Ghost
By Elena Sichrovsky
I see you and you’re surprised. Not because you’re dead, or because your feet don’t plant on the moldy wooden floorboards, or because the bookshelf fell right through you, my copy of Cat’s Cradle soaring gracefully through your cranium.
Just because no one’s ever looked at you. Not the way I am. Oh, you’ve had plenty of other kinds of looks: the kind where the eyelids are strained from being pushed too far back and the retina squeaks from being pushed too forward; the kind of pallid stare from behind shutter clicks of rapid-fire blinking; the kind accompanied by a flick of the tongue around the upper lip, a twinkle of gold in the white of the eye.
But I am just looking at you, the way one might look at their friend who’s taken longer than normal on the walk back from school, and they come through the door with their hair a little bruised by the wind and calves half-brown with mud and a broach of thistles on their blouse sleeve and their mother sighs in three notes of love and one of frustration and tells them that there’s still some cookies left on the kitchen table.
I see you and I hold out my hand. An invitation. You’ve never been invited, always rejected or pursued by either the frightened or the curious. Never simply asked to come in, to dry your shoes on the mat, to place your coat over the coat rack, to use a towel to dry the raindrops clinging to your hair.
You don’t take my hand, distrusting; perhaps it’s a latch to a trap door or the first part of some blood-spelled chant. Instead you wait and watch. Watch me slowly arch my creaking back to pick up the fallen books; my wrinkled fingers massaging the bent cover of Cat’s Cradle; my steps tottering back and forth before I place it atop the adjacent cabinet.
The bookshelf remains prostrate on the ground.
I see you there, and reach out again.
You put your palm in mine and it sinks right through the stitches of my skin.
You hold on to nothing anyways.
Hand in hand we go, skipping in our minds while I drag my body across the creaky floorboards and collapse into the sagging armchair. My knees pop like cannons as I bend them to sit down. My chest rises like a quilt thrown up to fold; my lips make lopsided shapes that gasp for air.
You curl your fingers around mine. Around the me-shaped sections of air.
I keep looking at you. You see yourself for the first time in the reflection of the tears gathered in the shell of my lower eyelid. You see the glimmer of your eyes, all wrought with sorrow and fear of what’s happening to me.
But I’m not afraid. I’m not.
Because I see you. I feel you, the wind through my sallow fingertips. The pressure on my open palm. The tickle under my nails. You are here, right beside me. I know it.
And you don’t look away. Not when the last tears slip from the enclosure of my lashes; not when my mouth twists in the final struggle; not when my ribs rattle creakily for more air. You don’t look at the empty house around me, or the buckets collecting the dripping water from the peeling ceiling, or the tubes trailing from my nostrils in a forgotten bridal procession.
Your eyes meet mine as the light leaves them. It’s a promise that no one has ever given me, a warmth that belies the sudden cold.
You hold my hand until you feel me holding it back. Air embracing air.
The nothingness flees.
You take my other hand in yours and all our fingers hug each other, from thumb to pinky. I have never been held like this before. No long-armed creature of life has ever carried me, all the unsightly and wounded parts of me, like this.
You see me, and I, you.
I feel the touch of your gaze, your light.
I step into it.
Elena Sichrovsky is an Austrian-Tawainese writer living in Shanghai, China. She’s a student at the Shanghai University of Engineering Science and a member of the Inkwell Shanghai Fiction Workshop. Her work has been published in SciPhi Journal, Black Telephone Magazine and Planet Scumm, among others. Through her writing she seeks to find the beauty in the terrifying and the terror in the beautiful. You can follow her on Instagram or Twitter.