I slip under the quilt, letting it weigh me down, until I feel almost like a living girl again and not an afterthought. I can feel the sunrise coming on. Ghosts walk by day same as we walk by night, but sunrise isn’t our time; when the cock crows, the dead go back to their graves. Everything human needs sleep, and ghosts are still human, no matter how much our situations may have changed. We still dream.
There’s no cock to crow for me here, but as the weight of several elderly cats presses the blankets down around me, I close my eyes, and I let the world drop away.
It’s been years since I remembered my dreams clearly. I think I dream of flying; I think I dream of home. I know I dream of Patty laughing, Patty with butterflies in her hair, Patty before she left me to follow her dreams and her demons into a future that was never to be mine. Just like every night, I reach for her, and just like every night, she slips away.
Patty always slips away.
4: Bar No Ghost
The phone wakes me.
I open my eyes and the world is black and white. Insubstantial eyes can see, but we don’t get color. Color is for the living, and for the dead whose eyes have the capacity to hold on to the light that they receive. I should probably be blind when I’m faded out like this—the laws of physics and all that—but sometimes the laws of the dead are stronger than the laws of the living.
The cats don’t wake when I pass through them, my feet dangling a few inches above the floor as I drift from one room into the next. My head is still muzzy and mazed with sleep, and I don’t feel like taking the effort to be solid just yet.
My answering machine was top-of-the-line when I bought it, a new, miracle invention that would make staying in touch easier than it had ever been before. Now it’s an antique, clinging to life by the skin of its teeth—or the steel in its sprockets, since it’s a machine. It’s going to break soon, and if I can’t track down another one that’s simple enough for me to understand and use, early morning calls are going to get a lot more annoying. Turn solid every time someone wants to sell me insurance, or miss a lot of messages? The choice is mine, and it’s an awful one.
The ringing stops. The machine beeps. And Brenda, sounding aggravated, speaks.
“I know you’re there, Jenna. No way you’ve gone solid before noon without a damn good reason. I don’t need you to answer the phone, but I do need you to listen.”
Brenda has my phone number? Brenda has my phone number. I don’t know how that could have happened—except I do know, because I haven’t changed my number in years. There are dozens of people she could have asked, most of whom have no idea she’s a witch, most of whom have no idea I’m dead, who wouldn’t know what to do with that information if they had it. Any one of them might have thought, “Jenna and Brenda are friends,” or maybe “Brenda’s a sweet old lady and Jenna keeps cats; she probably wants Jenna to pet-sit or something.” They wouldn’t have hesitated. They wouldn’t have warned me.
Brenda is still talking. “I ran Sophie down last night after you left. She said the pigeons were crying. She said, and I quote, ‘There’s a cat in the rafters, and no one’s ever going to rest again.’ So I went looking, and the ghost gang that usually hangs out down on Sixth is gone. No one’s seen them in a week.”
My feet hit the floor with a soft thump as I become too solid for the air to hold me. It takes a few seconds for the color to bleed back into the world, like Dorothy returning to the Technicolor fields of Oz. If I could see myself in this moment, I would look like a piece of black-and-white film flickering into existence, gaining color at the same rate as my vision, still fuzzy around the edges, like a nightmare, like a mistake. Ghosts have to sleep, and it’s sleep that gets us caught, that turns us into monsters in the eyes of the people around us.
“I’ve been digging, and no one’s seen most of the local ghosts in days. Weeks, in some cases. I’m not talking about the fringe kiddies, like that trucker who does deliveries down in the Fabric District—I mean people like Carl the Statue, and that nice boy who works at Midtown Comics. I don’t know what’s going on yet, but you need to watch yourself. Meet me at the din—”
The machine beeps and turns itself off, out of room to store any more words on its frayed tape. I’m solid enough now that I can reach out and press the button, triggering the message to begin playing all over again.