by Sara Veglahn
He wore a military uniform and carried a gun. His face was shiny from the heat. He looked at her but she could tell that he didn’t see her. She stared back at him. Her hands were sweaty on her handlebars. She felt dusty.
She realized, perhaps that very day, that she had not seen a man but a ghost. She thinks about this ghost a lot. It was the first ghost she saw.
She is asleep. It is spring. Open windows and a cool breeze. It’s early morning when she thinks she feels a hand on her forehead. She opens her eyes and sees a flash of bright red hair, then nothing. She thinks it is just the end of a dream. She falls again into sleep. Later, she feels a cool hand on her forehead again and wakes. This time she sees three ladies with bare feet and long nightgowns standing in the corner of the room. They sway slightly, like tree boughs. They have beautiful eyes.
If I am here, submerged, I am also there, in the house with my ladies. I am her, wearing a red dress. They are amusing me with their stories of the morning. After shoving a cup of tea into my hand, they stand before me in a line reciting and describing everything they heard and saw on their morning walk. They tell me a man paced the sidewalk outside the post office and screamed over and over, “It’s happening right now!” Near the river, the insects buzzed, they say. They say they looked deep into the river and thought they could see a small pair of eyes. They say the mayflies are getting ready to hatch and they say they could see one of them in the midst of her preparations for flight.
The river continues. It is both still and in motion. The bottom of the river is mud. The mud is difficult to stand upon. When it was warm, she bought smoked carp from a smoke shack near the river and ate its greasy, polluted flesh. After, she washed her hands in the muddy river. It was full of hands and legs, bodies swimming, avoiding the currents. Farther downstream it was easy to get caught off-guard and be swept away. There were so many stories of disappearances.
She has a dream where she lives in an apartment building across the street from an ornate mansion. There are several black metal mailboxes affixed near the front door. This place did not exist before this moment but it has been there for years. She finds herself in a kitchen, all white and glass. She is at the edge of the woods and there is a huge smoking cauldron. She crosses the stream near the mansion several times to investigate. Someone is hauling leaves and paper and wood to the cauldron to burn. When she looks inside, there is both water (an ocean) and an empty, black expanse of eternity.
I took my first breath in a room made of metal. Everything echoed and the noise was deafening. I could not believe how loud. When the oxygen hit my lungs it was knife-like. I cried out only once.
I was sifted through various hands and placed on a table. They left me there alone to gather myself slowly. The silence was deafening. I could not believe how quiet. I saw light through a small window and thick gray shapes moved calmly up and down the wall. Occasionally, there was the faint sound of scratching, voices.
I was half in and half out. I was a coin slipping from a pocket. I was enclosed in glass and felt like water. I became aware of the world and hesitated. There was too much.
Later, several sets of eyes were upon me. Beautiful, blinking, all different colors. Flowers were left, stairs descended. I return to this moment over and over. I can still see them and their revolving. I understood their movements, this vortex into which I was pulled.
She sees a ghost in a photograph and realizes it is both a ghost and a dead person—someone who used to be alive but who died, and who is possibly a ghost now.
Ghost: a wisp of fog who opens cupboards or rearranges objects on a table, or makes a loud racket upstairs, who makes an appearance in photographs as mist or shrouded figure who hovers about the heads of people who are alive, but now, who are probably dead too. It depends on the year of the photograph and also if the photographer was playing a trick with the film or developing or both. A hoax, they used to call these “spirit photos,” but even when people knew it was a trick they still believed. And why shouldn’t they, and why wouldn’t it be possible that it was recorded on film, even though they couldn’t see the apparition with their own eyes, out in the real world with all of its problems. Who is to say what’s a trick and what isn’t and that a mist or bright light isn’t something.
She once took a picture of an above-ground tomb. When she developed the photograph, she saw an intense light radiating from the tomb even though it was a cloudy day. She didn’t know what to think but she understood it was probably a spirit. She liked thinking about the sensitivity of film, of light, of the shutter closing so precisely at the exact moment.
A line of light lingers on the wall and makes a shadow that startles me when I walk into the room. It is there and then gone.
“Who is it? Is it you?”
This happens nearly every day. Every time I am startled.
My ladies hold their fingers to the sides of my head. They try to sneak up on me. It’s no use. Until something is right in front of my eyes, I cannot see it.
Pennies and buttons. Alone in the city. Nothing wandered back. Between the no-one-appeared and the what-did-not-fit, she slipped into cracks. She to the door or downtown and still she turned to the bridge and folded. Her palm buzzed. Her nearly glass and nearly worn and hollow. Pennies went on and off, out into the streets. Once: windows. Her key: something.
One afternoon on the first day of winter, I walked out the door. It was spring, I called out to someone. My ladies came running. It was the hottest day on record and I was on the street. I was crossing over.
The bridge traffic was stopped. Red light, green light, winter light, silence. I returned to my vortex, reverent. I was situated on the riverbank, looking at my wristwatch. It felt useful to keep track. My ladies were there, covered in whispers. I could hear bits of conversation: “But I thought you knew…”
I was pitched forward by a sudden crash, and it was there, on the edge of a gentle submersion, that my mind gave way. It was simple. I looked out over to the other side of the river and was drained of the future.
The river churned its mud below the blue bridge. I was down. It wasn’t the motion of flight. There was nothing to get away from. I was there, at the riverbank. I placed my hands in the river.
She has a dream where she is sitting next to someone’s sickbed. A lantern lamp twirls pastel light around the room. She cannot see who is lying in the bed. There are too many blankets, all white.
A steady hum persists as she sits. It is almost too loud to bear. It is like metal on metal crossed with electricity. It is like being in a horror movie except there is no blood, no demon, no evil. Everything is white and pure and calm except for the horrible noise. She tries to move the sheets to see who is lying sick in the bed, to see who is going to die soon, but something prevents her from doing so.
She wakes knowing that the person she could not see in the bed was her. She thinks this is a prophecy of her own death and she will probably be dead in the next day or two. This does not happen. It was no prophecy.
A day of sun. There were swallows on the power lines. A kind of warning. Or a good omen. Later, the sky turned green in a sweep of wind. The storm sirens sounded. Terrible wind. She thought she heard the roof crack. She thought she should gather herself and her things.
Everyone walked out to the streets to see what had been strewn. The roof remained intact, but every shingle had been torn off and thrown to the swampy grass. So many people with hands on their heads, so many with hands over their mouths.
After walking through her neighborhood and finding all of the felled trees, she went back to where she lived. There were things to be raked from the lawn. There were things to put away.
The sun shone through the muddy windows, making strange shadows on the walls. She gathered herself slowly, she walked the floor the way a farmer walks his fields. Everything was out of place, as if a smaller wind had come inside. It replaced one thing with another. The plates were where the cups used to be. The shoes were in the bathtub a
nd the soap was on the floor near the door. The books had been double-shelved, a row behind a row. Now the back row lay on the floor, leaving the front row intact. Nothing was missing.
A package tied with twine is thrown off the bridge. A leather satchel full of letters is flung into the river. Shirts, sweaters, hats, gloves are tossed off in fits of joy and fall to the river to be taken away by the current. A handful of paper is sent flying from the bridge walkway. A gold band is taken off and given up to the water below. A woman at night screams down to the water. A man at dawn screams down to the water. The ironwork is formidable in its construction, a barrier of crossmalleams. But the river is there below and voices barely audible call out.
She walked along the riverbank and jumped from rock to rock. The landscape there was both smooth and treacherous. Her friends had gone to drive the park road near the river. The road was circular, making the park an island marooned inside concrete and exhaust. She was down near the rip-rap because she hated driving around. Driving was boring and there was nothing else to do but go down to the cool, muddy water and let its damp fingers soak her clothes and skin.
The cars were beginning to disperse for the park curfew. At midnight the city locked the gates to the park so that no one could get inside. She wasn’t paying attention to the time and was sitting on a boulder watching the headlights on the bridge that was almost directly above her. A large beetle sauntered on the sand near her feet. She wanted to kick it into the river and watch its legs try to gain ground. She stood and as she did a flashlight beam hit her across the face. Her body twisted around and her foot got caught between the boulder on which she was sitting and another rock. She fell.
The river was in motion at the passing of a motorboat whose driver wasn’t paying attention to the no-wake zone near the park. She was dragged into the undertow and tugged out from shore.
She had never learned to swim. She tried to move but breathed water. She tried to open her eyes but was blinded by silt and mud.
When she opened her eyes she was back on shore and covered in the sticky sludge that the river was full of. A bright light shone into her eyes, someone was tugging at her clothes, she heard slow, low voices.
Sad emerald new and lost. The sky broken, I returned. I was a body churning and into moving I shone. It was out of necessity, these practical beliefs, a protection of cold iron, running water, bells, the special power of bread. The statues that preside over the fountains, the ladies of the forests, the secret spirits between the forest and the river. Wrecked and heavy, I return and return and return and return and return.
She has a dream where she is followed by several small snails. At first, she doesn’t notice them because they are so small. Their tiny shells barely make a noise when she accidentally steps on one of them. Soon, though, they grow bigger and she cannot help but notice that no matter how fast she walks there is always a large snail, the size of a potato, at her heels. Eventually, these snails become foxes. These foxes are a luminous, solid red. They freeze into statues when she turns to notice them. She does indeed believe, for a while, that they are statues. Solid red foxes frozen in mid-stride, jumping over a fountain, landing on a table, stealing food from a plate. Then she sees one of them blink, and she knows.
The first stage of life equals water. Once she reaches air she is different.
She is not a tree or tall grass or the underside of a bridge. Her wings have always been there. She sends the water away. There is a waterway in the distance and she has flown from it.
If dull wings, a predator. There is a search for shelter. The beginning of clasping. Divided eyes that are wings. A body into another body and vulnerable to wind. Time only lasts hours. It is what gives order.
She is considered wings, a single claw, an abdomen, legs. She has others who look like her. In several stages, she articulates motion. She is in water, she is in air, she is no longer.
In the grove on the other side of the river, she lingered near a spread of heavy walnut trees. She shivered in the shade although the sun came through the leaves in sharp fragments. Her ladies followed far behind her, completely unprepared for a walk. They wore black high heels with ankle straps and thin dresses with short sleeves that flapped in the wind. They should have been wearing coats, scarves, and gloves. They laughed as they always did, walking fast in the breeze, pushing each other playfully.
She stopped and stared at one of the ancient trees. It was so old. Who else had walked here when the grove was just a tangle of saplings? Who were those people? She became exhausted at the thought and sat on the dirty ground and made shapes in the dirt with a stick: a spiral, a triangle, a flower, the letters of a name. She was trying to remember something for which she was not present. She wrote a name over and over and over in the dirt. She pictured a person with that name. She felt she could become this person, someone sitting there among young trees, alone in the damp and chill. Someone just like herself but before.
Her ladies had been quietly moving towards her taking tiptoe steps. They were playing a game. Whoever startled her first would run several feet away and then run twice in a large circle. After that, she would jump on one foot until she was caught. The ladies seemed to find it hilarious so they played often. This time they were all “It” and soon, three long index fingers poked her shoulder. They ran away screeching and she was brought out of her trance, a trance that couldn’t have worked.
A sheep is slaughtered, a nail is hammered into a hand, several bodies lie still beneath sheets. A young woman is in bed reading. She considers herself a hero of her time, for herself only. She holds her hand out to someone walking past her door, a blur she cannot see.
She is silent, shakes her head no or yes when anyone asks her a question. Each night she dreams the hopeless dream to be. It is summer. She is in the summer house at the seaside. Her ladies bring in fruit, a sandwich, something cold to drink. The windows are open and the wind blows everything around.
She writes a letter, she reads someone else’s letters. Another woman is there with her. She is the same. They are the same woman, but only one of them speaks. What follows are several days and nights where the speaking woman tells the silent woman everything about her life. The silent woman remains silent.
What follows is a summer at the sea. They collect shells on the beach, they wade at low tide. They take their breakfast outdoors and gaze long at the soft sun. Her ladies take photographs of each other in their bathing costumes. They lounge and pose on the shiny black rocks that surround the cove where the summer house sits.
The silent woman narrates the past days in her head, makes lists of events. Her hands are folded primly on her lap. There is a photograph of the two women that has fallen to the floor. It is a picture where the two women verge on becoming one woman, but it is incomplete.
In the dream I am in an old mansion with ornate tapestries and tile floors. The mansion is surrounded by heavy iron gates and fences. Someone walks through a space in the fence and disappears. I see this from where I stand at a large window on the top floor. I watch this figure dressed in a military uniform bend low to the ground and go through the fence. I wait for what seems like hours to see whether this man will come back through, but grow impatient and leave the window. I hear running water but I cannot find it nor escape from the sound. I climb up and down the stairs, open every door and look in every room, trying to find where this water sound is coming from. In the middle of a dark room there is a dark stream that rushes through it, and an overgrowth of ivy and ferns. This stream begins at one end of the room, splashes out the window and continues along a gravel pathway that leads away from the mansion and into a beech grove. I leave the house through the window to follow the stream. I follow it as far as I can. In my peripheral vision I see the person in the military uniform walking parallel to me. I lift a hand and call out, but I cannot speak. I wake choking.
Mornings, they come to wake her, eyes dim from a long night of dreaming. They are in nightgowns, barefoot, their long re
d hair brushed smooth over their shoulders. Three cool hands are placed in turn upon her forehead. They whisper, Get up now, it’s morning.
Afternoons, they spend time chattering amongst themselves, sewing purple spangles on dresses, or making costumes for an evening amusement. The costumes are elaborate and identical. They only make costumes of insects or nobility: three grasshoppers, three knaves, three queens, three mayflies.
These ladies, as great as cities, gather their private nations and take flight. Arbitresses of east and west, they wander softly. They are of water, of any river or sea.
“Don’t you know it’s bad luck to compare hands?”
We are sitting on the strand, our legs bare, our sunhats low over our eyes. The woman who looks like me has taken my hand and placed it next to her own to compare. I pull my hand away.
My ladies are there with us. They have begun a game with shells. One makes a pattern in the sand with them and the others have to try to guess what the pattern means. Before they make their guess, they perform a kind of jitterbug. Then they sit down, rather hard, and place a finger to lips, ponder, then look up brightly and give their answer. They don’t often guess correctly, it seems, as they usually stomp off with a pout and frown.
