Far Horizons: Tales of Sci-Fi, Fantasy and Horror. Issue #19 October 2015 | Page 47

“I’m Corrine,” I said. “Text
me sometime.” And even though his
phone was right there, waiting to
record my digits for posterity, I took
his hand and wrote my name and number on his palm
in rounded, swooping letters. He would have to scrub
to get my name off his skin. Maybe he wouldn’t scrub
hard enough. Jenna would see, and she would understand she had been replaced.
I was not always kind when I was alive. I am
often sorry for that, now.
School is ending, and the movement of the exodus wakes me. I look for Polly where I saw her last,
but she is gone and probably has been for hours. Time
is all the same when you cannot feel your body aging
around you, and sometimes I lose track of it. I am
sad when I realize she’s gone. I think of my mother,
the way her face broke in half when she opened my
bedroom door the day I was born. I am usually sad.
Polly is only a distraction.
For a while after school, the janitorial staff
stays around, laughing raucously and smoking even
though it is against the rules. The have a fan and they
use it to blow the smell of smoke and floor wax out
through an open window. I listen to their conversations because I have nothing else to do. For a while
they tell dirty jokes and laugh, but then their laughter
fades to smiles and their smiles fade to muted conversation.
One of them, a big man with a bald head and
a bushy red beard, says, “Do you ever wonder if this
school is haunted?”
His partner, a much younger man with swarthy
skin and a pencil-thin moustache, says, “What, you
believe in ghosts, now?”
The big man shrugs. “I dunno. Sometimes, I
just get the feeling we’re being watched.”
The younger janitor slaps the older on the
shoulder with one hand while waggling the fingers

of the other. “Wooo. It’s probably La Llarona. Stop
being a fucking pussy.”
The big man snorts and shoves the other.
“What do you know from fucking pussy, faggot?”
I wander away. This is not news to me, that
live people can feel my presence. When I touch them,
they shiver, when I walk past, they look around. But
they cannot see me and they cannot hear my voice.
Polly