Far Horizons: Tales of Sci-Fi, Fantasy and Horror. Issue #20 November 2015 | Page 83

up another plate.
There is no time to waste. I
command the lights to flicker. The
woman looks up, around. Through
me. I lift the full rack of clean dishes and fling it at the
floor. It strikes with a terrific crash. Glass shatters; bits
of broken pottery skid across the clean tile. Shrapnel
hits the woman’s shoe. She screams.
Good. Now I have her attention.
I smear blood across the wall. She shrieks
again, jamming her hands against her mouth, eyes
wide and wild. She knows I am here. She thinks she is
under attack. I am nothing but a ghost to her, nothing
but a bogey.
In blood, with the tree as backdrop, I write
Help Polly against her windowpane.
Her eyes drift up as if they can see through the
ceiling. There is a spreading wetness there, not yet
saturated enough to drip. She runs up the stairs. I stay
out of her way as she screams yet again when she sees
the spectacle in the bathroom, this time the guttural,
heart-broken cry of a woman who is not afraid for her
own life, but for something she values even more. A
scream like that was the first sound I heard after I was
born. It was just as tragic from this throat as it had
been from my mother’s.
Paramedics come. Even though they check
her pulse and deem it thready but present, Polly is
standing beside me, watching the scene with pale,
disaffected eyes. She is nude and her wrists are open
to the air. The gashes wind from her wrist to her
elbow, no longer bleeding but proof of her stupidity
nonetheless. I shake my head.

The paramedics have loaded her onto a
stretcher now. They slosh through the water toward the
door while her mother follows, pale and absent as a
ghost herself.
“I bet she believes me now,” Polly says.
I thought ghosts could not see each other, but I
can see her and she can see me. Maybe it is just further
proof of how special she really is. But there is no room
for the extraordinary here. The living can be magical.
Ghosts are just dead. At least with Polly here, I know I
will not be alone. I will have more company than just
my dreams. Someone to talk to.
I would rather be alone. I would rather have
no one to talk to at all than to have Polly beside me as
one more regret.
“It’s not too late, you know,” I say. “Your heart
is still beating. You could follow them. Get back in.”
“Why would I?” she asks. “I’m crazy. No one
likes me; no one believes me. Being alive is a pain in
the ass. I just want peace and quiet.”
I snort. “There’s no peace or quiet here, Polly.
Only watching and regrets.” I look at her, study the
torn pieces of veins in her arms. “Why would you
choose to live? I don’t know. But if I had the chance I
know what I would do.”
She looks at me with her pale blue eyes. She
says, “I bet you were pretty when you were alive.”
“I was,” I say. “I was smart, too. But
thoughtless.”
“People grow out of that.”

“I tried to warn you,” I say.
Polly nods.“Did you make that mess
downstairs? Write my name in blood?”
“Yeah,” I say.

I nod. “Not me.”
She trails after her mother
and I trail after her. I am sad, and the
dreams call to me. I shove them away.
Before Polly I would have dropped
into them with gratitude. There is no

83