed.” He would go on to sleep that way for a week.

The boxes waited. They made up a paper-smelling, looming maze inside the apartment, and if he’d had the ability to feel at the time, he would’ve grown to love weaving in and out of those narrow corners.

He finally unpacked when his neck pain became more pronounced and chronic throughout the day. It was a slow, difficult, and excruciating process. The first thing he took out were the essentials—his pens, rulers, measuring tapes, and papers. His desk took a little bit of time. He’d had to reassemble it, and some of the parts had been difficult to dig up from the large, narrow box they were in. He cleared one corner of the apartment, and set it up as his workspace. He had put off his new client’s mock-ups long enough. At least now he could catch up on some work.

Instead of unpacking the rest of his things, he left them alone that day, the initial excitement waning all too soon so that the melancholy crept back in and settled in his stomach as comfortably as if it had always lived there. His work station looked like an oasis of normalcy among the cardboard towers.

Next came the kitchen utensils, the rug, and the television. He’d left his bed in his old house but took the mattress with him. He covered the king-sized futon in a dark blue fitted sheet and shoved it into one corner of what was going to be his bedroom.

He left the empty picture frames for last, hanging them even though he’d thrown out what they used to contain. He had taken everything with him except for the fridge (too heavy), the bed frame (too flimsy), and those pictures (too painful).

When he was done, boxes lay in boxes, devoid now of things and power. He had kicked one waist-high cardboard tower just to watch it topple to the floor sadly, hollowly. He got rid of those boxes the next day and went back up to his apartment to gaze with dead eyes at his new home filled with familiar things that felt strange in this new place. Nothing felt like his. Nothing belonged. Not the furniture, not him.

He missed the smell of cardboard, so to replace it he bought incense from a pop-up bazaar he’d walked past one day on his way to work. He lit an incense stick every time he left for work, safety precautions be damned. If he came home one day, and his apartment had crumbled to soot and ash, there would be no love lost anyway. In the meantime, he liked opening the door and being greeted with the smell of green tea and aloe vera.

Slowly, his things settled. Chairs created scratches on the hand-me-down floors; the sofa buried its legs into the rug; his desk began to morph into a place of comfort and productivity.

His heart followed this meticulous settling, and one day he woke to find it beating steadily instead of trying to race out of his chest. He laid one hand over that stalwart thumping and another over his eyes. Get up, Joel, he told himself, and then he rolled out of bed.

Chapter 2: Her

The first time it happened, he was drawing up a plan for a house that was to be built on a cliff. He’d done the ocular, and the site was beautiful. It overlooked the city, and the ground was solid enough to allow an anxiety-free construction. There would be large bay windows on that side of the house, though the cliff itself would be inaccessible from the exterior. That would minimize any accidents, especially since the clients were parents to a small child.

He was sitting at his desk, buried in images of this beautiful house when what felt like a draft blew past him. He raised his head and noted curiously that the apartment’s windows were shut. Chalking his slight shiver up to exhaustion, he’d leaned back on his red-cushioned office chair and yawned.

That was when he felt it again, and this time it blew straight into his ear. The gust was cold enough that it startled him out of his chair. Looking around almost wildly, he raised a hand to cover and warm his ear.

When nothing stirred in the apartment, he left his desk and prepared for bed.

Something had started creeping into his dreams, and it took no shape or form. It was there in every single one, calling, Joel, Joel, in a breathy, unfamiliar woman’s voice. It didn’t matter if his mind was simply rehashing the day’s events as he slept, or if he was dreaming about goldfish and boogeymen; that voice seemed to be coaxing him back to waking. Sometimes it succeeded, and he would wake up with a start, blinking anxiously and wanting nothing more than to go back to sleep.

One morning he had woken up just like that, yanked gently out of restfulness. He tried for a few minutes to fall asleep again, but his suddenly active mind had other plans. He dragged himself to the bathroom, leaning tiredly over the sink.

Joel, Joel, that voice called to him again. His eyes opened wide almost immediately, all traces of sleep gone from his expression. He shook his head, thinking he was still dreaming. He couldn’t be awake. That voice wasn’t part of the real world.

Joel, it giggled patiently. In trepidation, he realized that the voice was coming from the bathroom mirror above the sink, and all he needed to do was raise his gaze to see whose it was. He mustered the courage to do that, but all he saw in the mirror was his own reflection—pale, tired, and half-crazed.

On a Saturday afternoon as rainy as his first day in the apartment, she appeared to him. Not in a dream, not in the misty bathroom mirror, but right there in his old couch, looking as real as flesh and blood. She had reddish brown hair, blue eyes, and peach-colored lips.

One moment he was eating cereal, watching cartoons alone, and the next he was slowly turning his head to the woman laughing beside him. The cereal bowl fell. Milk and cornflakes spilled all over the old, dark green rug. He was frozen in terror, eyes wide, bowl-empty hands still raised in mid-air. He watched the light from the television screen change rapidly in her ocean blue eyes.

She turned to him, feminine laughter trickling down to a gentle smile. “Hello, Joel,” she said.

There was a scream in his throat that wouldn’t come out. He forgot to blink, and the cool air began to dry his eyes.

The smile disappeared from her lips, and her eyebrows knit into a worried frown. “Joel?”

Finally, his mouth and vocal chords remembered how to produce sound. “What… Who… Who are you!” He thought he saw a sheen of tears cover her eyes, her lower waterline reddening.

“Don’t yell at me.” He recognized her voice. He had been dreaming about it for weeks, and it sounded airy and otherworldly even though she was right there in front of him, long legs outstretched and resting on his low coffee table, indigo dress spread on his couch cushion.

But the longer he looked, the less she seemed real. He found things inconsistent with the laws of physics. The couch didn’t seem to yield to any weight, and the cushion didn’t look depressed under her thigh. The fabric of her dress wasn’t lying on the upholstery so much as spilling into it like melted wax. And her eyes… Nobody’s eyes could be that blue.

“What are you doing in my apartment?” he managed to ask, voice shaking wildly.

“It’s my apartment. I live here… Or at least I used to.” She giggled, but the darkness of the joke was lost on him.

More out of fear than will, he jumped out of the couch and ducked behind its arm, shaking violently even as he slowly raised his head to peer over the rough upholstery. She was still there, staring at him. “H-how do you know my name?” he asked in a tiny voice.

“Um… I can read. You’ve got documents all over the place. You’re always drawing and tracing and stuff… Are you an architect?”

He nodded slightly but remained silent.

She rolled her eyes. “Oh stop looking at me like that. God I miss being alive. What I would give to be ogled again instead of being stared at like I’m a creature from a horror film. Come now. I’m the Casper kind: friendly.”

“So y-you’re a ghost?”

“I sure am, sweetheart. Dead fifteen years and counting.”

Then he screamed, ducking again behind the couch’s arm and leaning against it with his hands over his ears. He shut his eyes tight and breathed heavily in disbelief. This can’t be real, he told himself, I’m seeing things. Everyone was right. I need to see a shrink. I’m not well. This isn’t—

“You’re not crazy,” said that echo-y, dancing voice. “I’m just as real as you, Joel.” There was a melancholy in her tone that somehow made his heart beat just a little less fast.

When he looked over the couch again, she was still there, looking at him forlornly.

“I’m real,” she said, sounding almost like she was trying to convince herself.

He swallowed twice before managing to speak again, “What’s your name?”

Her smile told him that she hadn’t heard that question in a long time. “My name is Deirdre.”

And then when he blinked, she was gone.

Chapter 3: A Commemoration

For the next few days, Joel didn’t see the ghost again. He was almost convinced that he had dreamt it all up when she started making her presence known.

Pens and papers he would leave in one spot were in a different place the next morning. Dishes he’d left in the sink would be dry and clean by the time he came back to the kitchen. When he forgot to light the incense, the entire apartment would smell like green tea and aloe vera anyway, the only evidence of their source the tiny cylinders of ash on the floor of the porcelain holder.

He refused to call out to her and ask her to come talk to him, but it wasn’t because he was afraid of ghosts. It was more that even in his head, he sounded crazy. Even with all the evidence he encountered daily, he would be damned if he started acknowledging a figment of his imagination.

One thing was for sure though: the apartment just didn’t feel as empty anymore. And… dare he say it? He was starting to feel just a little bit less alone too.

She… it had stopped pestering him in his dreams, so his sleep was actually restful. He wouldn’t admit it, not even to himself, but he woke up everyday hoping that she would appear to him again instead of just leaving innocuous little presents. If she were right there in front of him, undeniably existent, then at least he could examine his sanity instead of just wondering about its state.

Things were like that for about a month before he finally gave in. It was his birthday, and he was feeling particularly despondent, like the world had forgotten him. His cell phone was silent the entire day, except for a client’s email asking him to revise a plan. There were no knocks on the door or letters in the mail.

“Deirdre?” he had whispered, almost to himself. He was sitting at the kitchen counter, running his finger along the cold green tiles.

He wasn’t expecting a response, but there she was all of a sudden, sitting across from him, looking exactly like the first time he’d seen her. Her elbow was propping up the hand she was resting her chin on. This close, he could see the dark blue ring in her otherwise light eyes. “Yes?” she said.

He raised his hand as if to touch her, and then pulled it back towards his chest. “Are you real?” he asked, afraid to blink for fear that she might disappear again.

“You tell me,” she said.

“It’s my birthday.”

“Happy birthday.”

“I’d offer you a slice of cake, but… I don’t have cake.”

“And I don’t have a working digestive system.”

He made a loose shooting gesture towards her. “Right.”

“So, birthday boy, how do you want to celebrate?”

“I haven’t celebrated anything in a long time.”

“You shaved.”

“I shaved.”

“Was that a celebration?”

“Not really.”

“You haven’t shaved in weeks. And you shaved on your birthday.”

“It’s more of a… commemoration. Just to remind myself I’m still here.”

“I know exactly what you mean. Sometimes I bug you just to convince myself of my being here.”

“Why are you still here?”

She sighed, the sound unmistakable though he was pretty sure no breaths came out of that pretty mouth anymore. “I was late for the bus? I don’t know… What do ghosts say? Unfinished business?”

“What unfinished business?”

She shrugged. “No idea. I didn’t so much as leave dirty dishes in the sink.”

He swirled around in his stool once and then rested his elbows on the counter, all business. “Well… Is there anything you regret? Or…”

She shook her head slowly a few times, looking like she was deep in thought. “No… I was living a full life. I was an in-house art director for a fashion magazine. I had lots of friends. My family loved me…”

“Boyfriend?”

“Well, I guess that’s one thing. I never had a boyfriend.”

The statement genuinely surprised him. “Never had a boyfriend? How does a woman who looks like you go through life never having a boyfriend?”

“The feminists would skin you alive for that. I dated, sure, but… I never fell in love with anybody. Just never happened for me.”

Maybe some people just weren’t built for falling in love, he wanted to say, and if you’re one of them, and you do it anyway, it can never end well. “Why do you think that is?” he asked instead.

“Loved myself too much probably. Though I have to admit I’ve always wondered what it would be like.” She looked up, staring right into his eyes. The intensity of her gaze sent shivers down his spine. “This is starting to sound like a whisky kind of talk. You got any whisky?”

“You can’t eat cake, but you can drink whisky?”

“Not for me, dummy. For you. It’s your birthday. You’re allowed to get drunk.”

He did as he was bid, casually sliding off his stool, filling a short glass with ice cubes, and pouring himself some whisky. He didn’t let himself think about the absurdity of the situation, that he was following the suggestions of something his mind could only refer to as a ghost.

He kept the bottle near as they talked. Five refills later he was happily buzzed, and his questions became more brazen.

“What’s it like? Being dead?”

Her chest rose and fell. She was staring up at the pots and pans hanging from the cupboard above them, blue eyes seemingly brighter in her reverie. Her chin was resting on her palm, and her brown hair burned like fire in the dying afternoon light. He took a mental photograph of her looking just like that. He memorized the shape of her nose, the arc of her eyebrows, the mole right on her cheekbone. “Well,” she said, “it’s like living for a very long time. Longer than comfortable.”

That made sense to him even though he knew it shouldn’t have.

“I speak for myself of course,” she continued. “I’ve been stuck here for a decade and a half after all. It’s a very slow and boring existence—I think I’m allowed to use that word still. I’m a Sagittarius, you know, and I get very restless.”

“So this is hell for you? Being stuck here having nothing to do?”

“It’s not that I have nothing to do—our apartment is spotless, or haven’t you noticed—but going through walls loses its novelty very quickly after one is dead. At first I felt like a superhero. I spied on the people who lived here, and if I didn’t like them, I drove them out. Exorcists and paranormal ‘experts’ came and decided I was an evil spirit or some nonsense. The truth was that it was just really fun messing with people’s minds. Of course if it was a nice family or something, I left them alone. One time I scared the pants off a robber. The bum was trying to rob an old woman, can you believe it? A sweet, helpless, little old woman. And he was his neighbor, too! Oh, I was so mad… I gave him a scary movie-worthy fright, let me tell you. I made the lights flicker, and I froze his stealing butt off with my super ghostly breaths. Then I pulled down his pants and watched him trip all the way down the hall.” She laughed, and the sounds echoed eerily in the air. It didn’t faze him though; in fact he found himself charmed.

“Did you follow him into his own apartment?”

She shook her head, and he watched her brown-red curls slip in and out of the watery purple of her dress. “Oh, no. I can’t go past the walls of this apartment. That’s why those paranormal people really got on my nerves. I mean, I’m not evil! A girl’s gotta have some entertainment once in a while. I accidentally break a few glasses, and all of a sudden I’m evil? I was just trying to make some music, like in those documentaries with the water and the cups…” She paused, sheepishly smiling at him. “I’m talking too much, aren’t I? I’m sorry. I haven’t talked to anyone in a long time.”

He smiled drunkenly back at her. “No, it’s all right. No one’s talked to me in a long time. Was the last guy who lived here not into ghostly chats?”

“He was some twenty-two-year-old surfer wannabe. He showered once a week, and I don’t think the guy has ever been to a barber. I was not interested in making a connection.”

Joel laughed for the first time that day. “How long did he live here?”

“Two years, I think. Sometimes I would get so bored that I almost convinced myself to appear to him, but one look at those exposed, unwashed armpits, and I just… I couldn’t. I had never been so thankful I lost the ability to smell when I died, let me tell you.”

“I guess I should feel flattered then. You didn’t wait long before you decided I was worth scaring.”

“I wasn’t trying to scare you,” she said in a frustrated tone. “I just… I thought you needed a friend, that’s all.”

He downed the watered down whisky in his glass. “You’re very good at reading people.”

“What happened to you?” she asked. When he didn’t respond, she leaned in closer, and he realized almost immediately that she was no longer sitting on the stool. He couldn’t see the lower part of her legs, but he was pretty sure she was floating off the ground.

Her question was making him think of things he would rather not think about, especially not in this heightened, drunken haze. His eyes began to feel hot.

“What happened to you, Joel?” She raised her pale arm, running a finger down his cheek. He tried to imagine warm flesh, but it just felt like a cold pin gently touching his skin. It wasn’t the most comforting sensation, but he leaned into it just the same. “What happened to you?”

Chapter 4: The Constant

Sometimes he forgot he wasn’t alone in his apartment, and Deirdre would catch him by surprise, leaving a frosty kiss mark on the surface of the bathroom mirror or speaking up in the middle of the crime documentaries he liked to watch. “I think he’s guilty,” she would say. “It’s the husband. It’s always the husband.” More than once, her chilling voice made him spill his cereal, and it took all he had not to yell at her. He’d told her many times, patiently and kindly, not to creep up on him like that especially when she had been quiet for a long time, and he was complacent in his alone-ness. To that she merely said sarcastically, “Sorry if I can’t warn you with my footsteps. It’s pretty difficult to do ever since I died and became non-matter and all.”

Walking around in his boxers was uncomfortable for him at first. It felt like he was flaunting his naked torso to a stranger he couldn’t see but knew was there. Being in the bathroom made him paranoid. Deirdre was mischievous; what if she popped her head right through the shower curtains while he was soapy, vulnerable, and naked as the day he was born? What if she appeared in front of him while he was on the toilet doing his business?

After a while though, he realized that Deirdre respected those boundaries if not anything else. She never showed up in the bathroom unless he was merely brushing his teeth or combing his hair. Even being in his underwear became a non-issue. If she felt like talking, she would look at him just the same as when he was fully-dressed. “What have you got to feel embarrassed about, Joel? I’ve seen you in much less. You just don’t know it.”

It wasn’t long before he started to see her as a very strange roommate who only popped in once in a while.

He liked, most of all, when she appeared before him at breakfast. It was mostly to nag him about eating something other than cornflakes and milk. “I’d fry you some bacon, but cooking is much too complicated a task for someone without a body,” she’d say.

“Do I look okay?” he’d ask her when he was done, standing up to show her what he was wearing to work. He didn’t actually care, but he liked seeing the sparkle in her light blue eyes every time he asked for her opinion. He liked hearing her talk about something she was passionate about. It made her look… alive. She never asked him to buy anything new, but she did teach him a lot about dressing properly.

“Never wear a brown belt with black shoes.”

“Joel-darling, your tie is a little too long in the front.”

“You’re an autumn, did you know that? You can pull off a pastel shirt.”

Eventually, he grew to expect her. She was often there, but strangely enough she would go for days at a time without so much as a cold tingle on the back of his neck. It was even more unsettling because he knew she was there with him somewhere in the apartment. He just didn’t know where or why she wasn’t letting him see her.

And then when she “came back,” it would be as though she hadn’t been invisible for the last four days. He learned not to ask after the first time. She had snapped at him, blue eyes blazing something magnificent. “My god, I don’t owe you an explanation. This is my apartment. I don’t care what the lease says. Can’t a dead woman have some peace around here?”

Unaccustomed to confrontation he had merely remained silent and turned his attention back to the cold case documentary he was watching until she hovered beside him in the couch and said, “Oh, if the husband is dead, what are they reopening the case for? It’s obvious he did it.”

He was drenched from head-to-toe, and the only thing that saved his portfolio bag and its contents was the large plastic bag he had saved from the take-out he’d bought at lunch. He wasn’t in the best of moods when he got home, his leather shoes pretty much ruined and the socks inside them squishy and uncomfortable.

“Deirdre?” he called, feeling awkward that he sounded like a husband coming home to a home-cooked meal.

There was silence. He knew what that meant; she wanted to be alone. For a while he let her be, but then at dinner the rain started up again, this time louder and more obnoxious than before. Sheets of water poured from the sky, and strong gusts of wind threw wayward drops against his windows so hard that he was afraid the glass would break. That was when he noticed the water stains in the ceiling. Though there weren’t any leaks yet, he needed to know what caused the once-white paint to peel. If a pipe had burst and been mended, then he didn’t need to worry so much about structural damages. If the leak was caused by rain though, that meant that something needed to be repaired or sealed in the building’s structure. He wanted to make sure the seal was strong enough to withstand a storm.

“Deirdre? Deirdre, I need to ask you something.” He walked all over the apartment, calling out her name. “There are water stains on the ceiling over there, near the window. Were those from a pipe or should I expect the rain to be falling indoors any moment now? It’s looking pretty wild out there.”

The only response he got was the intermittent pitter-patter of the storm raging against his windows.

He was getting more frustrated by the second. “Come on, Deirdre! It’s a simple question! You can go back to your ghostly brooding after you answer me!”

A loud crash near his desk made him run to his work corner. He didn’t see her at first, but then the unmistakable indigo of her dress was bleeding right through the hardwood floor under the table. He pulled his office chair away and knelt down in front of her. In the shadows, her skin seemed to glow. She had never looked like a ghost more than she did at that moment.

“Don’t worry about it,” she said. “It was just a pipe.”

“Hey,” he cooed. “Hey, Deirdre, what’s wrong?” He almost reached out to touch her back, but then he remembered that she didn’t actually have one anymore.

Slowly she began to fade from his vision, turning more transparent every time he blinked. “No, no, no, no,” he said, trying to convince her to return. He was beginning see the back legs of the desk, the striped wallpaper, and the hardwood floor through the image of her. “Deirdre, come on. Talk to me. Talk to me!” he yelled finally.

Her image solidified in one instant, and she looked up at him, blue eyes wide and lost. “Can’t you leave me alone?”

“You didn’t show me that same courtesy.”

She chuckled ruefully, the sound echoing hauntingly with the merciless pounding of the storm outside. He saw her lips move, but her laugh seemed to come from everywhere else.

“How is it that I am no longer of flesh and blood, that I don’t even have a heart anymore, and still I feel this?”

“What do you feel?”

“Lost. Afraid. Nervous.”

“About what?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know! All these questions!” Thunder roared outside as if to punctuate her upset.

He raised a hand placatingly. “All right, all right, I’m sorry.” Not knowing what else to say, he cooed helplessly, “What can I do to help, Deirdre? Tell me what to do.”

The surprise in those exceedingly haunting blue eyes was easy to recognize. It gave Joel some relief. He didn’t know what he had said right, but somehow he had reached. Wherever she had gone, he had reached her.

“That helps. Just asking,” she said in a small voice. The tremors in her fingers calming down somewhat. She moved to slip out from under the desk, and he stood up, following her to the couch. She was floating more noticeably now, her countenance rippling more like water than the lifelike movements he had grown accustomed to. It was unsettling. She had never seemed more like a ghost to him than right now even though he’d seen her quite literally passing through walls, sometimes head first.

He didn’t know what to do with himself. He would offer her something calming, like chamomile tea, but certain modes of propriety just didn’t apply to this woman. For one thing, she didn’t eat, drink, or breathe anymore. So he remained silent, waiting for her to speak.

He didn’t have to wait long. Her talkative nature soon penetrated whatever haze of anxiety she was in.

“Sorry about that. It just happens sometimes.”

“Are you okay now?”

“Yes.”

He watched her facial expressions change as she seemed to argue with herself. “Is that a… a dead person thing? It looked like a panic attack.”

She shook her head, hair settling around her more realistically now. “Even when I was alive, it was there. I don’t know where it comes from, really. I wish I could tell you. I wish I could tell myself. Then maybe it wouldn’t feel so scary.”

“Did you ever see a shrink about it or talk to anyone?”

“Oh, sure. Having a shrink was so fashionable in those days.” This time, her laughter rang of her familiar brand of sarcasm. It settled the nervousness in his stomach. “I took pills, nothing hardcore. The movies make you think depression looks like one thing—shadows and lying in bed, and lots of rocking back and forth—but the truth is that it’s shapeless and unpredictable and present everywhere. I could be laughing, and it just doesn’t feel quite right. I’m not exactly sad… Just… not right.”

Her eyes were far away, and he thought he detected a bit of dulling in those light blue depths.

“And then one day…” she whispered, unconscious that she was still speaking. After a moment or two she seemed to realize what she had begun to say, and she shook her head as if to clear it.

“One day?” he asked her to continue.

She turned to him, and he saw there an expression he had never seen on her face before, a mixture of shame and vulnerability.

Suddenly he understood. “How did you die, Deirdre?”

She looked down at her clean fingernails, looking more lost than she did when he found her under the desk.

“You did it, didn’t you?” he said gently, trying to tell her that he wasn’t judging her. He couldn’t judge her if he tried. He understood all too well how one could get to that point, when there are things to live for and they just stop mattering.

She nodded, and the rain outside slowed to a light pitter-patter.

Chapter 5: Deirdre

People called her the life of the party. Men told her she lit up their lives. Most times, she believed them.

But then there were days when the roaring in her ears could not be silenced by music and compliments. On those days her ribcage felt empty of a beating heart, and nothing existed but the space where it should be. She didn’t see sunlight, or color, or joy.

On the fourth of July, fireworks erupted outside, and the night sky was a kaleidoscope of pink, blue, and golden comets. Her desk was cluttered with invitations to several parties around the city, including a barbecue on the rooftop of her friend’s apartment two blocks down from hers. Her phone had been ringing all day, and she had turned it off mid-afternoon. Even her inbox was flooded with event notifications and congratulations on the magazine spread she had art directed. It had taken her five months in prep work to produce. It was the biggest project of her career, and she hadn’t been able to keep herself from micromanaging. She had fought for eight locations in Greece and overruled the most of the stylist’s decisions about the clothes, right down to the accessories. She had insisted on featuring young, independent designers from all over the world—Italy, Thailand, even Estonia. Just gathering the clothes and accessories itself was expensive and challenging.

It was unorthodox to create such a major spread on unknowns, but she knew what her vision required, and she knew the public was ready for it. And she was right.

None of that mattered in the darkness of her room that night. Her bedroom overlooked the thriving, happy city, and even the distant fireworks seemed to bright for her to process and appreciate. She rested one hand on the cool glass, feeling as though she were touching solid air.

She tried to remember what it was like to be happy. Just yesterday, she was happy and bright and amazing. What happened? she asked herself. What happened between then and now? There were never any answers to those questions except Nothing. I slept, and I woke up, and my heart was gone.

She’d been having a series of bad months, and yesterday was one day out of so many. It wasn’t enough to offset everything else.

Where she had gotten the gun was of no importance. The moment she put the barrel in her mouth, there was only relief. When she pulled the trigger, its roar was lost to the fireworks outside.

Chapter 6: Joel

“It was two days before they found me,” Deirdre finished, floating in a prone position, eyes closed. She was lying on a bed of air, one of the perks of not being tied down by gravity.

Joel didn’t understand why any more than she did. All he knew was what it felt like, and for now empathy seemed enough.

There was a long silence before she spoke again. “What’s your drama?”

Even after hearing her story, he was reluctant to tell his, and he shifted awkwardly in the couch.

She floated back down to her seat. “Never you mind. I know your drama.”

“You do, do you?”

“I’m sorry I invaded your privacy.”

He realized then that she wasn’t bluffing. Her blue eyes shone with sincerity. Fury boiled in his stomach, and he had to take a few breaths to calm it. She saw his face instantly shift from calm and compassionate to disbelieving and angry, and she stayed silent, knowing that she deserved it.

“You rifled through my things?”

“I watch you. There’s nothing else to do around here but watch you. I didn’t have to rifle through your things. That little girl whose picture you cry over in the bathroom… Who is she?”

“That is none of your business!” Sometimes he left the shower on so she wouldn’t peek or hear him. Up until then, he thought she was respecting that.

“Joel…”

His body wasn’t accustomed to being enraged, and he was hyperaware that his heart was beating fast. His face felt hot, and there was a ticking near his temple that he couldn’t control.

When he got up to leave, she spoke up again. “It’s just you and me in this world, Joel. We haven’t got anyone else.” Her airy voice trembled with emotion.

He was already sobbing when he sat back down, hands covering his face.

“You must have loved her very much.”

He nodded.

“You’ll see her again, I promise.”

“How do you know? What if she’s stuck somewhere, too? Like you?”

She shook her head. “She was so little. Nobody would have let her miss the bus. Souls like that aren’t weighed down by complicated, grown-up things.”

He was silent for a moment, and then he said, “Her name was Caitlyn. It’s an ordinary name, but she was the most special person in the whole world. And she was mine.”

“Her mother?”

His voice filled with bitterness. “She left us. She was never a mother.” He ran his hand down his face roughly, spreading his tears more than drying them. “My daughter was all I had and all I needed, and now she’s just… gone.”

“All you can do is honor her life, Joel.”

He shook his head quickly, and he sounded scared and defeated when he replied. “I can’t. I can’t. I just want to pretend she never happened to me.”

He felt cold air sliding from his wrists to the back of his shoulders, and when he looked up, Deirdre was hugging him. He shivered, but it was a comforting cold.

“But she did happen. And she was wonderful.”

He woke up the next day, and he was still in the couch. One of the empty picture frames was propped up on the coffee table to greet him a good morning. Something in that little wooden rectangle’s turquoise finish made him want to weep.

With something akin to tenderness he reached for the empty picture frame, remembering what it used to contain. It was a photograph of Caitlyn at two years old, brown-haired and one-eyed as she stared up at the camera. It hadn’t been a very good picture. He had taken it with his phone, and she had laughed at the clicking sound it made. He had the photo printed anyway and let her pick the frame.

He set the picture frame back down on the table and shook his head, getting increasingly agitated at the thought of Deirdre’s mild “suggestion.” The woman was much too intrusive, especially for somebody who wasn’t even alive anymore.

“Don’t be mad,” her airy voice called.

He would’ve turned towards the sound, but her voice never really came from one direction. “What are you trying to do, Deirdre?”

“I want you to be okay.”

“I am okay!”

“You know you’re not, Joel.” She appeared before him, hovering above the table, legs folded beneath her thighs. “I’ve been dead fifteen years, and I’m not sure why, but what if… what if I was just waiting for you? What if they left me here, so I could help you?”

He looked up at her, conflicted, hesitant, but… was that hope in his eyes?

“Joel… We’re so little in this universe, so helpless. It… They… God… Whoever… can do anything they want with us. Look at me! I’ve been stuck wearing this outfit for years! I don’t know if I’m going to be this way forever, or if I’m going to get taken away at some point… today, tomorrow, now… So I have to make this count. Me being here for you, it has to count.”

The way she was looking at him did something to his heart. For the first time in very, very long, he felt…

“I love you. Do you know that? I love you,” he said.

Her knitted eyebrows relaxed in surprise. He didn’t wait for her to respond. He merely took the picture frame from the table and headed to his room. It didn’t take him long to find his wallet and take out the photograph buried behind business cards and receipts. It was creased where he had carelessly folded it, and it was soft from being inside his wallet for so long.

But the important thing was that Caitlyn’s smile was still there, as bright as the day he captured it. Her little toddler eyes seemed to tell him, Daddy, I missed you.

He slid the picture into the frame, and by the time he hung it back up on the wall, he was sobbing softly. Deirdre stood beside him, looking up at the photograph as if it were a painting in a museum. He turned his head to look at her, eyes filling with gratitude as she smiled at him.

There were no words left. The apartment filled with the scent of green tea and aloe vera, and for the first time since he moved in, he felt like he belonged.

Chapter 7: Sunset

The number of people at his funeral was nothing to boast of, but those who attended held such great affection for him that no eye was dry in the apartment.

No microphones were required. The place was tiny and the silence reverent. Only the occasional sniffling and breathless sobs broke the stillness of the air.

Friends and coworkers had squeezed into the worn, tiny couch, and around them were the rest of those who knew Joel. In front, blocking the silent television was a tall man, stooped and gray.

“Joel was my architect. He built us a beautiful house overlooking a cliff. My children grew up there, and there is not a day that goes by that my wife and I don’t walk down its halls feeling so very fortunate and sentimental.

Joel liked to keep to himself. He didn’t have many friends. In the years that I’d known him, he never once took me up on my offer to grab a drink. I didn’t know what he did with his time when he wasn’t working.

But this isn’t to say he didn’t live a full life. He was our friend because he was warm and kind, quiet and compassionate. I knew him for thirty-seven years, and I couldn’t tell you right now what he liked to do for fun. All I know is that he never… seemed to want for anything—not money, not fame, not women. He always just seemed… happy.”

All over the room, people smiled, knowing exactly what the man meant.

“He had the countenance of a man who was well-loved. I don’t know why, how, or where that came from, but whatever it was that made him the person that he was, I am grateful for it.

Bon voyage, Joel.”

“Bon voyage,” the room repeated.

It wasn’t long before the apartment emptied out, and then it was quiet. The afternoon light was waning, and the city was afire.

Deirdre raised her hand to the glass as if to touch it.

“I don’t even want to know where they’re taking my body,” Joel said, stepping up next to her.

“Does it matter?”

“No, it doesn’t.” He took her hand, and it wasn’t icy. Its warmth surprised him. He touched her cheek when she turned to face him.

“I missed your hair like this,” she said, gently running her fingers through the brown locks.

“You said you liked the white.”

“I was lying.”

“Deceitful witch… How am I supposed to trust you from now on?”

“You haven’t got a choice. You’re stuck with me for all of eternity.”

“But not here. We can go now, right?” He was going to miss the green tea and the aloe vera and the turquoise picture frame. But Caitlyn… Caitlyn was waiting for them.

The sun dipped behind the buildings, and the sounds of the city dulled with the onset of darkness.

“Come now, darling,” she said, reveling in the fact that she could wrap her fingers so tightly around his hand now. “Our bus is here.”

The End.