Then, the Ghosts

By Lillie Franks

 

First comes the end. In one, great, mushroom burst, or more likely, creeping up little by little like moss over food, humanity dies and despair begins. This is not a glorious, cleansing apocalypse. This is letting go of a cold, wet bit of driftwood and sinking into hungry water. This is the sound of no more tomorrows, and it is silence.

Then, the ghosts.

It is strange to haunt a world with no one left to haunt. When Ann writes the words “Get Out” in thick red letters on the east wall of the mansion, there is no one to nervously wash it away, no one to be shocked when it returns. When she stacks the furniture, no one unstacks it, and when she appears for the blink of an eye in a bathroom mirror, no one stumbles backwards, gasping.

Despair is peaceful.

Outside, ghosts wander the streets, looking for houses that have fallen to rubble and murderers who have been murdered. Two ghosts who once knew each other once pass through the same ruins and say nothing. No one looks at each other; the only trace they allow themselves to see is the writing they leave behind. Ann, among her stacked furniture, reads the warning on the wall and makes herself believe it was meant for her. She opens the wide doors and steps outside.

Despair is quiet.

The ghosts try to remember the old world, but only in shades of death. They remember it as a great thing which died and didn’t even return to haunt. They remember its promises were broken, but not the sweetness those promises were made with. It was like being buried alive in the open, the ghosts remember. There was always the taste of dirt.

Despair forgets.

Ann is proud of the little things she knows. She knows the mansion which every step takes her further from is important. She knows that something happened on the stairs which should have been the end and wasn’t. She knows that she was named Ann, and this used to mean something. Somewhere, there were people who knew that name, who turned it over in their minds and tucked it away when they were done with it.

Despair cherishes the scraps of everything it cannot have.

She sees ghosts who have lost even that much. They have no faces anymore, and their bodies are vague and luminous, no longer their body but the idea of a body, the memory of remembering a body. Some become no more than a passing sensation of cold, a dark thought on a bright day. It is better not to see them, Anne decides. It is better not to see anything.

Despair looks away.

There is no stillness in the dead world. Ghosts attack the insects and small crawling things that remain in the corners of their dead world and try to paint on them their memories of violence. Dozens of ghosts circle an anthill or cockroach nest all to make something that lives die. They claw and scrape and crush and lose themselves in empty revenge. Ann sees one of these circles and is sickened.

Despair cannot stomach despair.

The ghosts look away because there is no time. Too many things have to be built. A government, a church, work, bars, restaurants, business, hospitals, news, war, prison, all of them have to be because they were once. A ghost stands in front of a broken altar and shares the only piece of religion it remembers: “There is something that doesn’t need to be.” Ghosts flock to the capitals and governments of the world, because they mattered, before. Ann is drafted into an army, then left behind when it marches away to find a battle.

Despair isn’t enough.

Ann doesn’t look. Ghosts haunt food, water, clocks and sunlight, all the things that remind them of living. Ghosts walk through stone walls and into still, subterranean passages which twist through the earth. Ghosts float up into the empty spaces where everything seems simple only because there’s so little of it.

Still, not enough.

Ann tells herself, “There must be something other than this.” Ghosts write messages for each other on what walls are still standing, always in blood. “The opposite of despair is hope,” one says. “The opposite of despair is love,” says another, then, “The opposite of despair is continuing”, and so it goes, down the crumbling street. All of them are wrong.

Still, despair.

Ghosts stack rubble and debris into towering obelisks. Other ghosts knock these same towers down, because falling is movement and movement is life. There must always be movement. A ghost floats up to the top of the room they’ve hidden in, drops down to the floor, and then rises again, over and over and over. Ann doesn’t remember where her mansion was. She doesn’t remember what she had to do with it.

Nothing comes next.

Something comes next.

Ann walks past a ghost and looks away. Ann walks past a ghost and looks away. Ann walks past a ghost and it looks away from her.

This comes next, but it is not an ending. It is only another moment, a moment after the end.

Ann walks past a ghost and doesn’t look away. The other ghost doesn’t look away. Despair meets despair and suddenly, time passes. This happens only because it could. The opposite of despair is living, which means living through despair. Despair is its own opposite.

Ann sees. The ghost sees.

To live is to haunt and be haunted.

Then, the living.

 

Lillie E. Franks is a trans author and eccentric who lives in Chicago, Illinois with the best cats. You can read her work at places like Always Crashing, Alice and Atlas, and McSweeneys or follow her on Twitter at @onyxaminedlife. She loves anything that is not the way it should be.