Fiction: Haunted

    I can only credit myself with making a few genuinely wise decisions in my life. One of which occurred when I was fairly young. I must have been about six or seven at the time. I had just explained some detail of my inner world to a teacher and went back to drawing. The teacher turned to one of her colleagues and said
            "I  wish I still had the imagination that I did when I was that age".
I can't remember what I was talking about or who this teacher was, but I remember thinking "Aha! this imagination stuff must be pretty important if the adults wish they still had it.I'd  better not lose mine!"
So I didn't. Instead I cultivated my imagination, feeding it new bits of information and teasing out it's ideas. It grew up with me. During my worst moments I had any number of worlds to retreat into. Fits of boredom could always be assuaged by a visit one of my characters or inventing some new creature.
    While it may have lost some of the technicolor sparkle it had when I was younger, my imagination still regularly provides me with my best ideas. Even though I think I am well acquainted with the way it functions, my imagination still has the capacity whip around and catch me completely off guard with something like this short story. It almost seems as though someone else wrote this. I still don't know what to think of it.
Hope you like it


 Haunted

Black is the color of my true love’s hair.  She plays the guitar, reads constantly, and doodles in the margins of her journal. She dresses like a gypsy from story books. Her name is Sabrina. She speaks halting French with an American accent.  Her eyes are dark. She is one of the funniest people I have ever encountered and I strongly suspect that she is brighter than I ever was. Her eyes are dark and mysterious.  Her laugh is full of mischief.  Her voice is dark and calm. She constantly amazes me surprises me, and leaves me feeling breathless.  Sabrina’s presence is intoxicating. She is 20 years old, a year younger than I was when I died.

      They called it the Great War and it was more terrible than anyone could have ever imagined.  Brave fools that we all were, we all truly believed that this war would end all others. Our brave boys would take one last glorious charge to make the world safe and free forever more. We’d show the Hun what we were made of for King and Country and be back in London by Christmas.  It turned out that we were made of fragile sinew and blood like everyone else. None of my battalion would ever see England again.  A tide of artillery fire washed us all out of history on the fields of France. Infants who were born that year are now old men and women.  Barely anyone remembers.  Wheat is planted where I fell. Wars still rage around the world. Nothing has changed. Nearly a hundred years later and I still don’t understand what I died for.

     Being a ghost is like watching at the window of a train. You can see and hear the world moving on around you but you cannot touch it or affect it. Nobody knows you are there.  For the longest time I sought out mediums and spiritualists. Not because I had any great message to pass along, but simply to connect with someone. They were as unaware of my presence as anyone else. The living simply cannot see or hear us. We are not tied to any one place or object, but most of us stay put out of habit. Where else are we to go? Ghosts are merely echoes of the past, unable to change or move forward. We are stones in a brook.  I have met a few others of my kind, Most of us soldiers from a long ago battle. Romans and Gauls, Revolutionaries, Napoleon and Charlemagne’s men, Warriors from the Hundred Years War and The Second World War all still wander. When we can make ourselves understood to each other, we reminisce about what we miss most about being alive, things we barely noticed when we had them: Lungs filled with breath sunlight on our skin and the taste of water. German, British or Carthaginian, it makes no difference.  The thing that everyone misses the most is the touch of another person.  We all long for a simple hand on our arm or a kiss on the cheek.  Any ghost would readily shake hands with their worst enemy just to feel the press of flesh once more.

Sabrina came to Northern France to study history and literature. I first saw her walking across the winter stubble of the field where I lost my life.  She was wearing a lime green knitted hat, a too-large gray duster, a flowing patchwork skirt and a trailing striped scarf that I later learned she had made herself.  She sang a song under her breath that I didn’t recognize. It was something about gardening and an octopus.  The nonsensical lyrics and the way she hugged herself to keep out the cold reminded me of a child playing dress up.  I followed after her. Ghosts often follow people like fish following a boat. We don’t wish to frighten people or have any real purpose. It is just pleasant to be near someone again. I often wonder if people can feel that I am there. I remember the sensation of feeling someone’s presence in an empty place when I was alive.  It would be nice to think I kept some lonely spirit company at the time.  I enjoyed that first walk with Sabrina. She rambled slowly across the field and into the woodland, pausing frequently to investigate a toadstool or flip a clump of dirt over with the toe of her clunky boot.  Sabrina occasionally spoke her thoughts aloud, a habit I used to have when I was alive. People would tease me for it.  In Sabrina I find it charming. I can pretend that she is talking to me. That first day I learned that she was from Michigan. She had a younger sister who she missed she had only been in The Academy for a week   and was worried that she’d never master the language.  When we were walking along the banks of a stream in the low wood, a young Roebuck broke cover on the opposite bank. Sabrina stood stock still and breathless for the entire time the animal drank. An enormous grin spread slowly across her wind kissed face. Her eyes lit up and grew wide. It was one of the most perfect expressions of human joy I had ever witnessed. When the deer faded back into the woods she whispered “Wow!”  She gave a skip of delight as she continued on her way. I suspect this was the moment I first fell in love with her.

Ghosts of course have no heart to beat faster as the object of their desire approaches. I cannot blush when she glances toward me or even be seen. The whole situation is ludicrous and impossible. It should not be possible for one so long dead as me to fall in love. Had I survived the war, I would be old enough to be her great grandfather. Yet in spite of all reason I found myself waiting at the edge of the field impatiently every day for Sabrina to arrive for her daily walk. If she were but a few minutes late my imagination will concoct awful irrational scenarios where she had either suffered some horrible accident or met a young man.  I don’t know which I dread more.  I exist for the hour or two when we can walk together and relive every moment of our walks over again in my mind. I could easily follow her back to the dorms and spend every waking moment with her, but the few times I dared to return with her made me feel like a criminal and I left strait away. I never would have thought it possible, but there can be no doubt. This is Love. This is torture.  

                “This Fraulein can neither see nor hear you. She doesn’t even know you are there” Anselm tells me for what seems the thousandth time. “Forget about her. Why must you always dwell on what you can not change?”

Anselm’s ghost is tall muscular and blonde. He is my closest friend now.  He looks the way every German soldier would like to.  He was twenty four when he died in the Second World War, which makes him both older and younger than me. I wish we could have met when we were alive. Anselm speaks English fluently. He is clever and easygoing. His sense of humor is a bit fatalistic, which is understandable under the circumstances. He continues:

“It is like this obsession you have with wanting to know for what you died. What difference would it make now? Trust me. It does no good. I found out this too late. If I knew why we were fighting when I was alive, I would have turned my gun on my comrades. But this is all past. Nothing can be done anymore. If you can’t learn to let things go, Dummkopf, I’m afraid you will worry yourself to death!”

 We both laughed at this. Death is much funnier when it’s already happened

“Don’t you think if we knew the answers we could move on?” I ask him, more to distract myself than for an answer.

He looks at me with uncharacteristic solemnity.

“No. If that was the reason we are still here the world would be full of nothing but ghosts of soldiers who did not know why they died.” . 

I suspect that Anselm is right but it still doesn’t change anything. I still want to know the answers and  I cannot stop myself from thinking about her.

John Ryan, 2011