My short story is included below. I haven't come up with a title, so if you have a suggestion, please comment!
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One thing was certain, Jane had not thought claustrophobia would be her first feeling waking up in the afterlife, but here she was, gasping for air that she couldn’t take in. As she pressed desperately against the silver lining of her coffin, she found that she couldn’t brace herself. Her pale arms burst through silver lining and metal casing, plunging into the cold earth as if nothing had been there at all. She jerked her arms back to her chest in horror and closed her eyes tight. How the hell was she supposed to get out of here?
“Just stand up, it’s easier than you think” said a voice. She opened her eyes to see the misty body of an older woman floating above hers. She would have screamed if, in her terror, she remembered how, but instead she started flailing her misty limbs, trying to find stability in her new world sans gravity.
“Ah” the ghost sighed sympathetically. “That’s the ticket! Just get your body moving. You’ll figure it out soon enough. Pop on up when you’re feeling better.” She floated up through the earth and out of sight.
Jane took a deep breath (well, she tried to). It was no use delaying the inevitable, and whatever was up there would almost certainly be less terrifying than laying in her coffin for all eternity.
She tucked her legs under her body and plunged upward through the satin lining of her coffin, like she did as a child pushing off the bottom of her parent’s swimming pool.
As she left the darkness of the ground for the darkness of the night sky, she felt the summer breeze brush her cheeks and the moonlight warmed her face with its familiar glow. Jane glanced at her surroundings—she vaguely recognized the old graveyard in which her grandparents were buried, but something seemed different.
A great oak tree towered several yards in front of her, and beyond the oak tree was the little church. Had she been married there? Or was she thinking of someone else? Her life felt like a dream long forgotten.
Under the branches of the great oak tree on an ancient bench sat the old woman, the one who had visited her coffin. In the moonlight, she looked much less menacing and maybe not quite as old as Jane had originally guessed. She was clothed in a silvery white light, which lay gently on her limbs, and her shining hair cascaded over her shoulders. Jane advanced toward the tree cautiously, unsure what to say to her dead companion after her less than ideal first impression.
The woman rose gracefully as Jane approached with her arms outstretched in welcome. “Please forgive me—I’m so sorry if I frightened you, dear Jane. I couldn’t wait any longer to see you!” Jane was quite taken aback. “I’m sorry, what do you mean?” She looked intently into her companion’s eyes. She did seem familiar in some way. And did she look a lot younger? In fact, Jane wondered why she had ever thought she was an old woman at all. Age must be a relative thing when dead: the body has lived through every age, and every age now rippled through the woman’s face like water gently stirred upon a still pond.
“I was waiting for you to wake up. You’ve been sleeping for a long time.” The woman smiled as she pointed to the grave from which Jane had risen.
Jane Gray
12/20/1989—12/01/2020
“Oh gosh,” Jane replied, glancing around a the graveyard strewn with summer. “It’s gotta be June or something?”
“Something like that,” her companion replied.
“But it was winter? I can’t remember…but wasn’t it almost Christmas? And it was snowing. And I was hanging up a stocking for the baby—”
Jane’s speech halted. Her head spun, and if she could have been sick, she would have been.
“The baby” she gasped. “Where’s the baby?”
She began to run down to the path; she had to reach the gate. She had forgotten that as one of the dead, she no longer needed the paths of the living to travel, and she had quite forgotten that her body was just mist. All she remembered was the warm blood pooling around her former body as she had lain on the ground under the fallen ladder, her unborn child still inside her womb.
At the gate, the silvery ghost stood guard. “I’m sorry Jane,” she whispered firmly, “but you cannot leave.”
“Let me out!” Jane screamed and clawed at the silvery woman to no avail. She could not push past the woman or the gate, as if an invisible wall stood between her and the world outside. She tried pushing herself into the air again, but the invisible wall extended up and up. There was no escape. Jane turned back, her eyes glowing as she directed her rage towards the woman guarding the gate. She never remembered feeling this angry in the land of the living, but emotion was stronger when not checked by societal norms, and that emotion brimmed over. She screamed the primal yell of a grieving mother, torn from her young, and Jane’s voice became a living thing, a howling wind which tore through the cemetery. Gravel from the path flew across the grounds like bullets, and the great oak tree swayed violently towards the ground.
“I’d stop that if I was you.” The ghost woman said calmly. “They won’t like it. They’ll probably put you back in the ground again, and you won’t like that. You made quite a fuss last time.”
Jane came face to face with the ghost, her eyes blazing. “What do you mean last time?” Her voice shook with anger and desperation.
“I mean the last time you woke up. We didn’t get far before They—“ she paused, looking up, “they came and put you back. We aren’t meant to stay here long and They don’t like us disturbing the living, especially right next to the chapel.” She nodded respectfully towards the little church where Jane now clearly remembered being married last spring. The wedding was much smaller than she had always dreamed it would be, but it had been the loveliest day, with all of the flowers in bloom and trees shrouded in leaves. “Oh…I…I don’t remember.” Jane mumbled, almost apologetically, collapsing to the ground and leaning against the invisible wall. It was nice somehow to feel something was solid, even if it was her prison gate.
Her companion sat quietly next to her, curling her knees up to her chin, where she rested her head and examined Jane intently. “They wouldn’t let me wake you up again for the longest time. They said you had to wait, and so I’ve waited also, but I would really like us to go home now.”
“Who are you?” Jane asked.
“A friend,” the woman replied quietly. She looked very young as she said this. “I’ve come to help you out of here, if you will come with me.”
“Of course I’ll come with you if you can get me out of here,” Jane replied incredulously. “I have to see if my baby is alright. Can you get me back to my house?” She longed for her little brick house on the quiet tree-lined street, freshly painted white before the winter had set in.
“No, I can’t.” Replied the woman, her glance turning to the ground. “But I can take you home.”
“That doesn’t make any sense. My house is my home. What about my husband? What about my baby? I need to find them and make sure they are okay. I can’t go anywhere until I know they are okay.”
The ghost sighed quietly. She looked like a frustrated mother explaining to her toddler for the hundredth time why she couldn’t fly to the moon in her cardboard spaceship.
“Jane, you can’t go to your house. It’s not there anymore. It hasn’t been there for a long time.”
“What do you mean? It can’t be more than six months since…since I got here. It said December and it has to be June…or July at the latest.”
“You did die in December.” Jane winced as her companion spoke. “But it was many Decembers ago. Jane…you’ve been here for years.”
…
Jane hugged her knees to her chest and stared blankly at the ground. How many years had she been sleeping while her husband mourned and her child…had her child lived? Had she grown up without a mother, all because of some stupid accident?
“It’s okay.” The woman said gently. “Everything will be alright, Jane, you just have to come with me this time. Please.”
“But my baby…where is she?”
“She’s here, Jane.” The ghost replied, gazing across the churchyard.
“She didn’t make it? I killed her…I killed her.” Jane sobbed uncontrollably now, but no tears could flow from her misty eyes.
“No, Jane, she lived. She lived a long life in the little brick house, and she missed you and loved you and hated you…but she forgave you. And she’s here now and you can go home and be with her, but you have to let go. There’s nothing for you here anyways.”
Jane thought of her home and her life in the little brick house, of her dreams of being the perfect mother and growing old with her husband. She mourned for the Christmas she had missed with her new child and all the Christmases afterwards. A vision of her daughter’s life played before her hazily: her first birthday and her last; her wedding day and the birth of her first grandchild. All the days which Jane had missed flashed through her mind like a flood, and the overwhelming sorrow became the rain that fell gently into the graveyard.
“They say it’s time for us to go” said the voice next to her, and Jane saw that her companion was now quite, quite young. “Are you ready, Mother?”
And as the rain stopped, Jane and the child she held to her chest disappeared into the light of the sunrise.
Such a great story! I loved the description of the ghost - "Age must be a relative thing when dead: the body has lived through every age, and every age now rippled through the woman’s face like water gently stirred upon a still pond." Awesome imagery!
ReplyDeleteThank you! I liked that too. It's what I saw in my head!
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