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The Ghost Nina

Part 1

By Victoria ChwalekPublished 3 years ago 6 min read
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I remember her fingers the most. Their bony spider dance webbing threads into needles at the window where I first saw her. Dancing, dancing, dancing their spiderly dance. Transparent and terrifying in their pursuit. I would often see her at that window and I would often try to follow her in my mind into the dark dampness of her concrete cage. Did her spider fingers crawl into crevasses and lips at night? Did she sleep soundly? What kind of nightmares and torments and hopes and fears did she harbor? Where did her mind travel to when I was not around to witness it?

I did hear her voice once. I found her standing at the bus stop with a scarf wrapped around her head and the red lipstick she would rub on her cheeks. She stood there like a postcard of desolation, a broken twig tree of flesh and the ephemeral. She had a handsome face if it wasn't for the sadness debilitating it. She reminded me of the red-eyed rabbits my grandfather kept in rusty cages in the yard. Her skin was even more translucent in the harshness of a winter daylight and I knew blue veins like a constellation of frozen rivers and lakes were zigzagging on her breasts. Her heart was a black bat like darkness, dirty and scared, cornered against her ribs. Dancing, dancing, dancing. Did the bat crawl into crevasses and lips to sleep at night? Where did it travel to for rest?

You look miserable I said.

Her eyelashes - the other strange smaller darker spiders - fluttered distractedly as she kept on starring at the empty road in front of her. Then for a second, a collapsing lapse in time, she dropped her dogged focus and her gaze wandered in my direction.

Drań she squeaked, my little mouse.

I did not know what to say then so I left her standing there that day. My queen needed space.

On most days, I would follow her like a shadow around the gray corridor maze leading up to her apartment, always a few steps behind but clever in my smallness and disguise. I knew by heart the tiktok of her heals and the number of steps it would take her to climb seven flights of stairs. One, two, one, two, one, two. Five hundred and eight times. I was well acquainted with the barely perceptible heaving of her breast, in and out, in and out, in and out. What did you think about when you climbed stairs? When you opened faucets? When you cut your wrists?

Her husband was a small man. She was not scared of him but she was also never touched. She looked forward to a peaceful life when she moved in but after a few years closed up on her she would lay in bed afflicted with a strange maladie – her veins were burning her flesh from the inside. Like fire. Like flames. Burning like acid spit spat from the mouth of a thousand ogres and anger and sadness and emptiness and folly and the crackling of moth wings on candles. Ever dancing, dancing, dancing. Tik tok, tik tok, in and out, in and out, in and out. The flames licking her wounds from the inside. Transparent and terrifying in their pursuit. She went on to sporadically make lovers out of the other husbands in the brutalist mess we called home but it was never enough to empty herself out of herself. She was a strange sad nuclear bird bitch experiment. She was silent and explosive, a corrosive metal-eating snake.

One night she opened the coffee tin every couple kept in the freezer in those years and found it filled with bills which she proceeded to spread on the table like a strange omen, a mesmerizing puzzle. 20 000. An overwhelming amount of money. She imagined a Toyota and nylons and oranges and maybe a plane ticket too. She imagined herself packing her bags and the bags under her husband's eyes, and seashells and seashores and seagulls, but it was only her mind that ran away that night. The doors and windows in the building were always open the neighbors would later repeat like broken records. Sometimes the chains are internal they would always omit. She never opened the freezer door ever again after that night.

I would years later wander the labyrinths of my thoughts and at times I would find myself staring at the old portraits of Nina as a child. A museum of my own creation. A transposition of desire and time. I saw her as I believed her to have existed. She was the kind of girl to bite her lower lip and to sit on her hands. An impatient child struggling to teach herself the rules of the world she observed feverishly unfolding around her. A child lost left to her own devices like most children then. A child that had learned to look out for the subtle changes of mood in a room and on the faces around her. A survivalist. A mute rock collector who could feel the intrinsic efforts of sediment formations and moss. A silent sneaky feline that played games in her mind to pass time, a futile pastime. Games that were never fun but that were inescapable nevertheless. A mind that ran millions of kilometres every hour. A wild horse, a wild card, a speeding train. Curious mostly out of necessity and fear. She was more electricity than flesh. The story was always there, eternal and inescapable, all she did was walk. Were those the formative years that led you to the bathroom where they found you? Did fate enclose you back then? Was the air you breathed made of premonitions and setting skies and environmental factors? Who fed you those bad apples? Oh my love, my love. In the next life, I will find you before and build you a shelter and a fire and I will feed you manners and a brilliant future. I will be your umbrella and a hand to hold.

I found her diary a few days after her death when they were emptying the apartment. The little black book had fallen into a crack behind the couch and found its way into my hands. A parting gift, my love? Disconnected thoughts, grammatical errors, accidental neologisms and butterflies darkened the pages. No explanations. A few maladroit scribbles that attested to her receding existence. She was an island with her own ecosystem, ruled by her own nebulous rules. Sometimes I feel that the only person who sees me here is that little boy from 3A. My love, oh my love.

For a long time afterwards I dreamed of crushing her little spider hands in my palms and not having done so that day at the bus stop emptied me of myself a few times over the years after that day. My love, oh my love. To what crevasses and lips did your mind crawl into?

I have never visited her at the cemetery because to me she left that day with a tin can in her purse and a heart heavy with oranges. In my mind, my queen floats in some corridors in America married to a man who is not me but who keeps her safe and alive and happy. Or maybe she runs inside the heart of wild horses in the plains of a land made for animals as nebulous and nervous as her.

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