A Little Life, After Death

Anne Baker found the day that she died to be rather boring, actually. It was in the middle of May: she was out in the garden, watering flowers where they bloomed on plump bushes, and had, by way of the heat and a too-tight corset, dropped of exhaustion and hit her head against the raised stones that made a perimeter around the dirt. She died without knowing any pain, and after a few minutes got back up, brushed herself off, and saw herself lying there dead.

It took her a moment to realize what exactly had happened. Then she tsked and brushed down her dress once more. It wasn't a happy circumstance, all this; she was still a young woman--in the prime of her life, many said--but if she was dead then she might as well act proper before whatever specter came to usher her to her final rest.

She looked around the garden paths for a hooded figure; an angelic light; a smoke-embossed face. But none met her, and no one came around this part of the house, nor would they until her husband James returned home from business. It was a pity, that; she did quite love James, and had wanted to grow old and stale and someday die in her sleep nestled up to him. But the world cannot be perfect in any way, and she tsked again, stepping out of the way of the blood that pooled out of her head. Dreadful, cleaning up all that; absolutely dreadful.

It took Anne Baker a few minutes to make her way back inside her house. She had left the keys in the mortal realm, after all; their ghosts did not follow into her unearthly pocket. The door was steadfast and stubborn, and the knob utterly refused to cooperate.

"Well, you can't expect me to stay out here!" she said, looking around at the pleasant day and listening to the birds. Far off, where the road to her front door became a road properly trafficked, she could hear the gentle sounds of men on horseback and an occasional car. "I'll catch cold if I'm out here."

Remembering the peculiar circumstance of her own death, Anne Baker thought at once that ghosts, such as herself, were entitled to powers beyond the reach of the living. One of those powers, if such superstitious stories were to be believed, was the uncaring way they dealt with rude doors and walls such as this obstinate oak piece she had.

Taking a breath, Anne tried to prepare herself in case she smacked her face into the door. Thankfully, nobody was around--but how embarrassing it would be nonetheless!

Perhaps if I shut my eyes, she thought, then it will not be so frightfully silly. I can tell James that I was not watching where I was going, and bumped along then.

She walked forward a few paces, and then another few. She peeked an eye open, and joy sprung up in her features.

Here was her beloved living room! Ah, to spend an afternoon reading on her crochet-covered couch! To dust the windowsills, in preparation for pies placed upon them. To curl up and fall asleep, her head on James' lap, after he set a blaze roaring in the fireplace, knowing that all was right and safe and warm in the world.

And at that moment, when Anne went to liven the place up with a light, did she truly realize that she was dead.

The ghostly form paused in the unlit room. Sunlight came in through parted sills, dispersing her figure to the naked eye. Her cats, napping against the stony floor of the hearth, did not move. The room hung perfectly still; the dust would collect without her presence. Her lips pursed a moment; she ought to find some way to keep the place her own, her own tidy home, but the more she thought about it the more the idea fell by the wayside.

For she was dead and, even without interacting with the precious things around her, she knew that she could not move a one.

Perhaps, in a moment of passion or a fitful rage, she might've knocked a potted plant over. A curtain might rustle from a volcanic yell of breath. The chains that wound around ghosts in fiction and clamored so scarily throughout the house would clink only for mice and spiders to hear, if she desperately wanted them rustled. Her home was no longer at her mercy, and she wondered if she might be heard, telling James she loved him when he went to sleep.

And time passed her by, since time needed her not anymore.

As she breathed, the life of her home flashed around her. When James came home, she heard his wailing, and it broke whatever heart beats silently in a ghostly chest. But that was a little bit passed; she had wandered wherever her fancy went. Her mind remembered the trunk of old clothes in the attic, and she laughed to herself, looking at the trunk and thinking of how she might behave at a sale. Would someone pay more for clothes she danced about unseen in? But then she was in the basement, humming and sighing about the dankness and drafts from windows that had gone unfixed. And then, in the middle of the night--for it was night now around her, which she registered only by a diminishing of the light outside her windows--she saw that her beloved was curled up in bed, asleep, alone.

It was a rare sight, that. She usually fell asleep before him. He commented that she was like a needy child, and it made her pout whenever he said it. And her pouting face always raised his spirits to a chuckle that invaded her senses and turned her face into blushing, happy scarlet. He always seduced her into slumbers: coaxing out Morpheus with a gently petting hand, gliding over her hair, and a deeply murmuring conversation about nothing at all important.

But here he was, sleeping, and in his dreams twitching. His face contorted with whatever disaster he'd witnessed on his inner eyelids, and his lip trembled. And Anne, whose thoughts had become scattered around the rooms of her house as she'd wandered through them, focused herself to a glasslike clarity once more and moved to his bedside.

James shivered; Anne sat, barely indenting the bed. Her hand reached out, and in the moonlight she saw how very pale she'd become. It was as if she were all outline, and the places in between were full of stars and sighs. She bid herself be tangible, and in that tangibility brushed her hand against his cheek. He was warm, terribly, foreignly warm, and stained with sorrow and mortality. And she knew she was cold, terribly, foreignly cold, and the curling up of his shivering body confirmed this.

She withdrew her hand, watching him, and a loneliness took possession of her. Time would pass her by, and in that passing, he would be swept away. Her death would become little more than a memory, held deep in a hurting heart, and soon enough he might leave where she could not follow him, to some other house with another wife who might bring a smile once more to the loneliness that plagued his face as well.

Leaning down, she pressed herself as close to him as she might do without inducing another shiver from him, and told him in a whisper,

"I'm still here."

But to her surprise, her husband was not sleeping, for sleep had not taken him on its wings in all the nights of the week. His eyes started open, and Anne's gasping retreat from the bed caught his weary attention. But he could not make out her form among the other moonbeams, and sat up at once, looking around for her.

It was a wild, disheveled look. It had been three weeks; James Baker had buried his wife in a day long past and had dreamed of hearing her footsteps wandering the house each night. The cats had been no company but to whine for food and keep his schedule normal. For a moment, in the moonlit room, he detected the briefest chase of her figure, caught in the afterglow of a photograph taken by Life too soon, but then it vanished in kind.

"Anne?" he called, he beseeched, but Anne found that she was so tired, even with her excitement. All the fire had been taken from her lungs, and her outline paled and wallowed in the nighttime until finally James fell back to the bed, awake and caught in the throes of futile hoping. Try as she might, in mustering up another scream for him, another push, there was nothing but little breaths that made no noise.

And as she blinked, time passed again, and the night became day, and birds chirped at the sunshine coming in, and his bed was emptied out to somewhere far beyond the house.

When she realized it, Anne stood again, shaking her head. She left the room and drifted through the halls, looking at the rooms they had left in disarray. The house was always undergoing some kind of reworking: the idea had been to turn the upstairs study into a room for her to sew and read in, and perhaps in coming years a children's room. Ah, but such dreams seemed silly in modern thought, and so she suspected it would again be a study, or be locked away and left to sit dusty and unmoved so as to preserve it for her memory.

She tuttered and hummed and as she passed through one of the cats in disorienting mindfulness, she heard it yowl something awful and scamper away to stare at her with huge fishbowl eyes.

"Oh, puss; I'm sorry, come here! Come here," Anne smiled, reaching to it, but the feline's hackles raised and it dashed off into some crevice of the house unknowable even to a ghost. But then, Anne thought, why should I chase it into the dark? A whole host of things there may frighten me!

So drifting, she made her way down through the house as she usually did, and looked through the great rooms, admiring all the lovely things she and James had collected in their brief existences together. There were two painted scenes of European merchants on distant shores docking in markets, and she admired each brushstroke and shouting figure. There were three butterflies, spread and nailed under glass, and she hummed at the color that drenched the wings. There were so many volumes on so many shelves, and she remembered each that she had read with fondness, going over the plots again and again to keep them fresh in-mind, as she could not very well open them to read.

And there were a few photographs hung of the trips they had taken together. There they were, in London; in Paris; in Egypt; in China. There, in her mother's backyard garden--and that was a continent far more overwhelming than anywhere they'd visited. There, on their honeymoon in America.

So many places, held in memories just behind one's eyes, all forgotten and snuffed out until darkness came in, and with it the night, and with it the stillness to dream again of old and happy things.

"Anne?"

She turned, and noticed that it was dark now in the house. Her little breath of white air shifted and rushed out of the closed room and down the hall to where James had called.

"Anne, if you are here, please come to me. I want to make contact. Please come."

She came upon him in the living room, and had to laugh, for it was the silliest thing. He had moved the couch slightly, and sat in front of the fire. A single log burned, and on the rug he had placed a Ouija board. What a foolish contraption! She'd heard of them, and giggled to herself--but the laugh died just as she had, and she saw with great pity the desperation in his face and form. He was older than she had remembered: white lines had just started their creeping into his hair, and age had clawed a first time at his face.

Anne cleared her throat and knelt down in the rug opposite him, smoothing her dress. The fire crackled merrily.

"Hello," she said, but he could not hear her, and that was not new. She looked to the board; he had placed his fingers on a tiny triangle that hovered over letters, and she pursed her lips. This was all so dreadfully silly; he didn't really think he might contact a spirit with a bit of cardboard, did he?

Oh, perhaps it was worth a try. Why not?

But before she could, a man yelled outside. She glanced around, although James did not, repeating his imploration for contact. Then, all at once, a disheveled and gruff man burst into her house, tracking all sorts of spectral mud in. Anne stood up sharply.

"Excuse me! This happens to be my home! What are you--?" was all she got out, before the man hollered in joy and rushed to sit down in front of the Ouija board.

Anne stamped her foot. "This is my home! What the devil do you think you're doing?!"

"What's it look like I'm doing?" the man replied, holding his hands over the triangle and gritting his teeth. "I'm going to--"

"You're not doing anything Horace, you swine!" another man shouted, sprinting in through the closed door and tackling Horace over. The two yelled, and Anne stood back with a gasp, watching them grapple. Then a shrill cry split their ears and a woman came in, wailing about how she simply must get someone to contact her son; another woman came in shouting "Mavis, don't you dare take my spot!" and then on and on until poor Anne Baker was stranded in her own fireplace with her feet among the coals and ashes, and a rabble of rowdy and swearing spirits were trying their very hardest to move a stubbornly unmoving planchette.

James looked around the empty room and sighed. It had been twenty minutes. He finally mumbled a quiet "Thank you, and goodbye," and folded the board up. He looked at it a moment, then threw it towards the fire in a rage. If it hadn't hit the grate, he would've watched it burn. Then he put his head in his hands, trembling.

"Oh, you sod! Pick it back up!" one of the ghosts wailed, another stamping its foot, another--

Anne's teeth gnashed, gritted, and finally clacked open:

"That is my HUSBAND!"

James' head darted up at the whisper of "husband" in the empty room, unmistakably his wife's voice.

"Get the hell out of my house! All of you!" Anne stalked out of the fireplace, and the others protested-- "Out! OUT! All of you, with your nattering and your hissing and your impatience: GET OUT!"

They all stared at her, then one by one left, their heads hung, angry words mumbled under their breath. In the far corner of the room, the cats had turned into small balls of fur and watched. The last one--Mavis, Anne remembered--at least had the courtesy to mumble a "sorry". Then the Bakers were alone, and Anne huffed and stamped the soot off her feet, had she had any there on a mortal form.

"Sorry, darling," she said to James, but he did not hear, nor did she expect him to. He was staring around the room, watching it carefully, and after a moment he slowly stood. She blinked, watching him: he crossed to a bookshelf and got a volume of the Arabian Nights. Then he returned, sat on the couch, and opened the book in his lap to the start.

And then he read, out loud, as he might've done almost a decade ago to the wife he'd called Anne Baker.

And Anne Baker slowly smiled, then beamed, then became a radiant shade in the firelight, and the couch next to James Baker indented ever so slightly. He smiled to himself, and read, and in another moment felt a cold and gentle weight against his shoulder, something so light he might've thought it imagination if he were not looking for it. And he read for hours, until it was late into the night, and the next day repeated it, and felt again the cold weight upon his shoulder of her ghostly head, and the next, and the next, until all the Arabian Nights had been read. And he started on another great series, and Anne sat contented and beaming, eyes shut, listening to his voice until suddenly it stuttered.

She blinked her eyes open, looking around the room. James looked different; the room as well, for fifty-five years had passed, and all the comforts had been replaced, and new cats were mewling to themselves. His hair was white all-through and his features were kindly and old. He cleared his throat, coughing and patting his chest, frowning at something there. Then he smiled, glancing over in the vague direction of her seated form on the couch, and smiled. He could not see her, nor did she expect it, but she smiled back anyway.

In another moment, he was reading again to her, and she put her head back down against him, shutting her eyes and listening to the soft and tender voice. And time passed, ticking and turning, until a flash of light came over them. She opened her eyes and saw a teenager standing by the fireplace, looking wide-eyed at a small camera in his hand. And she looked over and saw her husband, young and chuckling, pausing his book to look back at her.

The smile lit up her face as he put an arm close around her.