My apartment loomed empty. No more dishes in the sink, junk piled on the counters, trash starting to stink. All my furniture had probably been donated. Someone else would be leaving half-finished beer on my coffee table and having sex on my old couch. I’d bet the girls who wore my clothes next would look nicer in them, with better jobs and brighter futures.
Too bad I couldn’t use my laptop anymore. I’d come back hoping to catch up on some TV. But this would be for the best. I would have been all alone here, just like everyone warned me I shouldn’t be.
Time for me to move on, find a new place to stay. I wondered how other ghosts kept from going geist, if they didn’t reside at the Haunt.
Those kids back at the morgue seemed to be doing all right. But they were together. That must’ve been how they managed to last so long, even while doing nothing but talking to the newly dead. I didn’t think they were a couple, but there had to have been some nights they’d at least huddled close, let some memories slip through the skin. For research, if nothing else.
I went to go check on them, hoping I wouldn’t end up witnessing the worst kind of cautionary tale. Thankfully, I found them sitting side by side on the floor of another morgue. This one stored its cadavers in drawers.
“This isn’t really happening,” Carlos recited. “You people are a figment of my dying consciousness.”
Danny sighed as she dragged her pen across the page. “So self-centered.”
“Hey, there,” I said.
They both jolted in surprise, staring up at me.
“Come on, guys, you know what we are?” I asked. “You shouldn’t be spooked so easily.”
Carlos peered up at me, somewhat warily. “Mal, right? I didn’t think you’d come back.”
“No one’s ever come back,” said Danny. She didn’t stop scribbling.
I’d forgotten that my goodbye last time hadn’t been the friendliest. But I could make up for it. I had some pretty valuable data for them.
“I’ve got something to show you.”
Since I didn’t particularly want to touch any autopsy instruments, I pulled on one of the drawers. It came out unoccupied, so I hopped onto it, posing with a bit of showmanship, grinning at my captive audience.
Danny dropped her pen, her hands flapping in excitement. Carlos whistled.
“How are you doing that?” asked Danny.
“It’s easy, after the hard part, which is forgetting we shouldn’t be able to touch.”
Carlos tried it, going for another drawer. His hand went through it. He tried again, and again. “It’s not working. Am I broken?”
“Let me try,” said Danny. She passed the notebook to him and did the same thing, reaching right through the drawer.
Slowly and deliberately, I leaned in and opened the drawer. It came with the shape of a bag-covered head peeking out, so I quickly slammed it shut again.
“Give it time,” I said. “Besides, that’s not all.”
I motioned for them to approach. Neither of them took my offered palms. Not yet.
“What is it?” asked Danny.
“Come with me.”
Carlos reached for my hand first. Danny tucked her notebook and pen into her bag, slinging it over her shoulder before following suit. Though I tried keeping my walls up, their apprehension soaked through their shaky fingers.
As the sterile walls turned pocked and covered in vines, both grasped my hands tighter, the pulse rattling us to the bone. They turned to stare in awe through the doors of the ballroom at all the phantom dancers, blue as smoke in the moonlight.
“This is a good sample size, isn’t it?”
Danny’s gape turned into a giggle. She sniffled, drawing a sleeve over her face. Carlos put his arms around her, laughing into her hair.
“Would you like to dance?” I asked. Not that I’d join them, yet, but just to give them a nudge.
Her averted glance seemed a bit shy. Another wallflower. “We’ve got a lot of work to do.”
“Come on, it could wait,” he said, already bouncing to the beat. “We deserve to party.”
“For real?” she asked, still sniffly. She tapped her fingers to her lips. “After all we’ve been through for this information, you want to drop it and risk forgetting, so you can go rave?”
He went still, bending down to look her in the eyes. “I would never forget any of it.”
“I won’t!”
She tapped even faster. I was about to offer to keep her company if he still wanted to go dance, but then he rolled his eyes, putting an arm around her. She busied her hand returning his embrace instead.
“Whatever, professor,” he said. “No fun till homework’s done, right?”
They shared a laugh into each other’s shoulders before pulling apart, composing themselves, like they’d forgotten they had an audience.
“How’d you guys meet?” I asked.
They looked at each other, wondering who should tell the story.
“We met at a morgue,” he said, with all the due morbidity of that locale.
“Where else?” she added cheerily.
“She surveyed me, of course.”
“He kept coming back and asking me how it was going, even when I hadn’t met any more people to survey.”
“I felt bad for bothering her so much, so I said I’d help.”
She gawked at him. “Is that why?”
He threw his hands up. “You were so obviously annoyed by me!”
Her bashful dithering owned up to it. “I mean, I wouldn’t have minded, but I had so much data to remember, and you kept wanting to talk about music and stuff.”
“That’s why I volunteered, so we could keep talking.”
She seemed torn between injury and gratitude. “What about the science?”
“I’m all for science!” he said, like it went without saying, something everyone could get behind, like chocolate. “But the company wasn’t bad, either.”
They might’ve forgotten all about me, from the way they were beaming at each other. It ached, seeing how little they had in common, and how much they still loved each other anyway. Even if it came out of necessity, of having no other choice for company. They’d thought they were alone, adrift at sea. Then they were sharing a life raft.
I wondered if it would last, now they’d reached land, and had other options to not be alone.
They turned back to me at last. “Have you got anything to write on?” he asked.
In the library, amongst the ancient tomes and yellowing paperbacks, I found an old but blank leather journal. They both managed to get a hold of it, but Carlos let Danny hold it to her chest.
She turned to me. “I can’t tell you how much this means to us.”
I didn’t know what to say. I tried shrugging it off.
“I’d better get to writing,” she said.
They curled up side by side. “You have a pen?”
We scoured the entire library, until we must’ve displaced every piled book, stirring up a storm of dust.
“We’ll find one,” I promised.
Evie would know where to look. But when I tried spiriting to her, it only brought me into the midst of the dancers. Just as I remembered she didn’t dance, the sound and crowd and pound of the pulse swallowed me up, going to my head like wine. Someone took my hand.
I forgot why I’d come as I let myself be taken for the ride.
* * *
I couldn’t help but answer the call spoken through skin, telling me to brace myself for a whirl. My stomach leaped with a roller-coaster thrill as the flapper girl spun me around, her dress bright as city lights against the warm dark night of her skin. She laughed—and for a moment, as our hands touched and she taught me dances long dead without speaking a word, I fell a little in love with her.
My heart broke when she let go and went shimmying away, until I fell into another’s arms. His body barely let mine know ahead of time before he lifted me up high and suddenly dipped me back down, through the arch of his legs. When he put me back on my own feet and swung me out wide, he almost let go, but he felt my call to stay. He wasn’t as pretty, pale and square in his plain brown suit, but he sure knew how to swing.
As I rode along, my starving skin woke to the touch of so many hands and arms and hips, as I met more and more dancers, each pulling me closer and closer as they felt their welcome from my first touch. I couldn’t even remember when I’d been born, seeing so many ballrooms and dance halls and discos in their memories, whirling dresses real and remembered, sweethearts watched across the room and lovers taken to bed and tonight still up in the air, hunger all around. Even the singer’s voice ran ragged with loneliness, so distant, trying to pull us all closer. I could hardly believe it when I looked up at the floating stage and recognized her.
“Evie?”
She hid her appetite so well. As if the pangs of longing came from us, not her. Why yearn, when she could join in?
The feel of a familiar hand made me falter. My partner and I went still as everyone moved around us.
“Come to dance?” said Alastair.
The spell had been broken—just long enough for me to remember myself. It all came back to me. Sunflowers spilling at my wake. Trash flung across my bedroom as my sister searched in vain for a suicide note. The wind in my hair up on my apartment rooftop.
I spirited right the hell out of there, taking him with me.
“Seriously?”
I wrenched my hand away before he could take us back. Through the walls of the piano parlor, the pulse kept beckoning. I couldn’t bear to go much farther.
“I can’t do this.”
He dropped all his usual pretense, riled up enough for a modern inflection again. “You were doing this!”
“I forgot that I died.”
“Exactly! Why do you think we dance?”
I closed my eyes, still fighting off the pounding of the pulse in my head. “My family is burying me tomorrow, and I’ve been out drinking, and dancing, and I even went on a date! I don’t deserve to forget what I’ve done.”
He stared at me, too still not to be roiling under the surface. At last he said, “What date?”
At least I still had it in me to smirk, for a moment.
His eyes went clear, cool and pale as moonlit snow. He slowly leaned in, trailing the tips of his fingers over mine. For once, he didn’t hold back. He didn’t share any memories, but he cracked the door just wide enough to let something slip through. His blood called to me, the same as mine to my dance partners, letting them know I didn’t mind getting close.
“There’s no taking back what you told me on the dance floor,” he said.
I gave up a sigh. “I know. Why do you think I can’t stay?”
The pulse drowned out the wailing in my head. It shouldn’t have. The least I could do was feel it, even if it made my wrists chafe.
The geists were in hell, and I deserved to join them.
He reached up to touch my face. I wanted it, though it nearly hurt. My numb skin woke in shock the same as an icy wind, or cold shower, or pain. His thumb brushed my lip. I couldn’t help it. I had to know. I stuck out the tip of my tongue to see if we could still taste.
His skin tasted like I remembered skin tasted. Even if it were only my memory, not new, not his own taste, I never thought I’d get to feel it again. So I didn’t care. I sucked the rest of his finger into my mouth like I meant to fucking eat it. He watched with a knowing smile.
“So this is why you’ve been so uptight,” he said. “If you let loose, there’s no holding the real you back.”
He hardly flinched as I chafed his skin with my teeth, before I pulled off with a last lick. I already missed the fleeting tang of salt and skin. My mouth was so stale, sick of being empty. I wanted more.
“I’ll just have a bite before I go.”
I grabbed him by the collar and muffled his gasp as I pulled his lips down to mine. He tasted as sweet as rain on a parched tongue. His arms closed tight around me. I couldn’t help but moan. I’d so badly wanted a good, hard kiss tonight.
All too soon, he let go, pulling away. “Who’s the boy?”
Oh, shit. I’d forgotten to keep my walls up. Even if that face had only slipped into my head for a fleeting moment, it had been long enough.
“Did you leave him behind?” he asked.
Correcting him would mean admitting I’d gone out with someone who still had a pulse, and I really didn’t want to hear his take on that. I kept quiet, lying by acquiescence.
“So that’s why you’ve been dragging your feet.”
“What’s the deal?” I asked, as casually as I could. “I thought you wanted me to move on.”
“When you have me, I’d rather it be with joy, not grief.”
“As if,” I said. As if this hadn’t just happened. I couldn’t bear to look at him.
His voice went soft, even tender. “It will come as a relief, once they bury you. As it is, you’re still a burden. Once they release you to the earth, and your eternal fate, they’ll carry on. So will you.”
I didn’t reply. As much as I wanted to refute him, that sounded about right. They couldn’t mourn me forever. And I couldn’t keep mourning myself, even in strange ways like this.
He put a hand on my arm. I tried shrugging him off, but not too hard. Slowly and surely, I let him pull me closer, until he had me in his arms, burying my face in his shoulder. I couldn’t decide what embarrassed me more—making out, or this. I put my fist on his chest, like I meant to pound it, push him away, only to let it rest there.
His laugh rumbled against my ear. “You were looking for a pen?”