by Various
“Me neither,” I blurt out. “People don’t come out here unless they’re depressed or looking for trouble. Which are you?”
He chuckles. A low, warm sound that prickles the hairs on my arms.
“If I must pick one, I’d lean toward depressed.” He tries to say it lightly, but a heavier note lies beneath the surface—the riptide hidden beneath pleasant waves. That heaviness resonates in my chest. I edge toward him, looking up into his face. Just out of arm’s reach, I try to find what the note means.
Pale moonlight illuminates the stubble peppering his jaw. Dark, fine eyes and a nose slightly bent, as if it’d been broken and never straightened.
“Didn’t anybody tell you it’s not polite to stare?”
I flinch and avert my gaze, face hot. “Sorry.”
He chuckles again, and the heavy note is gone. “Just teasing. Come sit with me. I’m a bit lonely, I’ll confess.”
I scan his face again. The muscles in my body tense, heart still pulsing a little too hard. It’s exhilarating, and despite my fear and caution, I climb up beside him.
Still keeping a gap between us, I turn my eyes to the sea. “Why are you lonely?”
“Because I’m alone. Why else?” He leans forward, toward me as if trying to see my face.
Warily, I look over at him, expecting the laugh again. But there is only a query in his eyes as he scans my face. Only curiosity in the lines around his mouth.
“You’re alone, too,” he says at last. “What draws you to this abandoned place?”
His interested tone thrills me, opens me up so words of my own come pouring out against my will. “I haunt this place. It’s all I have. But nobody ever comes. Except sometimes the pier-folk. But they’re high or drunk, and carry guns. I hide from them. So it’s just me and the sea, usually—”
The words only stop when I slap my hand over my mouth, stunned that I said so much, so bluntly. My wide eyes meet his, expecting a reaction. Disbelief, fear, amazement.
He just looks sad. Offers a slip of a smile and scoots closer so our knees brush. A tingling sensation shoots through my body.
“Well, I’m here tonight.” Simple words, but there’s comfort in them.
Energy buzzes through me, and I want to jump and run. With great effort, I sit still, marveling at this new, wondrous change to the monotony of the afterlife.
“So… who are you?” I say, leaning toward him so our shoulders brush, too.
A pale smile curves his lips. I’m reeling in this moment—losing my caution in the intoxication of another being, of touch and words. Of all these things I’ve gone so long without. I drink in the man’s dark eyes. Inhale his scent. Snatch up the little touches of sitting so close.
“How about we start with my name?” The teasing note is back in his voice. “I’m Cole.”
I roll his name around in my head, almost giddy as I stare into the rolling waves. One syllable, simple, but full of strength. I enjoy its echo in my mind.
He jostles me lightly with his elbow, startling me out of my reverie. “What about you?”
“Me?”
“Yeah, what’s your name?”
“Oh!”
A pause. He’s waiting, but I can’t seem to speak.
“Your name is Oh?”
I look away. “No.”
He stills beside me, then his fingers brush the underside of my chin, pulling me gently back to look at him again. I avoid locking eyes.
“What is it?” There’s such gentleness in his tone.
My gaze darts to his eyes and back to my hands, coiled in my lap. “I haven’t spoken it to anyone since… since before.”
“Before what?”
Tears crest in my eyes. They burn like saltwater. I want to speak my name, I want to tell him. More than that, I want to curl up in his arms. It’s silly because he’s a stranger, and these feelings rushing through me are purely the effects of loneliness.
But it feels like love. And I miss love.
I open my mouth to say it, to speak my name to him. But suddenly I realize, I can’t feel the wind anymore. Startled, I glance down at my body. I can see little waves radiating off my skin—like heat waves off the pavement in the summer.
“Well?” Cole prompts.
I bolt to my feet, but can’t feel the sand beneath me. “I can’t—I have to go.”
He stands, concern washing any hint of teasing in his voice. “Why? What’s wrong? Did I do something wrong?”
I shake my head, desperate to get away. “No. I’m sorry. I just have to go.”
Bolting down the shore, I force myself not to look back at him. His voice carries on the wind as he stands alone.
“You’re a little late for Cinderella—she leaves at midnight, not one.”
• • •
I spend the next day huddled in a cave—a gap created by the rocks, where the sea doesn’t reach and the wind doesn’t blow. And people can’t see you.
Hugging my knees to my chest, I stare off into nowhere. His face fills my mind as I replaying our entire conversation again and again.
Blinking, I look down at my incorporeal form.
I ache, wishing I’d stayed to let him see what I really am. I wish I’d told him everything.
But then he’d have run away. People are scared of ghosts.
Ghosts are scared of people.
After the sun gives up its claim on the sky, I climb out of my cave and pace the shore. Hyena-like laughter drifts from the pier. I shiver, fighting off memories of the night that put me here.
The moon seems sluggish tonight, just a slip of its usual self. I wait for it, watching it as I lie in the sand.
A little before midnight, I hear a car engine approach and cut out. A door slams, and I bolt for the shadow of the rocks, peering up toward the reeds and brush that eventually meet the road. A man descends, picking his way down the hill before sliding to a halt only twenty feet away.
The moon is pale, but the figure familiar. Cole.
“Come on, come on,” I whisper to the moon.
Cole stands there, arms planted on his hips as he scans the seashore. He begins to wander down it, bending every now and again to lift a shell and toss it into the ocean. One or two he keeps, shoving into his pocket.
The moon finally takes its place. The wind no longer blows through me; I can feel its salty breath on my skin. Bolting from the shelter of the rocks, I trail Cole. I jog up behind him, and then stop short as he tosses away another shell.
He stands there a moment, a sigh lifting and dropping his shoulders. Then he turns, and freezes. I can just barely see the smile possessing his face. “Hi there, Cinderella.”
I grin back, struggling to wipe the silly expression off my face. “I’m not Cinderella.”
He approaches. “Seemed like you were afraid of turning into a pumpkin or something.”
I can’t help but laugh. “She doesn’t turn into a pumpkin! She just changes back to her old clothes and the carriage turns back to a pumpkin.”
He stops before me, looking down into my face. Reaching out, he runs his fingers through a lock of my hair. I shiver, a staccato beat returning to my chest.
“I missed you,” I say, then cringe.
He chuckles, not unkindly. Grabbing my hand, he leads me back toward the rocks. “Don’t be embarrassed. I missed you too. Couldn’t stop thinking about you today at work. Kept thinking maybe I was just crazy and you didn’t really exist.”
I smile as we take up our old seats on the rocks.
“Or maybe, I thought to myself,” he continues. “Maybe you were just a mermaid and you’d get your tail back at one.”
My smile fades. I turn away.
“What’s wrong?” he asks, squeezing my hand.
I just shake my head and try to memorize the lines in his face. The permanent parentheses around his lips, the nose slightly bent, eyes I keep losing myself in.
“You hit close to home.” The admission makes my heart stutter in my chest.
<
br /> The muscles in his shoulders and neck tense. “What do you mean?”
I want to tell him. I’m lonely and tired of the ache. I want to confide and find comfort in him. I want him to do the same. But there’s an edge of fear running through me, a whisper that says he’ll run away.
What do you have to lose? I war with myself. Him. I could lose him.
But I don’t have him. Not really.
So I lean forward, bolder than I was even in life, and I press my lips against his. He sits stiff, unresponsive for a fraction of a second, and panic seeps through me. Then his arm slips around my back, and he pulls me in. He kisses back, releasing my hand and tangling his fingers in my hair.
I lose myself in the warmth of his lips. In the wholeness that I feel in that moment. His hand on the small of my back feels… perfect.
I pull back, face still close to his. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
“Try me.”
I touch his face, run my hand over the stubble on his jaw, set my thumb against the corner of his lips.
“I’m dead. I only come alive at midnight, here in this place.”
He brushes a kiss against my cheek, but he still seems tense. “Everybody feels that way sometimes. There’s nothing wrong with that.”
My heart sinks. I extricate myself from his arms and stand, feet sinking in the sand. He wraps his arms around my waist and settles his chin on my shoulder.
“No,” I say, jaw working. “Cole—I am dead. I’m a ghost. I died on this shore eight years ago.”
He turns me around to face him. I want to yell it now. I want to scream it at him so he’ll listen and believe me.
“I know.”
Two words, but they send me reeling. I clutch his arms to keep from falling. “What? How? I don’t…”
I feel him moving me back to the rocks, but it’s as if I’m in a dream. Or back in my incorporeal form. But I’m not. His hand warm against my arm, he settles me next to him.
“I was there,” he says. His voice breaks. The riptide, I knew, lay just beneath. “Just a stupid, foolish kid. Only thirteen or so. I wanted to tick my parents off, so I went to the pier. Thought I was tough, that I could handle whatever was down there. I couldn’t wait to come home and tell my friends I’d hung out with the punks at the pier.”
His voice drifts off. I turn to look at him, watching the memories haunt his face.
“They pummeled me. Did this number,” he pauses, pointing to his nose. “I managed to slip away, but they chased me. I was so… scared. They had guns. And they kept shooting at me. I could hear the bullets whipping past me, smacking into the sand.”
A shiver works through me as I listen. A fragmented memory surfaces in my mind, and a gasp tears itself from my lips. “The kid. The kid who ran past me.”
He hangs his head. “It was my fault. I didn’t tell anyone. Wouldn’t say a word to my parents, didn’t explain to anyone how I got beat up. I was horrified. Especially when I saw in the paper about… about you. And I knew it was my fault.”
I can’t breathe—an odd sensation that burns in my lungs. “They meant to catch you, but they found me.”
Tears streak his face. “It’s my fault.”
I shake my head. If he’d come six years ago, I’d have agreed. I went through a period of rage where I’d probably have tried to snap his neck.
But sitting there beside him, I can’t feel anger. Just the sorrow of it all. “I shouldn’t have been out here either. I just… I was broken and desperate. It seemed like the perfect place to end it.”
He sucks in a sharp breath. “You were going to…”
“Yeah. But when you charged past, and then… then they came. I didn’t want to die anymore. I ran too, but they caught me. They… well, it didn’t end soon.”
Cole shakes beside me. I pull him into an embrace and hold him. I offer him comfort as he cries against me. Before I realize it, I’m crying too. Minutes tick by, and I know soon I won’t be able to hold him.
I find his lips, and our kisses are salty and wet with tears.
After a moment, he straightens. His breath is uneven and ragged. “But why… why do you become…”
“Tangible?”
“Yeah. How?”
“I’ve thought about that for a long time,” I say. “I think they shot and left me at midnight. But… I didn’t actually go until around one. I… lingered. Somewhere between death and life for an hour. Way I figure it, this is my reprieve. My allowance of time.”
Cole blinks back tears. “I’m so sorry.”
I shake my head. “Don’t be. It won’t change anything. But I’m glad you came. So glad you came.”
We are silent a moment before I ask my last question. “Why did you come?”
His jaw works a moment before he answers. “It took a long time to work up the courage. I couldn’t do anything right in life. There was always this guilt, this heaviness underneath it all. And I knew I had to come back to this place. I did. A month ago. And I saw you from the road—but you weren’t physical yet. God, you were so beautiful floating over the rocks.”
He clears his throat. “I came back a lot over the past month. But last night was the first time I could manage to come down from the road. To speak to you.”
The midnight hour draws to a close. His hand passes through me, awe painted on his face as he takes in my shimmering form. I smile over the ache of no longer being able to feel him.
He doesn’t leave, doesn’t run away. He just sits beside me and we discuss the past, his life, my lonely years here.
“So,” I say. “You have your closure. What will you do now?”
“Closure? I guess it could be called that. But I’m not going anywhere. I want to stay with you.”
“What kind of life is that?” I ask. “You can’t even touch me until midnight. And then only for an hour.”
He smiles, passing his fingers through me again. My light shimmers on his skin, illuminating his face. “It’s enough for me. What about you?”
I look into his eyes. “It’s enough for me too.”
A REASON TO LINGER
by Alexis A. Hunter
First published in At Year’s End: Holiday SFF Stories (2012), edited by L. Lambert Lawson
• • • •
STANDING BEHIND the bar on New Year’s Eve, Lawrence wonders why he pours all his energy into keeping Linger up. The tendrils of light that form his body quiver as his gaze sweeps across the crowded establishment.
Most don’t see what he sees—dirt piles and crumpled leaves cluttering the corners. Barren window frames with glass-shard teeth.
Instead, they see mahogany walls and leafy, scrolled trim; summer landscapes housed by ornate frames; a clock that ticks a quarter ’til midnight; and a dozen tables, around which ghosts sit and chatter.
They tell tales of their deaths, or, more rarely, anecdotes of their lives. Lawrence has heard every story, and the repeated phrases grind on his nerves.
Exhaustion sweeps through him. He glances at the men’s restroom. White hot light laces the door’s edges and bursts from a fist-sized hole in the center—the only thing Lawrence’s projections can’t hide.
Sighing, he struggles to maintain Linger’s illusion.
The front door cracks open, letting in a stranger and a gust of cold wind. Lawrence turns to see a ghostly child, no older than twelve, quivering in the light of the streetlamp outside. Snowflakes kiss the wet pavement behind her as the glittering city parties into the night.
“Can… can I come in?” Her form is bright and hot white, like the light from the men’s room door.
The bottle of gin disappears from Lawrence’s hands. “Come sit down, kiddo.”
She eyes the door with its fist-sized bolt of light. Her eyes are wide, scintillating with myriad shades of pearl and glacial blue. She edges closer.
Lawrence leans over the bar. “You okay?”
She looks up at him. “Am I dead?”
“I’m a
fraid so.” Sinking back, he holds her gaze.
“You are too?”
He nods.
“… Is this your place?”
“Sure is.”
She wraps her thin fingers around an empty glass on the bar. A sigh raises and drops her shimmering shoulders—she hasn’t yet realized that she doesn’t need to breathe anymore.
A premature, off-key chorus of Auld Lang Syne rises from the ghosts of Linger. The girl smiles.
Staring down the road at another long year, Lawrence feels the particles of his being shifting and straining as he fights to maintain the projection. He wants nothing more than to close his eyes and let it all go—float through the men’s room door and on into whatever lies beyond.
The paintings on the wall begin to fade.
Hugging herself, the girl whispers, “I don’t like that door.”
“Me neither,” he replies.
“I don’t want to go through there yet.” Stretching her hand out, she touches his arm. “Can I stay here awhile?”
In that touch, the particles of light that form their spirits meld. Warmth ripples through Lawrence, and the paintings rematerialize, along with the bottle of gin and a jukebox he’d long ago forgotten.
“Absolutely, kiddo,” he chokes out through the lump in his throat. “I’ll keep this place up as long as you need to stay.”
M. K. Hutchins became eligible for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer with the publication of “Blank Faces” in Orson Scott Card’s InterGalactic Medicine Show (May 2012), edited by Edmund R. Schubert.
Visit her website at www.mkhutchins.com.
* * *
Short Story: “Blank Faces”
BLANK FACES
by M. K. Hutchins
First published in Orson Scott Card’s InterGalactic Medicine Show (May 2012), edited by Edmund R. Schubert
• • • •
SOMETIMES, seems like my clothes are just mud. Cracked mud, wet clumpy mud, fine dusty mud. Underneath it, there’s cloth somewhere, but it don’t show on the outside much.
I slouch out back of the saloon, under a lip of roof. Didn’t have the money to be inside, and I’d already managed to steal a shot of whisky tonight. Barkeep said he’d cut my tongue out if I try another.
