ST3.10 | "Like Silver"

PROMPT: During the month of October, the veil between the living and the dead is at its thinnest. This month, give us stories of haunted characters—either haunted by the remembrance of a lost loved one, or maybe haunted by the things they didn’t do . . . or worse, the things they did do. Supernatural stories are okay (though not a requirement) in response to this prompt, but above all else, make it character-driven, and make it noir.

LIKE SILVER

by Derek Alan Jones

I stand leaning against a stone half-wall at the foot of granite stairs, in the same stance and spot I was in the first time that I saw her. It’s the same stance and spot I’ve taken every night since they put her in the ground. I thumb the lighter she gave me after our first year together, and I touch the flame that springs from it to the tip of my cigarette.

I check my watch again after taking that first drag.

In just under a minute, the theater doors will open. The people will file through them, down the stairs, into the night. None of them will notice the woman walking along the edge of the crowd, who will brush by me so closely that I smell the rose oil she wears. In a city this size, a crowd like this, you never notice the ghosts.

She’ll push her hair back with her hand and toss a smile over her shoulder at me, just the way she did on that first night we met.

Just the way she has every night since they put her in the ground.

Those doors finally open, and I flick my cigarette as the pounding in my chest tries to decide whether to stop or to double its pace.

Then, in the doorway, she’s there.

In the marquee lights, she’s silver. Not silver like the color, but silver like a Silver Age. Silver like the Silver Screen. Like hard lighting and soft focus. Like a perfect big band score.

She brushes by and as she does that rose scent hits me hard, and every ounce of will I have is put to work holding back the tears. The crowd is just a blur and a hum now. I’m mostly a blur myself. The only thing in focus is her. I watch her pass, and I breathe in every moment of her as it comes. I imagine that, if I hold my breath, I can hold on to those moments for just a little longer. I wait for the glance she’ll give me and that playful cocked-brow smile. It’s that smile that I still see in my head every time I hear her name.

But that smile doesn’t come. Not tonight. Tonight, she does something she hasn’t done in all the nights I’ve come here.

Tonight, she breaks the pattern.

She breaks her stride.

She stops and my heart stops with her, and when she turns and faces me fully, her eyes lock onto mine the way a hand locks around a throat. I cannot will myself to take a breath, and I cannot will myself to move, because the anger that burns in those eyes is one that she has never turned on me.

“You can’t keep me here like this,” she says, and her words are almost lost in my joy and heartbreak of hearing her voice. As they settle on me, though, the weight of those words is almost staggering.

I want to ask a question. I want to understand. But I can’t clear my mind enough to decide what question it should be. Even if I could form the thought, I have no faith in my ability in that moment to form the words. Her face softens, but only slightly, when she speaks again.

“You have to see it all.”

She’s gone then, and my breath comes back in short and shallow stabs. I’m on my knees on the concrete, right arm flailing of its own accord, swatting at the hands of the man who tries to help me to my feet.

A few more breaths, and I’m running, without direction or intention, barely conscious of my movement, wanting only to put distance between myself and the words she said.

You have to see it all.

The cold stings my lungs, and the car exhaust thickens the air I’m choking on, but still I take it in gulps as I run in absolute disregard. My limbs aren’t under my control until I make it to my door, and even then, they shake so hard that I struggle to turn the key.

Once inside, her words play on a loop inside my head, and that look in her eye blazes through every inch of my memory.

You can’t keep me here . . .

I’m not keeping her here, I tell myself. I know that it isn’t true, but I keep up the act, as thin as it is, and I try and fail to convince myself.

I went to the theater that first night, when I should have been at her visitation, because I couldn’t bring myself to tell the stories, or to hear the stories again. I didn’t want to see her family. I didn’t want to see the faces of our friends. Above all else, I didn’t want to see her lying there like that. I didn’t want that memory. I wanted to remember her the way she had been inside that perfect moment. I wanted things to be the way they were before it all went south.

I wanted to see her in silver.

I thought that I could cling to that image and spare myself the rest. So I went to the theater, and there she was. It was just as simple as that. I know she wouldn’t have been there if I hadn’t come to see. She wouldn’t have come down those stairs every night if I hadn’t been there waiting.

I take a long, slow pull from the bottle that sits on the kitchen counter, and, if only for a moment, the burn of that cheap bourbon chases everything else from my mind. That first pull leads to a second, and they multiply from there until my mind is no longer racing. Until it seems to stumble, and I do the same, down the hallway, to the bedroom, where the bottle I haven’t noticed I’m still holding hits the floor.

She’s not supposed to be here.

She’s not supposed to be like this.

In the neon glow that has forced its way in through the crooked blinds, she looks the way a Lou Reed song sounds over second-hand speakers. Like a brash strum of a beaten guitar, or desperate words in a stilted voice that never quite finds the rhythm.

I run my eyes over the broad, feathered wings inked across her back, and I remember the way I wondered, the first time I saw them, if they were meant to be angel wings. By the time I saw her here, like this, though, I knew that didn’t fit.

This was where it started. This was the first step she would take in her slow walk to the end. Even half-drunk and half in shock, I can see that now. What I can’t see is how the hell I didn’t understand it then.

It’s all written out so clearly on every inch of her, and I’m sure that if she spoke a single word, I would hear it in her voice. I’d known her history and her old habits, but I let myself believe, or I made myself believe, that she was only tired and a little over-stressed. That some sleep and a decent breakfast would put the color back in that sunken face and the light back in those eyes.

I wonder then if this is what she meant by “see it all.”

I don’t have to fight the tears this time. I don’t have to grind my teeth and close my throat to stifle the sobs. I'm almost entirely certain that I couldn’t if I tried, so I let those tears and sobs come as they please, and I sink down to the carpet with my back against the wall.

It’s there, on the floor, against the wall, that I find myself in the morning, and I’ll admit that I’m grateful to the bourbon and shock for having dulled the night in my mind.

I don’t get much time to relish that relief, though, because when I step out for a cigarette, she’s waiting for me.

In the sunlight she is fading, sitting hunched and shaking in the corner of the balcony. Her knees are pulled up to her chest and tucked into a sweatshirt that I could swear used to fit her well. Her hair is down over the face that she refuses to turn toward me.

This was when I knew. This was when I finally let myself admit I knew. It was the last time we spoke, or at least the last time that I spoke to her. Spoke at her, maybe. For all my pleading, for all my demands, not a single word I said got through, and not a single word was returned. Even now, I can’t piece together a sentence that would do either of us any good, but I search and I strain like I did then, begging my brain for anything that might prevent what’s coming next, because I know, the same way I knew when I saw her like this, that she wouldn’t make it through the day.

I blink and the corner’s empty.

I light the first of seven Pall Malls I’ll smoke before I can force myself inside.

When I do, it’s there, where I knew it would be, sticking out from behind the counter – a pale and rigid hand lying still and flat against the carpet. My heart rips open all over again, but this time, I don’t go to her. This time, I don’t turn the corner to find the emptiness in her eyes and the needle still in her arm. I’m numb now, and I’m cold, and I can’t help but wonder if this is the way she felt in the end. The words “see it all” scream in my head, but I can’t make myself see this again.

Then, something breaks.

Something must have broken, somewhere inside my head, because I find myself sitting out on the front stoop, and I don’t know or care in the moment exactly how I got there. The nails I’ve been digging into the concrete of those steps have worn down to the quick, and the taste of copper fills my mouth from chewing on my lip. The sun is warm on my face, and the air smells of late November, and I don’t know how long I’ve been sitting there before I notice her next to me. This time, I’m the one who struggles to turn my eyes to her.

“I’ve seen it all,” I tell her. “The beginning to the end.”

She doesn’t look at me when she answers.

“The beginning and the end were hardly all there was.”

When I do look up, I find a trace of a laugh on her lips. Her hair is pulled haphazardly into an approximation of a bun, and strands of it fall over her face when she lets out that laugh. It’s hearty and it’s honest and her face is full of color and life. She turns that face up to the sun, and she pauses, and she basks in the light of it as if she were trying to breathe it in. This is the way I’ve seen her countless thousands of times. This is the her I had forgotten. The her I had overlooked. The one that I’d lost to the grief and the guilt and the infatuation and the ideals.

As she stands and disappears down those steps, I finally understand, because she isn’t silver here. She isn’t neon, or fading, or dead. Here, on this stoop, in the sunlight, all she is, is her.

I sit in that spot, silent and still, until the daylight gives way to the neon. In just under a minute, those theater doors will open, and the people will file through them, down the stairs, into the night.

But tonight, I won’t be there waiting.

DEREK ALAN JONES spends most of his time working in a warehouse in Kansas and the rest of it writing speculative fiction. His work has appeared in the Saturday Evening Post, Apex, and Tales to Terrify, among others. Find it all at DerekAlanJones.com.