“In my day, getting trashed in a graveyard used to mean something,” I said. I kicked at a crushed beer can on the ground, my right foot passing clean through it. Old force of habit. “This?” I declared, “There is no poetry in this.”
“Fuck off, old man,” said the girl lying prone in the grass. Her backpack was under her chin like a pillow. She had a pile of empty beer cans next to her head.
“I am not an old man,” I said. “I will have you know that I am, in fact, a God damned ghost.”
“You dress like an old man,” she said.
“I dress like the emo revival movement,” I corrected her.
“And how long ago was that?” she asked.
“Couldn’t tell you,” I said.
“Ah, gee,” she said. “Old man.”
“Give it up,” hollered a voice two tombstones down. “There’s no point. Nothing’s spooky to anyone in this damn world of endless light. You’re not scaring anyone.”
“Not now, Frieda,” I shouted back. “We’re just talking. Why does it always have to be about scaring someone?”
I turned back to the girl. “What, uh, time is it, by the way?” I asked.
“Two in the morning,” she said. She stretched her arms out like a cat, yawning and shielding her eyes from the eternal sun.
“Oh,” I said. I shielded my eyes as well and looked toward the sky. The horizon was draped in the silhouettes of an infinite sea of skyscrapers. It was impossible to tell apart the factories from the corporate offices. Each person was identical to the next as they came and went in permanent limbo. The air was humming. I watched as the girl began to pick at a synthetic flower that’d been left on my grave however many decades ago. It was plastic, pink, and eternal.
I do not know how long I have been dead, but I do know that it’s been longer than I was alive. A lot longer. Everything else that I know is as follows:
1. I know that ghosts like Frieda and myself are an increasingly common occurrence due to a prolonged generational mishandling of the emotional energy of this world.
2. I know that there is no longer a night sky full of stars under which dreamers lie.
3. I know that my name among the living was Thomas.
“Hey Billy,” the girl said. She put her hands on her sleeping friend’s shoulders and started rocking him back and forth. “Billy, wake up. This guy’s a ghost.”
Billy snored in protest.
“I think Billy’s on his way to becoming a ghost too,” I joked.
“No,” she said. “He just gets like this sometimes. He needs his golden six.”
“Golden six?” I asked. I sat down next to the boy. He was short and squat and tightly wrapped inside of a purple hooded sweater. He wore a red beanie that he’d pulled down over his hood to completely cover his face. Empty beer cans were scattered around him. He’d kicked his sneakers off before he’d fallen asleep, and every so often his toes wiggled inside of his black and white striped socks.
“You know,” she said, “the perfectly regulated amount of sleep for a maximized workday.” Her voice was sing-songy, like she was quoting an old commercial jingle. “We’re both skipping our six,” she said. She cracked open another can of beer and took a large gulp. “Or at least I am,” she said, casting a spiteful glance toward her friend.
“How do you sleep if it’s never dark out anymore?” I asked.
“How did you sleep before?” she asked. “We turn our visors to night mode, close our eyes, and collapse. It’s staying awake that’s hard.” She yawned into her beer, staring down at the can in deep contemplation. She pulled out a blade of grass and rolled it into a little ball between her fingers. Her hair was brown and tied into two separate knots above her visor, which covered her eyes. I figured that Billy’s visor must be under his hat.
“Did it really get dark every single night when you were a kid?” the girl asked.
“My whole life, actually,” I said. “I mean, not completely dark. There were too many buildings in a lot of spots. Some places never seemed like they were dark, but you could at least kinda tell when it was night, you know? We had cities that we said never slept, but nothing this out of hand. Actually, I’ve been wondering for a while—how do the birds handle what’s going on?”
“Birds?” she asked.
“Birds,” I said. I flapped my arms and whistled like a chickadee. She tilted her head. I flapped my arms harder, making chirping noises and prancing around, pretending to peck at the ground with my nonexistent beak in perfect pantomime. “Birds!” I shouted. “Are you telling me all the birds are gone?” I asked.
“I guess,” she said. “I don’t know what those are.”
I stared at her, trying to glean something from her empty expression. “You’re messing with me,” I said. “Even if your current capitalist hellscape of sleepless nights and infinite light has led to the extinction of birds as a whole, you’d still recognize them from video games, or movies, or—” I gasped dramatically and flailed my arms, “books or something!”
Her stoic act broke and she laughed hard, spilling beer into my unknowably old grave with its faded lettering. “Can you show me what one looks like again? Just to be sure?” she asked.
“Ok,” I said. “You got me.” I watched her for a moment and waited for her to calm down. The second she stopped laughing I flapped my arms and chirped again, this time more aggressively while also floating around and pretending to fly. I could hear her laughing just as hard again. I took a pratfall into my own grave. I soared through the dirt and fell briefly into my coffin, stopping just short of seeing my own fleshless cadaver. I began to wonder how long it’d been there, then curiosity gave way and I pushed my head through the rotted wood for the first time since I had died. I saw my expressionless skull, nearly bleached white. I locked my eyes with their former sockets. I tried to count the years, but I came up with nothing. I stared harder. I tried to feel something—anything at all, but nothing would come to me. The me in the box and the me floating above it were completely divorced from one another. Anything that had made me me had long melted away.
I shot back out of the grave, hooting like an owl. That sent her reeling. She was sprawled out on her back and cackling wildly in the timeless way that only a drunk girl could.
She sat back up and wiped her face on her sleeve “Thank you,” she said. “I think I needed that.”
“No problem. It gets pretty boring out here,” I said. “Are there really no birds at all, though?” I asked. “I mean, I’m dead, but that’s still really depressing.”
“No, not really,” she said. “I mean, there’s an aviary downtown where you can see some during your rec hours, but the line’s always way too long. Plus, I hear they mostly just shit, like, constantly.”
“You’re not wrong, they do shit a lot,” I said.
“That’s a hard pass for me.”
“There’s more to them than that,” I said. I looked around. “A murder of crows or something would be nice to have around here,” I lamented. “It’d help spook things up a bit.” I looked back toward the skyline. “This really isn’t the kind of place I imagined I’d be haunting while drifting away on my deathbed.”
“How’d you die?” she asked.
“That’s a bit of a personal question,” I said.
“Oh, come on.”
“The last thing I remember is eating a whole lot of pills.”
“Really?” she asked. She frowned.
“Yeppers,” I said, straining to still sound cheerful but course-correcting way too hard. “Didn’t care for the way things were going.”
“Oh,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said.
There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, and I couldn’t remember the last time I’d actually seen one. The light was uniform and sterile, like it’d been bottled up and mass produced in a hospital or some stuffy office park. I’d spent so much of my life in both kinds of places that I sometimes wondered if I were the one being haunted, even this far along into my death. There were licks of tungsten yellow pouring from the occasional odd square window, but they were few and far between. There was probably some statute on productivity that dictated the color of lights and their legal uses.
I imagined some rebel hiding away in an apartment out there, hoarding an ancient string of Christmas lights, sealing off their windows with duct tape and dark sheets, then drinking in the illicit glow like a well-aged wine for as long of a moment as they could spare without getting caught.
It occurred to me that it was likely that no one still alive had so much as a memory of the night sky. I was overcome with a yearning to see a bird flying over the horizon, even if it were just taking a shit on someone’s car. I imagined it as hard as I could. I could almost see a lone blackbird gliding out of the corner of my eye, flapping lazily over a plain building. The longer I tried to picture it, the more it began to shift against my will into the vision of my own skull from a few moments before—smooth, white, and nondescript. If you’d searched “skull” on a computer, it’d look exactly like the result.
I wondered if there were any bird ghosts out there. I imagined them being just as confused as I was, flying north forever, not knowing when to let go.
“I’m sorry,” the girl said.
“For what?” I asked, snapping out of my daydream.
“For asking,” she said.
“He talking your ear off about that stupid emo music?” Frieda asked. I hadn’t noticed her floating over. Frieda bent over and picked up one of the beer cans that’d rolled out of the girl’s backpack, cracked it open, and took a sip.
“Whoa,” said the girl, “I thought you were a ghost too.”
“She is,” I said.
“I am,” Frieda said. “A very powerful one,” she added. “Able to fully materialize at will.”
Her normal, unassuming smile twisted into a wicked grin.
The girl’s mouth hung open as she stared in disbelief, fear welling up behind her visor-covered eyes. She tried again to wake up her friend. She managed to roll him over onto his stomach, but he just kept snoring before rolling himself back, still asleep.
“Really?” I asked. “That’s all it took to scare you? Some stupid parlor trick drinking a shitty beer? God damn it! Jesus Christ.” I kicked at an empty can on the ground again, this time focusing as hard as I possibly could on the very tip of my foot. I poured my entire will into some small fragment of myself, trying desperately to manifest whatever physicality Frieda was able to on a whim. To my avail, the can made a solid TING sound as it rolled off into the overgrown grass.
“Hey, you’ve been practicing,” Frieda said. She took another sip of the beer she’d filched and smiled at me, any former trace of malice gone from her face.
“I have,” I said. “You’ve been dead a lot longer than me, you know.”
“Believe me, I’ve been knowing it,” Frieda said. “I saw your little moment in the ground there, by the way,” she said. “That’s a big rite of passing.”
“Don’t you mean rite of passage?”
She smiled at me and tilted her head forward just a bit.
“Oh,” I said.
The girl looked frantically back and forth between the two of us. “How are you doing that?” she asked. “You’re not real. You shouldn’t be able to touch stuff, let alone crack jokes.”
“Not real?” I asked, a bit hurt.
“Honey,” Frieda said. “We’re ghosts. We shouldn’t be able to do anything. We shouldn’t be.”
“Oh,” said the girl. “I guess, I mean, yeah,” she stammered. “That makes sense. Sorry,” she said. She yawned again. “This is the second night in a row I’ve skipped my six.”
“You’re going to need to sleep eventually, you know,” I said.
“I’ll sleep when I’m dead,” she said. “No offense,” she quickly added.
“No offense taken,” I said. Frieda dropped her beer before drifting away to watch the traffic on the highway.
“I didn’t upset her, did I?”
“It’s hard to say,” I said. I looked back at Frieda. She was floating perfectly still, betraying no emotion whatsoever. “You might want to get going, though.”
The girl looked at her feet. She methodically retied both of her shoes before brushing the empty beer cans back into her backpack. She was meticulously careful not to leave any trash behind. “That’s probably a good idea,” she said. “Maybe I can actually get some sleep for once.”
“Couldn’t hurt,” I said. “I miss sleeping terribly.”
“It was nice meeting you,” she said. She got up and began to drowsily walk away, then turned back. “Is it okay if I come back some time, though? This is kind of the only place with any grass to lay down in.”
“I don’t mind,” I said. I tipped my translucent baseball cap to her as she made her way toward the wrought iron graveyard gates. I lingered on and watched the gates for a few moments before drifting over to Frieda.
“You alright?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “I’m dead.”
“Other than that mortal affliction?”
“Other than that?” She furrowed her brow, deep in thought. “Other than that, I guess I’m alright. Been better, though.” A blue sedan sped by, its headlights throwing unnecessary light into an utterly over-saturated world. Hundreds of paper coffee cups had been tossed into the back seat. A middle-aged man was driving with bloodshot eyes locked forward. A teenage girl was strapped into the passenger seat, her face pressed into the cold of the glass window as she slept.
“Do you think there’s a point to this?” Frieda asked. “Seriously, what’s the point of ghosts in a world without night? Are we here to babysit? To whine to kids about the way things used to be?”
“That doesn’t really sound like much of a haunting to me,” I said. She huffed in agreement.
“It won’t be long until they figure out a way to charge us rent,” she said.
“Look, I’m not paying rent to anybody. Period,” I said, trying to sound tough but missing the mark completely. She looked away.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Yeah,” she said.
We watched the cars in silence. I felt hollow in a way that I hadn’t felt since right before I’d died. Frieda seemed to feel the same. Without either of us realizing it, we’d begun to hold hands. The traffic remained steady, the cars arrhythmically honking at one another as drivers fell asleep and drifted into the wrong lanes.
“Do you remember power outages?” I asked after a while.
“Power outages?”
“Like when a storm would knock out the power, and you just kind of had to wait for the lights to come back on.”
“Ah,” she said. She thought for a moment. “My sisters and I would light candles and tell each other stories that we’d make up on the spot. We’d laugh and laugh and laugh until the lights came back. Our parents would join in, too. It was the longest we all ever could stand being in the same room together.” She looked up, then touched her face for a moment. “I hadn’t thought about that in a while,” she said.
“I wonder if something like that could ever happen again.”
“Might be the only thing that could save them at this point. The living, I mean.”
“Speaking of which,” I said. I broke away and turned to face the boy gently snoring on the hill.
“For Christ’s sake,” said Frieda. “Get him out of here. That boy has no respect for the dead.”
We drifted over and sat down on either side of him, perched like two campers warming up by a fire. We watched his chest rise and fall. He was completely oblivious to our otherworldly presence. His face had become uncovered, and it looked much older than I would have guessed. Each ragged breath carried with it the weight that it could be his last. Frieda’s expression slowly melted from disgust to disinterest and then teetered dangerously close to pity.
I opened my mouth to say something.
Before I could, a bird swooped down from overhead and landed on the boy’s chest, ruffling his sweater. The bird hopped a few times, then briefly preened its stunningly colorful feathers. It cocked its bright red head and locked eyes with me, then Frieda, both of our jaws hanging wide open. The bird cooed, then took off back over the horizon.
For a long time, we said nothing at all.
Frieda scooted over and leaned into me, resting her head on my shoulder. “Maybe we can let the poor thing be for now,” she said.
“Just for a little while,” I whispered.
“Just for a little while,” she repeated.
I imagined the power going out—not just here, but everywhere. I pictured the whole world plunging into darkness, then houses one by one slowly flickering to life in candlelight. I saw little girls holding hands and sharing stories, falling asleep excited to wake back up first thing in the morning.
“Do you think that bird was alive, by the way?” I asked.
She nuzzled my arm. “Does it matter?”
“No,” I said. “I suppose it doesn’t.”
Max Zell is a technical writer out of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He’s fond of birds, ghosts, and flowers. He currently resides with his girlfriend Kate and his cat Bagel. You can find more of him at http://hiimmaxiwrite.com.
Image Credit – Photo by Matthias Müllner on Unsplash
