(7)
 One day I came into her studio to ask if she had a piece of charcoal for my shading. I found her standing at her easel, painting, but her eyes were downcast and tears ran down her cheeks.
"What is it?" I asked.
Her body language told me she did not want me to embrace her. Her eyes opened, and I followed where her gaze pointed to. Across the street was a grassy hill with a few trees on it. Two children stood in the middle of the hill. They were about the same age—six—a boy and a girl. He had light brown hair, and the girl had blonde curls. He wore short pants and a light shirt. She wore a light-blue dress. Both wore scuffed play shoes. They were, as the saying goes, pale as ghosts, and their eyes were a bit darker and larger than you would expect. They stared across the street into Lolo's studio.
"They were so young," she said. She started crying. Throwing her brush and palette down, she ran from the room and locked herself in the bathroom.
These children, these wraiths, started hanging around outside. They did not come in. They rang the doorbell a few times, but ran away when I went to look. I could see them hiding across the street behind a parked car. Always, they stared in our direction with those eyes.
We were eating dinner one evening—savoring, I should say, since ghosts don't eat or digest—when a pebble hit the dark window.
"What do you suppose they want?" I said.
"Don’t get up to look," she said. She stabbed at a shrimp on her plate. "I want you to move back to your apartment, Ray.'
I stared at her in hurt.
"You can come visit whenever you want."
Her eyes had a new melancholy in them lately. When I went to visit her, we lay together, but it was different. We were just two ghosts enjoying one another's disembodied feeling. She no longer let me into her mind.
"What's wrong?" I asked her one time as I lay beside her. I had one arm over her belly, but she did not reciprocate by holding me.
"I don't know," she said. "I 'onestly don't know. I think maybe my time is coming. I feel something."
"What do you feel?"
"A change, like when a train is coming to take you away."
The days went by, the children played on the hillside across from Lolo's house, and she would get weepy seeing them.
I started going for long walks by myself. The days grew shorter, the evenings cooler, and there was often a hint of burning wood on the night air.
I wandered the moonlit paths where I had been murdered. I couldn't bear to visit Loma Portal. Even the thought of seeing that gray-green water, and long white waves curling under deep blue skies, made me feel a sense of loss.
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Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
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