Daniel Waters - Break My Heart 1,000 Times

I walk through walls. I whisper at the window when I watch her leave our home. I flicker at the edges of my own memory.

She sleeps now, her breath ruffling the edge of her pillowcase. I dont know if it is my presence at the foot of her bed that causes her to roll over. Her arm, suddenly free of her comforter cocoon, stretches back over her head, and her pretty face, framed by long auburn hair, turns toward the ceiling.

She looks so much like Mary, I feel the familiar ache that is like death but deeper. I reach toward her, intending only to stroke her cheek, but she whimpers and I wonder what walks through her dreams.

Her alarm sounds, playing a song recorded many years after my death, a song I like. I fall through the floor as her eyes begin to flutter.

Her mother is already in the kitchen, rattling pans, brewing coffee, pouring orange juice. She pauses every three heartbeats to look back at the kitchen table, where the rest of her family will soon sit, her face wrung and lined with worry, as though she feels there is never enough time. And she is right, of course. There never is. She doesnt see me standing in the archway, as it takes effort by me to be seen. For all I know, it may take effort to see also. She lifts her eyes toward the ceiling through which I just fell, hearing the padding of her daughters feet as she rises to shut off the alarm. I wait until I hear the screech and groan of plumbing above as she runs hot water for her shower.

I pass through the kitchen wall. Inside the cavity there is an ancient bottle cap and the skeleton of a mouse, its tiny spirit long fled. There are wires, and when I pass through them I tingle and hum and the light in the kitchen dims and then flares.

I enter the living room, so different now than when I was alive. Two recliners, a long sun-blanched sofa, and a huge television with a dusty screen. I peer into the dark mirror of the television, but Im not reflected at all, not until I lean forward and brush my hand across the dull surface, where lingering static renders it visible briefly as a white blur that waves and recedes. I look down and see that I have disrupted the clock on the DVR again; a quartet of zeroes blinks on and off at me.

Her energy guides me upstairs to her like a beacon, and I can see puffs of steam curling out from under the bathroom door. I pass through the unlocked door; Im pulled to the place of my death as though drawn by a magnet. I pass through steam and shower curtain, and she is there, and I would blush if I still had the ability to do so.

Averting my eyes, I look in the tub, where water swirls down the drain. As I watch, the water turns to blood, and then the swirling blood overwhelms the drain and rises to her ankles and continues to fill and oh no I remember I remember.

I remember. What a strange thing for one such as me to think. Strange because I am no more than a memory myself. A memory that no one other than myself holds any longer.

There are others like me but not like me. Others who appear and fade, but for them consciousness has not returned, they exist as memory alone. Or do they? The wall between the worlds of life and afterlife was always permeable, even before the holes began to appear in its foundation.

The blood recedes and turns to water yet again. Shes noticed none of this. She has her eyes closed against the possibility of trickling shampoo, and I watch her flesh stipple as I stand there, my invisible spirit bisected by the plastic curtain. My presence brings a subtle chill. I can still have an effect on the tangible universe.

I step back from the shower and wait by the sink. I prepare. What is easiest is to find a moment in time gone by and hold on to that moment. With effort and energy, the memory of a memory may become visible again. Time is not entirely linear. She shuts the water off, and the towel slung over the curtain rod slips.

I make the effort. The curtain draws back, and she sees me.

Veronica didnt fear the ghosts every waking moment, the way some people did. Ghosts were an established fact of her life since the Event; there was just no avoiding them. But the one place she did not want them at all was in the bathroom. The bathroom, in her mind, should be a permanent ghost-free zone. So when she got out of the shower at 6:49 that Tuesday morning before school and saw a ghost standing in front of the mirror that would not reflect his image, she shrieked. She clutched her towel and rushed past him to her bedroom.

She sat on the edge of her bed and steadied her breathing. She dried her body and wondered if the ghost had left yet. Sometimes they stayed around for as long as fifteen minutes, but usually they were there and gone in the time it took to snap a photograph. She hoped it was the latter. Shed left her clothes in the bathroom, and it was too much effort to pick out another outfit. Now dry, she wrapped herself in her towel, deciding shed give the bathroom another try.

He was already gone. Why did it have to be a boy? she thought. He looked like he was about her age. Hed been shaving or combing his hair, she thought, and then she decided he must have been combing his hair, because hed been wearing a shirt, and who shaves with his shirt on?

There were pockets of warm moist air in the cramped bathroom, but the mirror above the sink was clear. She stepped in front of the mirror and got goose bumps. There was a definite chill where the ghost had been standing. She shuddered. How many people had stood in front of this sink over the past seventy years?

Too many, she thought, plugging in her hair dryer. She wouldnt have been surprised if there were an endless parade of ghosts traipsing through the house and the acre of grass and gardens outside. Ghosts walking up the carpeted stairs in twos and threes, ghosts staring out a window that is no longer there, ghosts wedged in the breakfast nook, sitting in front of invisible tea sets. Sometimes they left an aroma; even now she thought she could smell a hint of cologne, a subtle, faded smell; woodsy, not at all like the body sprays jocks in her class applied by the gallon.

It was a nice smell, she decided. She wished she hadnt been so startled and that shed actually taken the time to look at the boy; but all shed had time to notice was his blond hair, which had just begun to curl over his collar. Maybe hes cute, she thought.