You make the final cut quick.

Some would say it’s a mercy, though the days that came before this one have been anything but merciful. You took your time. It had to hurt. It had to be a slow build of agony. You wanted this bastard to feel how you’ve suffered—ever since he did what he did to me, to you. And now, you guess, he’s felt it; and now, you guess, he’s bleeding out in front of you.

You think of my death, again and again, consuming it and converting it into new violence.

“All of this is for her.” Your voice is unsteady. You’re accustomed to working in silence. “All of this is for Charlie.”

You believe it.

The dark, shiny spill from his throat and over his chest is barely worth noting after the cuts, the holes, the pieces missing or broken or rearranged. He probably doesn’t register that you’ve spoken. Lucky him. So sure, it’s mercy, that last clean flash of your knife through his flesh. When he stops moving and the wet rasping ceases, you observe what’s left, unaware that you are also being observed.

I entered through the cut, in the blood, slipping through that narrow, vital space. Like most things I’ve done before, it wasn’t on purpose, but it wasn’t an accident either.

Before that, I mostly remember white. Not the blinding sort but the crisp, clean eggshell color of new paper, drawn in crisp, clean lines. I woke every day to the same inoffensive narrow space, more hallway than room, the sort that numbs emotion and thought. Sometimes I was brought out. Those were the best days. There was a whole world—portioned out, precisely delineated, of course—and always, always you. Mostly, though, I was waiting, which I’ve only recently realized was what I always did. It’s amazing the sorts of things you notice about yourself when it’s too late to change them.

And then I heard your voice. I saw the slice. Drawn by the light and the sound and the threads of memory, I was through. You sheath the knife at your hip, and I’m there too, a stubborn, unseen anomaly that hangs at the edge of the blade like a dewdrop on grass. Part of you, I think, would be proud of that. If you knew. But you don’t even notice.

You melt into shadow. I used to love watching you like this. One moment you’re there, the next you’re invisible and unembodied, and like a spill of ink you spread along the floor, slip up the warehouse wall, crawl through the skylight and follow the usual route home. Alleys, backlots, rooftops. The night is damp and chilly, dark spaces deepened and thrown into relief by starburst neon signs and flickering streetlights. The pavement shines and winks as you pass. As ever, you take me with you, whether I like it or not.

Listen, I don’t have a body, not anymore. I know this. It’s one of the few things I know with any certainty. Despite that, I feel like I’ve died a hundred times instead of just the once. I guess in a way I have, because you trot the story out with the same frequency as that guy who lived across the hall from us used to walk his yappy Pomeranian. You’ve invoked my name, or you’ve told yourself that what you’re doing is because of me, or, heaven forbid, for me.

I’m so fucking tired of that, Johnny.

If I had a body, it would be heavy. I’d make it lead. It would drag you down and keep you pinned in place until you smothered beneath the density of it, fully real, too real, more than I ever was before.

You keep me grounded, Char. You keep me tethered.

You used to say stuff like that all the time. I hear it now with the clarity of cut crystal. It has the taste of something that was sweet once, left to ferment for too long. Age has transmuted it to truth, and the truth is mostly bitter, like me. Still, a little bitterness is better than nothing.

So I nurse it slowly. I let it define the smudged edges of what I was. It’s like getting drunk in reverse. No, no, not sobering up—that suggests a return to a normal state of equilibrium. I don’t want to be what I was: dull, sort of fuzzy, never quite realized, always what you needed me to be and nothing more. That was what I had before. I see the shape of memories and possibilities, indistinguishable from one another, out of reach but gaining color and sound. I’m patient.

 

~*~

 

To a lot of people neither of us ever met, you were a hero. To me you were just John. Johnny.

We met at the bakery I worked at, my hands dusted with flour, yours flecked with reddish paint. I asked if you’d just come back from murdering someone, which was, I admit, a shitty joke to make at seven in the morning when you clearly hadn’t had any coffee yet. You looked so startled by the comment that I would have felt worse about it if it hadn’t also made you even more attractive. Because yeah, I’d already decided you were worth a double-take. It was the weirdest thing—blonds aren’t usually my type, let alone the “Pre-Raphaelite archangel in a shabby black hoodie” type—but the moment you walked through the door, I couldn’t look away, and for a few seconds we were the only people in the room.

In an attempt to recover, I asked you what the color was called. I figured anyone who worked with paint enough to have it dried all over their fingertips would be more specific than “red.” Your mouth tilted, and you considered your fingertips as they hovered over the lip of your open wallet.

“It’s cinnabar.”

And then I made another stupid joke about cinnamon buns. I don’t remember what it was, and I wouldn’t tell you if I did, because it really was irredeemably bad.

You laughed anyway. There was something a little scattered and insubstantial about you, and I liked that. It was charming. It made you seem safe.

While you turned to add an upsetting amount of cream and sugar to your pour over, I bagged your pain au chocolat. I wrote my phone number on the bag too, hidden right under the neat fold at the top. Figured I’d already come off like a too-friendly weirdo, might as well commit.

By my lunch break, you’d already texted. I’d forgotten to tell you my name, you said, but you hoped I’d give you a chance to learn it.

We went out for dinner that night, then to an outdoor movie where we spent most of it making out on my grass-stained, moth-eaten picnic blanket. It was late summer, so the air was humid but steeped in the promise of autumn’s lurking chill. I invited you back to my place, which you didn’t leave until the next afternoon. And that’s how we started, when it still felt like ‘we’ and not just ‘you’.

 

~*~

 

The night I slip back through, you don’t sleep very well. Granted, there probably aren’t many people who sleep well hours after cutting a man’s throat, even a man they hate. There aren’t many people who could sleep well after doing what you’ve spent the last few months doing, working your way down a shortlist of the people responsible for my unspeakably tragic and untimely death.

The knife is stowed away in the usual place, with your gear and your guilt. I’m there in the dark, flattened into the gap beneath your bedroom door, taking up as little space as possible. There isn’t much of me to begin with, and there isn’t much for me to eat but the tepid anger and manful grief you’ve seeped all over the apartment for the last year.

Every time you start to nod off, just when your mind starts to fuzz and your awareness of time and the room fade, you’re eyes-wide fully awake. It’s a prickle along your arms, a feathery shifting in your gut, the gentle almost-rousing of a hand brushing your cheek, though there is no hand. You wait and listen, watching the ceiling. There’s no sound other than the usual occasional clatter of the ice maker out in the kitchen, the muffled blare of traffic below, and the steady vibration of music from your downstairs neighbor. Annoying, but nothing you don’t usually sleep right through.

The feeling won’t stop dogging you. You get up and take a turn around the apartment. Lots of things could explain the chills, the slight dizziness, the restless urge to move. Maybe you ate something that had gone off. Maybe you shouldn’t have had that nightcap. Maybe it’s because when you close your eyes, you see that fucker’s throat spilling blood, and then you see me, the way I was when you found me and realized it was too late and everything had happened exactly the way it was contrived to.

One of those, sure. Who can say. It’s a mystery.

You’re about to pass the studio when your bare feet cease their aimless shuffle over the hardwood. The door is closed. It’s locked too, which is stupid because it locks from the outside and you’re the only person who lives here now, so what’s the point? You haven’t painted in almost a year, and it’s not like anything in that room is going to get away on its own. Despite all this, you decide to go inside.

The studio smells faintly of turpentine and wood shavings. It looks just as it did the last time you saw it, tidy and sparse, with a spectacular view of the city from the bay window. Everything is in order—paints, canvases, charcoals, paper, brushes, cleaners, custom taboret. Courtroom sketches pay your bills (mostly), but this is where you do your best work, the stuff no one ever sees but you and me.

The piece you were working on before you shut the room up because you just couldn’t anymore is uncovered. A coating of dust over the canvas surface makes it look like the subject is standing in a soupy fog.

The subject is a woman, or almost. The details are missing. But she does have my hair, the bobbed curls in muddled bleached browns and faded fuchsia, and she has my long pale face and spatter of freckles. The beginning of a full lower lip is demarcated by a smudge of darker pink. There is no nose, no eyes. Nothing below the neck either. Your gaze lands on it and lingers, because I’m looking out from the negative space you never filled, peering out over the shoulder of the version of me you tried to immortalize.

Do you see me?

I think you must. You press the heels of your hands to your eyes, breathe in and out slowly three times, and then look again. I’m still there, but you’re too angry to see, because that anger that’s fueled you is back, and you’re thinking of me and hating yourself for jumping at things that aren’t there. I latch on to the flare of your rage and let it give me strength, because it’s always been for me, or at least that’s what you claim. Makes little difference from where I’m sitting. I’ll take what I can get.

You throw the canvas across the room. It lands face down in a corner, and you lock the door behind you again. You go to the kitchen to make a sandwich, and it hardly tastes like anything, and when you go back to bed you only manage a fitful sleep.

I curl beneath the bed and think. Your restlessness is softer than the anger, easier to digest when I know it’s because you’re dreaming of me, even if those dreams are tinged with the sour tang of regret.

I thought I had you there for a moment, in the studio. I thought you saw me—really saw me. It when you looked away, as if I was an intrusion, like you have no use for me now. I wonder if you will begin to forget me. If, now that you’re absolved and I’m avenged, you’ll let me starve, and fade, and die again.

~*~

 

I found out who you really were soon enough, though I wasn’t supposed to, and I’m not sure you ever stopped resenting it. Everyone knows supers are out there, keeping the rest of us safe or, you know, not so safe. But it isn’t every day you meet one and know it. It’s definitely not every day you find out you’ve been dating one for the last seven months.

We didn’t have anything planned that night, but I wanted to surprise you. I figured it would be fine. With how many nights I was spending at your place by then, you’d given me the keycode. So I let myself in and was waiting with wine and a take-out order from our favorite date spot and a new set of lingerie I really liked under my sweats. You were running later than usual. Work, I assumed.

You didn’t come in the front door. You arrived with a clamor through your bedroom window. I found it wide open and you doubled over just inside it, still more shadow than man. One of your arms and half your torso was stretched impossibly, a flattened black mass climbing the wall. I knew I was looking at Chiaroscuro, the most obscure and mysterious member of the Guild for Good hero syndicate. Their identities were closely guarded, but we all knew they put down everything from petty criminals to top-tier, catastrophe-level villainous types, and most people were grateful for it. My first thought was that of-fucking-course a guy who lives normie life as an artist would style his vigilante alter-ego something as pretentiously on-the-nose as Chiaroscuro. It was a nice mundane thing to focus on instead of “Jesus Christ, this is some secret to keep from me, Johnny.”

Shadows are your thing. You become them, travel through them, manipulate them in small ways. Of course, when it comes to physical combat you’re no heavy hitter—you’re good with blades and can throw a punch well enough—but your abilities make you a dab hand at stealth and recon and traps, and they make you almost impossible to injure.

Which is why it was pretty startling to find you bleeding onto the area rug. Almost as startling as seeing your body resolve at last from the soft lines and borders of immaterial velvet darkness into the body I was more familiar with, kitted out in your black Guild tactical gear and mask. Whatever had happened—you never told me—you’d taken a beating.

I didn’t ask what was going on. I just looked at you, and you looked back in pallid, battered dismay, and then I went to the bathroom to grab the first-aid kit.

I was soaking a square of gauze in disinfectant when you finally found something to say.

“I can patch myself up, Charlie.”

“Yeah, I’d guess you can.”

“I can explain this.”

“Think I’ve got the gist, actually.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.”

You were quiet for a few moments. “This is okay with you?”

My stomach flopped, and my fingers felt numb as I dabbed at a cut dripping blood down your temple. The balance of power seemed to tilt steeply for a moment. I didn’t try to convince myself this meant nothing. I’m not that naive. I knew the sorts of things that happen to normies who get themselves attached to people like you. Family, partners, loved ones… it too-often goes tits up for people like that. It’s like signing up to be collateral in someone else’s loan agreement.

Was this okay? No, Johnny, it wasn’t okay. I was not okay with this. I wasn’t okay with what it meant, because what you were really asking me was: Are you okay with more secrets? Are you okay with having a target on your back? Are you okay with knowing you’re the best way for someone to hurt me?

I wanted to say those things to you then. You should have told me sooner. It was the sort of thing I ought to have been allowed to consent to. I felt myself getting angry, desperate to make you understand. I could have been less careful with the rubbing alcohol, so that you felt how much this stung. I could have slipped, dug a finger into one of those slowly congealing wounds until you flinched and gave me something that didn’t make me feel like such an idiot for letting myself be duped. Seven goddamn months—how had I never noticed?

And I was going to. I was going to do something, or say something, because it was my right and I think it’s what you expected.

When I opened my mouth the only words that came out were,

“Yes, it’s okay. I love you. I’m not going anywhere. Are you okay?”

What the hell was I saying? I had already moved on to cleaning one of the cuts on your hands, being careful around what I was pretty sure was a break. You looked at me with disbelief, one eye bracketed by a crescent-moon bruise.

“I’m good,” you said, “as long as I have you.”

That was about the time I started feeling less. I felt less, I mean, and I felt like I was less. The scope of my world narrowed. One morning a week or so later I woke up and I couldn’t remember clearly what I did beyond the present moment. Like, if I got out of bed, and walked through your bedroom, and out the building to the street… where the hell was I heading? I had a job—I thought I did—a history, and friends, and family, and hobbies, and private, gross habits I’d never share with anyone. A whole life apart from you.

Did I?

I didn’t know anymore. I couldn’t say with confidence that I had ever known. Maybe I’d always been like this. That was fine, really. You and I were in a good place.

When you asked me to marry you on our one-year anniversary—You make this all worth it, Charlie. Without you, I’d forget what’s really important, Charlie—of course I said yes. It didn’t cross my mind that while a dead girlfriend makes good fodder for tragedy, a dead fiancée is high-octane narrative propellant.

~*~

 

Ever since I died, you make everything too personal. The rest of the Guild have seen the changes in you, and they don’t like what you’ve become. They’ve spent the better part of the year trying to distance themselves from the things you’ve been doing outside their purview. You got fixated on your list, on your private work, on anything that would let you keep stroking that Charlie-shaped vengeance boner, and that rarely took the form of checking in with the unimpeachable Guild and sticking to their code of ethics. Last few calls that have come in, they don’t bother making sure you’re with them.

You don’t give a shit. It goes with this new thing of yours. You’d been thinking of striking out on your own anyway. Vigilantism at its purest, right?

One night you can’t sleep again—you rarely can—so you decide to work. Painting is out of the question. Who knows what faces you might see staring back at you from a fresh stretch of canvas? You’d never fill it fast enough. Instead you head out, riding the shadows, senses sharp and open for signs of trouble in need of defusing.

You’re not sure how you end up at the abandoned construction site. It was going to be a new luxury hotel along the river, but then a young woman was found murdered there only weeks into construction, and the project was postponed and then called off. Case of organized crime and mistaken identity, they said. Her fiancé knew better, didn’t he?

The site is captive in its incompleteness, yet there’s possibility in that. It could become more one day. Or it could be torn down and something else could be built over it, and no one would ever know what almost was.

It’s the last place you want to be. I’m not thrilled about it either, but I don’t have much choice. I’m drawn to them, still. Not just because you’re there. They remind me of where I used to spend most of my time, not meant for staying but familiar and comfortable.

We’re the only people out here this late, so I’m impossible to miss. There’s a defunct bus port on the corner at the edge of the site, not far from where you’re standing now. I’m sitting inside, beneath a flickering fluorescent light.

You recoil and fight the rare intrusion of panic.

I used to bring you joy. I know I did. But God, you’d never know it now. You have nothing for me but your worst impulses.

When you dream about me, I’m never the same. Sometimes I’m the way I was that night, broken and bloodied beyond repair. Other times, I’m casket perfect, and you lay me to rest and kiss my forehead and remind me I’m at peace now, even though you are not. Or else I’m just as I usually was, slightly unkempt, never quite still, smelling of butter and cinnamon, peach and copal, alive and yours.

Dreams, of course. This is more like a nightmare, though there is nothing monstrous in my appearance. I’m not sure I did this on purpose. I’m still in thrall to you, caught in the gravity of your remorse and wrath.

You think of leaving. You begin to meld with the long, stark edge of shadow cast by some of the struts, but you stop yourself, and you come to me. This isn’t what either of us expected. You hate that I’m here.

“You can’t keep doing this, Charlie.”

“Hello to you too.”

I haven’t heard my own voice in so long it sounds like someone else speaking, but it’s only us. You’re no less shocked, on the edge of horror.

“Is this real?” You look away and wish you’d obeyed the urge to flee. “Or just in my head?”

“A little of both.”

“Well, stop it.” Your fingers flex, joints popping. You’re unable to stand the way I stare up at you with such detached interest. “This isn’t how this is supposed to work.”

“How is this supposed to work?”

“You’re dead. Gone. You stay that way. You stay out. And I have to live with it.”

You haven’t told me anything I didn’t already know, but it still hurts to hear you say it. For a long time I gave you the benefit of ignorance, but you’ve bought into it entirely.

I consider being diplomatic, but I can’t stomach anything but the bluntest truth. “This is your fault.”

“My fault? You think I wanted you to end up—”

“No. I don’t.”

You’ve made that abundantly clear every time you’ve taken your time on one of those assholes who did this to me. No, Johnny, I don’t think you wanted me to die. I think, if you’d been able to choose, you’d have wanted better for me. For you and me. Choice wasn’t really an option, though.

Make no mistake, part of me craved the things you’ve done since. Whatever remained of me, lurking in the margins, got a little sharper every time, a little hungrier for more of what you had for me. They deserved it, I figured, and that kept me close, a captive audience to the continuation of your life without me in it.

But I didn’t enjoy it. Enjoyment isn’t something I understand right now.

“You’re the one who hasn’t let me go,” I say, and then I can’t stop. “You think this was what I wanted from you? That I’d be proud? Flattered? You’re not honoring me with this shit. It’s indecent. You can’t just keep using me like this and expect nothing to happen.”

“Of course I can—that’s how this goes. You knew that.”

You ask me why I stayed with you when I could have left, and I ask why you never ended it either. I remind you of all the times you’ve told the others how you would change things if you could, how you wish you could go back and fix it, how you’d give up anything to see me again, to hold me, to bring me back, to tell me how sorry you are that you weren’t there when I needed you. And I ask you, if that’s true, why you look away every time I’ve tried to get through since it happened.

You’re doing it right now. Your gaze is sliding off of me to land on the filthy plexiglass-covered toothpaste ad behind me, a beautiful woman with a Pan Am smile.

“I don’t understand why you won’t let me back in,” I say.

“That’s a different type of story.”

“Yeah, I guess it is.”

“This is simpler. Easier.”

“For you.”

You don’t deny it.

Your indifference almost banishes me entirely, and though I hold out, I’m shattered by the realization that this really is what it comes down to for you: you prefer this one-man show you have now, fully realized in the wake of tragedy and loss. You know who you are, and who you are can no longer accommodate someone like me.

So why am I standing here asking permission to be let back in? I’ve already broken some rule. I’m not the phantom version of myself that you’ve spent the last year refining into a token you can carry around and look at when you need to remember your purpose. Whatever I’m becoming now, you can’t control it by shoving it away into a coffin or a footnote. The fact that you’re afraid—just a tiny bit—stokes something dormant in me, and I stand, squaring up to you.

“So, what?” I say. “This is just part of your gimmick now? This is okay with you?”

You have the grace to flinch as I throw your own words from years ago back in your face. Even barefoot I’m nearly as tall as you are. You never noticed before.

But you have nothing else to say. I hiss a breath through my teeth. “Jesus, Johnny. What the hell happened to you?”

“You did. Now get out.”

Poor you. You close your eyes and turn to leave, and I follow in your wake, unseen.

~*~

 

Next thing I knew I’d moved out of my place and into yours. It was bigger. Nicer. Made no sense really, how you could afford that kind of place on an artist’s income.

Days became very short, time highly segmented, moments truncated. My head was filled with memories I swore I hadn’t made but that were unequivocally mine. It was like most of my life was led in a place I had no access to, and the only parts that felt real were the ones I spent with you.

I was happy, though. We were happy. You had to be happy, right, for it to really hurt when everything went to hell.

 

~*~

 

You decide to forego heroics for a while. You tell the others you’ve overdone it. They’re all too happy to take you at your word. What you don’t tell them is that instead, you go bar hopping. You take a woman home with you. She’s a bartender, and you’ve both flirted plenty of times before, so it isn’t totally grotesque, but mostly you don’t want to be alone.

You’ve been drinking. You tell her the sob story about your dead fiancée, as if that’s the sort of thing a woman wants to hear from the guy she’s come over to fuck after a few rounds of drinks. This is the first time you’ve used me to pick up someone new, and it pisses me off more than any of the other shit.

Don’t insult me by dismissing it as jealousy. I’d want you to be happy, if that was what you wanted too.

I only wish I could warn her away. You’ll tell yourself it’s just a one-time thing, but it’s not. She’s sympathetic now. She touches you in ways you haven’t been touched in so long. She even looks a little like me. She’ll get involved, and you’ll let her, and something will inevitably befall her. After me, you know what it’s like. Tragedy makes you interesting, it gives you a reason for doing what you do. The best part is, you get to keep your life because you’re the black hole at the center of it all.

So she’s getting undressed, and you’re getting a condom from the dresser. You see me through the crack in the door, standing in the middle of the hallway, just outside the studio. I look almost alive.

“Get out.” You say it in the quietly threatening tone you reserve for the worst of the worst.

But she hears.

“Excuse me?”

How this must all look to her! You standing there half naked, throwing the door wide open, shouting full-throated into an empty hallway, “Get the hell out of here, Charlie! Get out!”

You keep shouting. She decides this isn’t for her. You don’t notice her putting her clothes back on and slipping past you. Only when she passes me by do her steps falter. She doesn’t see me, not the way you do, but she feels the nexus of your anger that keeps me around, a hot spot that makes her skin prickle with sweat and her heart begin to race.

She won’t be back.

 

~*~

 

I had a moment of clarity a week or two before my life ended. I was in the shower, getting ready for another early morning at the bakery that I’d remember but not really experience. You were still asleep. I’d spent most of the week wracked with anxiety. Nothing felt very real. I wondered if it was possible to dissociate for months at a time.

But my thoughts were sharper than they’d ever been when I realized that this was your story. I was just in it, put here to die. Like a sacrifice. It wasn’t even your fault, really. You didn’t choose it. I’d been dying for a while. The version of me that had existed before our paths crossed had been whittled down to the parts that enriched your life, and the rest was dismissed to the unexamined ether.

Did other women like me have the same revelation shortly before their deaths? Did they speculate about how it would happen or begin to look for harbingers? Did they decide to fight it?

I’d like to say I was filled with revulsion, that I was overcome with sorrow, that I was furious. Something in me was; the same part that wanted to tell you “no” the night I discovered your secret. It might have been enough to be allowed to go through some fucked up version of the stages of grief. I still can’t tell whether the apathy I felt instead was because I was incapable of anything else, or if I was deliberately choosing to be stoic.

I became two people that night—you get that, right? You get to be Johnny, and you get to be Chiaroscuro, switching between two states of being, each with their own rules and limitations but never fully just one or the other. And I got to be the Charlie That Knew, and the Charlie That Didn’t Know. I’d never been a fatalistic person, you know, but there it was. The end was coming, and I’d march straight on to meet it.

As I watched foamy body wash sluice off my legs and down the drain, I numbly rationalized.

It’s like art.

I’m not a sacrifice, I’m someone’s muse.

I should be flattered.

The gig is simple enough: exist conveniently, show a bit of love and understanding when it’s needed, make you more human but don’t be too human myself. Don’t be too challenging or complex or needy. And when the time comes, try to remember I was a good woman. The perfect catalyst to your next step.

Guess I ought to be grateful I had a part to play in your life at all. I could have been relegated to mere backstory, out of sight from the get-go. I got to live, for a little while. Dying’s the easy part, right? You’re the one who would really suffer.

That’s the lie I told myself, and it was very noble and pretty. I actually felt bad for you. I was in that deep. I turned off the water and put on my robe and decided I could spare a few more minutes in bed. When I kissed you, you woke up and asked me what was I doing, didn’t I have work, I was going to be late, I shouldn’t even be here anymore.

“Stop worrying about me. It’ll be fine,” the Charlie That Didn’t Know insisted. “I just love you so much, that’s all.”

The Charlie That Knew seethed in silence. My time was almost up.

 

~*~

 

I’ve found a place to stay! Just out of the frame. Which is where you liked me best anyway. There’s a big stretch of wall in the hallway that connects your bedroom to the living room. I’ve been spending most of my time up in the corner, just where it meets the ceiling. It gives me a good view of what’s going on, and it’s not as dark and cramped as under the bed. Sometimes you notice me.

You’re terrible at hiding it. You flinch, and avert your eyes, and curl your shoulders like a sullen teenager uncomfortable in his skin. You’re incandescently pissed off at me for refusing to stay in my place. You think what I said to you at the construction site was a declaration of war, but really all I want is what was taken from me. I don’t need your anger now. I can sustain myself just fine on my own—I have more of it than I ever realized when I was alive.

Not so long ago, you were comfortable in the idea of being haunted by me. Haunted is just a trait, like witty, or moody, or generous, or irresponsible. You’re not so keen on it now that it’s turned into a verb. Being haunted is inconvenient and exhausting. It demands more of you than you were ever willing to give.

You haven’t been going out much. You’ve seen me in the elevator too many times, and it’s worse in the stairwells. Best not bother with them at all.

The space in here is yours, at least, so you figure that gives you an advantage. The TV is always on. You can’t abide silence anymore. I wish you’d swap out the Bob Ross videos for something else—I get it, he’s relaxing and so wholesome, but a person can only take so many happy little trees. You order a lot of delivery. You don’t answer your phone. When you watch porn it’s not even the good stuff, because you know I’m watching too.

Tonight you’re doing something a little different. You’ve emptied the studio and begun papering the hallway over with whatever you can find, covering the blank areas with ink, paint, charcoal, pastels. Watching your hands run over the plaster, I can almost feel them on my skin. There’s a sensuality in your agitation that is simply delicious. To you, I’m an infestation in the walls. I half expect you to nail planks over the doors and windows next, as if to ward off a home invasion.

You work and work until you’ve penned yourself in and, you believe, me decisively out. It’s a valiant effort. I regret to inform you I’m already inside. You never let me leave to begin with.

 

~*~

 

I wish I had more worth remembering, but I don’t.

How did it happen? How did I die? No one even bothered to write it. It was practically an afterthought. One day I just never came back. When you found my body, the worst was done. I was gone. Particulars unimportant.

Imagine what that’s like. They say leaving it up to the imagination is worse, so pick the worst thing you can think of. Make it brutal, or quiet, or slow, or sudden. Really enjoy yourself. Go on, Johnny. You have my blessing.

As for me, I can only measure it by what it did to you. Naturally. I assume this means it was spectacularly gruesome.

Oh, you were inconsolable. Devastated. Lost for weeks at the bottom of a bottle, and when you climbed back out you’d determined never to fall apart like that again. Now you’d be strong. For Charlie. Your Charlie. You’d do what had to be done to make things right. For me, for me, always for me, because I was gone and someone had to make sure it wasn’t in vain.

That might be the thing that really gets to me. I should have been able to have my death, at least. It’s cheap to be robbed of something so intimately mine, no matter how terrible it is. But it was all about you.

I hope, when you go, you feel it. I hope it’s your own. I really mean that. Maybe that’s what it takes to find peace in whatever comes after. I wouldn’t know.

 

~*~

 

I’m everywhere these days, and you’re getting worse at pretending I’m not. Even something as mundane as the walk down the hallway from the bedroom to the living room is abhorrent. You’ve been contemplating how realistic it would be to never leave your bedroom until you’ve figured out how to banish me for good.

One night you crack a knuckle, that old nervous habit I hated, and you convince yourself that I’m there in the minuscule pocket of air and sound as the joints slip. You still can’t help but try to keep me in a space that’s all yours. You always did have a wonderful imagination. It was one of the things I loved most about you. Your theory lasts long enough for you to go to the kitchen to grab a knife—why not just get rid of the offending digit then?—but you talk yourself down.

You’re on edge, not thinking clearly. Maiming yourself is perhaps a touch extreme. You should open a window. You should go outside. You should sleep. It’s been too long since you’ve done any of those things. This can’t be healthy. But first, you’ll drink.

Still lost in the creeping notion that I’m inside of you, you open the fridge to grab the vermouth and find me staring back. I shouldn’t fit at all, really. The shelves are too narrowly spaced, and I was never a petite woman. I feel cramped and boneless, neck bent as if broken, body twisted into an unnatural mantis hunch. The cold in here makes me shiver, and I can’t get the stink of overripe peaches, the spill of ketchup you never wiped up, and leftover everything pizza out of my nose. But it’s worth it to know my senses are my own again, not just filtered through yours. It’s worth it to see the way you fall back, mouth open and gasping noiselessly. The door slams shut, and I laugh for the first time I can remember since this all started.

 I admit, I’ve become too playful. I like to surprise you, just to see how you react. I shouldn’t tease when I see how frightened you’ve become. But it didn’t have to be this way, Johnny. We could have figured something out, a way for us both to be happy. For a while there we worked quite well together.

 

~*~

 

You keep to the bedroom, though the supplies and rations you took with you are dwindling.

Every morning the walls are closing in a bit more. The only place you feel like yourself is when you’re slipped into a shadow, convinced I can’t reach you there. You chase them all day as the sun moves and the light shifts.

It’s fine, really. I’ve been enjoying myself in your absence. With all this freedom I recover more and more who I was before you, though the place is full of mementos of us, too. I don’t think I’ll ever be rid of them, but the parts without you shine a little brighter by the day.

Today I decided to leave. I wasn’t sure I could. It’s been so long since I was on my own that I expected the world to just end past a certain point, or that I’d find myself stuck again in that waiting space, hoping to be welcomed back in for whatever time you can spare.

But I step outside, and there isn’t a barrier in sight. I remember what it was to walk down the street. Once, I knew where I was going and why I wanted to be there. You weren’t in the picture at all. You’re not.

It’s early yet. It feels like the sort of day to start finding out who I could have been. My shadow on the sidewalk looks a little like you, behind me and under my feet. The world is wide.