I just completed my freshman year of college! :) I’ve enjoyed it, but in these last few weeks especially I’ve been longing to get back home, longing for the freedom to write and read and daydream as I please, without the pressure of my professors’ deadlines.
However, I did discover that some of those deadlines were fruitful for me. “Lucy and Kate,” “Anya Ladanov,” and today’s story were all written for the Creative Writing class I took this semester. I found that the pressure induced by an external deadline made me write slightly differently than before. In “Lucy and Kate” and today’s story especially, I found myself writing more personally, less guardedly, putting more of myself into the story than I am even comfortable with. The results puzzle me somewhat. I have been stretching myself in genre and style, and I’ll still have a ways to go before I am comfortable with realistic/contemporary fiction (or with the surreal elements I tried to add in today’s story). But the whole point of this year-long series is to show you the process. So here’s the story I spent the most time writing + revising for this class, “The Spirit’s Words.”
The Spirit’s Words
The outline of a woman hung just outside my window, dark against the moonlit sky outside. I knew immediately that she was a spirit, perhaps a ghost, a being I had always wondered about but never really believed in until then. Her edges seemed to flutter, as if she had been caught up against the house by a gust of wind.
“What do you want?” I whispered, my voice still heavy from sleeping. I glanced down at Lily, who lay in her sleeping bag on my bedroom floor, her hair like a mussed bed of flowers on her pillow.
“What do you want, Jess?” The ghost’s voice slipped like a wind through the window, chilling me. She seemed to press a palm against the glass.
I lay there, numb. Lily would know what to say to spirits. I could only stare at the figure so impossibly close to me and try to make out her face. She seemed to have none.
“I already know. You want life the way Lily has it. I have heard your prayers as they climbed up the air to heaven.”
She was right, although I was too young to respond, to have the bravery to affirm this.
“The way she knows everything, sees everything, says everything, everything happens to her—”
It was like that all the time, like at school for example—Lily was always the star of plays, the maker of jokes, the first one to spring to a classmate’s aid when they fell and spilled the contents of their binder, the one who was either loved or mocked by others for being “weird,” but never ignored.
The figure’s voice became so much like a wind I could hardly make out the sounds of the words. But my heart understood them intuitively.
“It is hard to live with her, hard to share with one who already has anything, hard to be so still and silent around one so free.”
All I could do was lie there and agree.
“I am here now, to let you know, Jess, it will not be like this forever.”
“What?” By this time I was well on my way back to sleep.
“She is too close to the edge of all things. One day she will snap and your ties will break. And you will breathe easier then. You will have space to fill up your own life.”
“What?” I asked again, a strange spark of excitement in my chest I did not know what to do with, but within seconds I had entered thoroughly into a new dream, and the moonlit bedroom was forgotten. Yet it seemed only a moment until I opened my eyes again, and the sunlight was coming through the window, and my friend Lily was sitting up, repairing one of my broken earrings that had been lying on the floor.
To be in hell is to be tightly sealed into one’s own mind, with no cracks to let in air. When you are left with only yourself, the walls around you made of blurred glass, impossible to see through—that’s hell. As the outside world wanes and you have nothing to consume or meet or see or talk to, you begin to feed upon yourself, the proverbial snake biting its tail.
This was how I felt on that day when Chris and I skipped school and went out to the river, to sit on top of his car and stare out at the water. It was seven years since the sleepover where the spirit delivered its message, and 48 hours since Lily had been declared missing.
“I don’t believe her,” said Chris between the crunching of almonds. “It just doesn’t make any sense. She’s not psychic.”
What he really meant was, he just couldn’t take Lily seriously, although he wanted to.
“She used to talk about that kind of thing all the time, when we were younger. She told me once that she could speak in tongues.”
“Is she Christian? Aren’t they the ones that do that?”
“She’s not, not as far as I know. But she also told me that when she was four she had a dream of herself in a former life where she was a park ranger.” Lily was an expert on all things animal, ecological, and botanical.
“That’s just a coincidence. It’s because of the dream that she got into all that stuff. Or vice versa.”
I didn’t say anything. I sat still and watched the river, gray and thick, slowly pressing on, the line of trees on the other side a mysterious company looking back at us.
Chris finished his almonds. Now the stillness was even deeper. A few birds crowed from the trees by the dock. Over in the woods to the left of the parking lot, someone giggled.
“Even though I don’t believe it, we should definitely go to Ms. Kalman and tell her about it,” said Chris grimly after a while. “It’d be wrong to just sit on this.”
I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t. Chris began throwing the crumbs of his almonds onto the grass between the parking lot and the river. There was no good reason to do so, except that he liked everything on his person to be clean, no dust, no residue.
I watched the river and wondered which way Lily had gone on her mysterious mission. West, down the river, or east, upstream? North, up into the hills, or south, into farmland? Of course, it was unlikely in these modern days that a runaway would prioritize following the river. They would go down to the highway, to whatever city they thought held what they were looking for. But knowing Lily…she could make it, if she had to, up in the woods among the rich people’s houses, food and medical supplies in her backpack, eyes scanning the ground, automatically cataloguing each type of plant. She had that skill.
Both Chris and Lily could be like that, so precise and confident in their understanding of the world. As the quiet one, the slow one, sunk more deeply into my own mind than anyone else I knew, I felt I had no such advantage. My only special knowledge was the prophecy of the spirit that still resounded in my mind. My only area of expertise was Lily, the friend around whom I orbited, whose smiles were my sunshine.
“Jess, we really should go and talk to her. Let’s do it now. We really should.”
I nodded and jumped down. We got into the car, morbid silence still swirling around us. As I settled into the seat, dread pressed down on my stomach like a cat kneading its paws inside me.
Lily and I were both ten, on the night when that spirit appeared. I remember that because Lily had just turned ten a few days before, and I had been ten for a while. And now that we were both ten, Lily could finally sleep over at my house.
It was exciting, the prospect of being able to extend our adventures into the night. Chris could not have come, of course, but we didn’t know Chris at that time. He was still just one of the boys who played soccer during recess and paid no attention to us. And so our whole world was each other.
In the afternoon, we played games as normal, enacting various drawn-out and terrible dramas with our stuffed animals, taking breaks to play Uno or Just Dance. During dinner I sat silently while Lily entertained my parents with tales of her recent trip to Disneyland—an early birthday gift and a kind of once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for her, whose family could not easily afford such a thing—and the latest facts she’d learned about snow leopards. She prattled on regardless of the food that sat untouched on her plate, eyes as bright as the lamplight glinting off silverware.
We had to do the dishes afterward, much to my embarrassment as a hostess, but Lily didn’t mind. As she helped me rinse and load dirty plates, she continued with her stories.
“The really interesting thing about Disneyland happened on the way back.” She pushed her bangs out of her eyes with a tomato-sauce-stained hand. I cringed and handed her a wet towel. “I didn’t want to say it in front of your parents in case they laughed at me. But when we were flying back, I was sitting by the window and Mom was sitting next to me, and there was this old man sitting next to her, and I could hear all of his thoughts. From two seats over.”
“That’s just silly.” I looked out the window and saw my own incredulous face mirrored in the glass. It was already getting dark outside. “Telepathy isn’t real.”
“It’s because he let me hear them, I think.” Lily lowered forks into the dishwasher with a clink. “They were all very nice thoughts! He was thinking about his grandchildren and how sweet they were. And about all the places he’d traveled to.”
“Uh—well—even if that’s true—isn’t it creepy of you, to listen in on someone’s thoughts?”
“He had been to a lot of places—forests, deserts, I think I even recognized a few. Grasslands in Africa, the Russian taiga—”
“Really? That’s a lot of places to—”
“And then my mom started talking to him, and she asked him if he had any grandkids, and he told her all about them and I knew things about them before he said them.”
Her hands had gotten stained again—she reached for the towel and wiped them, smiling at me, face alight. I smiled back, unable to help myself. When Lily smiled, everyone smiled, regardless of what strange things she said.
I put the soap in the dishwasher and closed it. As we dried our hands and headed upstairs to my room she rambled on, but I wasn’t listening.
I was thinking about a time when we had all visited an old church on a school trip—after all this time I certainly can’t remember why, or what church it was. Lily and I had stuck close together the whole day as usual, until the moment when the quiet pastor had finished giving a little lecture on the history of the building and we students were free to explore. Most of the kids wanted to go read the ancient names on the gravestones in the cemetery, or stare at the faded pictures on the walls, but Lily insisted on going up to the pastor and barraging him with questions. As they talked I had found myself melting into the background, unable to add anything to the eager flow of words, standing out of reach from the warmth of the pastor’s kindly smile and the sparks that seemed to fly as Lily waved her hands in enthusiasm.
Before long I had melted out through a side door, into the older part of the cemetery where the gravestones were too faded for my classmates to take interest. And there I had stood and stared at the gravestones and asked God why I could not have what Lily had, why she always had the whole world on the tip of her tongue, within her reach, and I had nothing but silence.
All this was running through my mind as I followed Lily up the staircase to my bedroom. And I remembered the request I had made of God at the time, that he might give me something of what she had—something burning to see or hear, some secret to share or hold, some higher knowledge or at the very least a higher question. I know now that those prayers would be answered that very night, when the ghost appeared, close at my window.
For 48 hours now I had replayed those memories threadbare in my mind, until the moonlight and the silhouette at the window and Lily’s head on the pillow were all I saw no matter where I looked, until I was afraid to speak lest all that would come out were that spirit’s words or my muttered responses. Chris knew nothing of it. Of course I had not told him about the incident, and of course I could never tell Lily.
When Chris became our friend, I wondered if this was the breaking of ties the spirit had warned about. He had become our friend during PE in eighth grade, when he suffered an ankle injury and I had had troubles with my knee. Both of us sat on the sidelines, ignoring each other at first, but when Lily stepped out of the game for a water break—which she did as often as possible, to see me—she drew the two of us into conversation. He was easier to talk to than he seemed, and I enjoyed his earnest and precise way of conversation, but I always assumed in those first few months that only he and Lily would become real friends. She could ignite his sense of humor in a way I could not. I wondered if before long they would drift off together in a new little realm of their own and I would be left apart. But Lily’s love for me was strong enough to keep us all together, and in the years since then our duo had become a trio, a home base for Lily and Chris but for me, the whole world.
Now it was just Chris and I ascending the steps to the Kalmans’ home.
“Ms. Kalman, I’m so sorry,” said Chris as soon as Lily’s mother opened the door. She tried to let her worn face form a smile but when that didn’t work, she waved us inside with a lean hand.
“Shouldn’t you two be at school?”
“We wanted to see you.”
We sat down at the dining room table. There was an old address book open on the table and a mess of papers and notebooks. I recognized Lily’s journal. That was one of the few habits she’d picked up from me, instead of the other way around.
“I just don’t know how you do that,” she’d gasped when she first glimpsed my diary in fifth grade. “Your handwriting is so neat, and—you write like that every day? A page for every day?”
I’d nodded, unsure what was so special about it, but her eyes were wide, and her wonder made me feel warm. “Wow—I should try that—I’d like to remember every day of my life, everything that happened!”
I’d smiled at that, knowing she would never remember to write every day, if she remembered she had a journal at all. But I got her one for her next birthday.
From the looks of her journal now, she had decorated it with much enthusiasm, but the bookmark lay at less than the halfway point.
“I’m just trying to figure out where she might have gone. So I’m calling relatives and—and anyone else who might know. Of course the police are supposed to do all that, but I just felt I ought to do it myself.” Ms. Kalman was a thin woman, but she sat down across from us as if carrying great weight.
“Well, she left us something that might help. That’s why we came.” Chris reached for his pocket. Ms. Kalman was already leaning towards us, eyes flitting from one to the other, hands trembling. Her eyes were forest-brown like Lily’s. “Jess found it in her locker at school.”
He drew it out of his pocket, where he had kept it, not trusting the cleanliness of my pockets. He had kept the paper folded in the same haphazard way we’d found it, stuck behind a math textbook.
Chris handed it to Ms. Kalman and let her unfold it. She stared at the words we’d already memorized.
Dear Jess and Chris,
I have to go away. Don’t worry about me. I know it’s all so out of nowhere. It’s because there’s someone who needs me, kind of far away. A relative, I think, but I don’t know. She’s been calling out to me for a while now. I’m sorry. It’s my life’s calling. I have to go. Remember that I love you both.
-Lily
“What does all this mean?” Ms. Kalman looked at us. We shrugged.
“We don’t know anything more about it than you,” said Chris.
Lily’s mother lowered the paper, hands still trembling. “What does she mean, that someone was calling out to her? I never—I never heard her on the phone. She doesn’t have her own phone.”
I cleared my throat. “I think she means—I think she thought that someone was speaking directly to her mind. She used to talk about that kind of thing a lot.”
“Oh, I know, but—” Ms. Kalman trailed off. She clutched the note so tightly it wrinkled. The three of us sat there as she stared into space. Through the stillness, the memory of the spirit’s words resounded through my head. “She is too close to the edge of all things—”
Chris made an incoherent sound beside me. I turned and saw him sobbing, as quietly as he could, sleeve pressed against his eyes.
Something broke inside me, at that sight. I had to fight to keep myself from suddenly exploding into wails, from breaking the stillness that way.
Suddenly the phone rang. It was as if the cries of desperation in my belly had vented themselves some other way. It was a landline phone, the same kind my family had finally gotten rid of when I was small.
Ms. Kalman got slowly to her feet, speaking over the phone’s ring as if to exert her presence over it, to declare that everything was under control.. “She did take a lot of interest in my mother, my aunts, their lives—she thought I was selfish for hardly ever seeing them. She didn’t understand that I needed that break from them. After all they did to me. But she pitied them.”
She lifted the phone to her mouth. Chris and I couldn’t quite make out the tinny voice that came from it. But I knew what the voice would say as soon as her hands picked up that phone.
I knew it and I wasn’t surprised when her face screwed up and blossomed with tears.
Lily’s body had been found in the river, by a man who happened to live down the street from her grandmother, when he was taking his boat out for a ride. It was unclear what had happened to make her fall in the river in the first place. But I wasn’t surprised that she had died that way, whether intentionally or not. That was the curious thing about Lily—for all her knowledge of woods and waterways, she had never learned to swim.
That was all I could think about for the first ten minutes, the ten minutes that felt like an eternity of Ms. Kalman weeping in her kitchen and Chris and I standing around her, just two kids who didn’t know anything more about the world than her, wanting to help her and not knowing how.
Once Ms. Kalman had been helped up and taken to sit at her dining room table, where she grasped at all the papers around her as if they could help, eyes wandering and confused, then the breaking I had felt turned to unraveling.
I ran outside and headed in the direction of the river. It was a short run. I would get there in time. In time for what, I did not know. In time to meet Lily—in time to meet the spirit, to shake my fist at it and curse it—in time to get there before Chris. I could hear his footsteps behind me, as I sprinted through Lily’s quiet neighborhood, my lungs still threatening to break apart in a scream.
Where was Lily? In heaven, someplace far away, full of grandmothers to care for, or in hell, a place like here? When those waters had wrapped themselves around her, had she known where she was going? And the spirit that had spoken to me through the window, what was it thinking now? Was it laughing at me for my questions, for my mourning?
The world wheeled around me. Its center of gravity was gone. I ran down to the riverbank and vomited into the water, once and then again and again, trying to release the spirit’s whispers from my system.
Chris reached me sooner than I expected. He grabbed my arms to pull me back. I didn’t realize until later that he was afraid I would tumble in myself, following after her in desperation.
“Is it bad that I wanted this to happen? And that I knew it would happen? I knew something like this would happen, that she would be gone one day. I even wanted it. I thought the world would feel bigger. But I don’t think it does.”
Chris didn’t say anything. I could tell he was grasping for words, but he could find nothing precise or clear or confident enough to say. I let him hold onto me and we watched the river slipping eternally by, out into the wider world where we had never gone.
Well, there’s the story! Let me know your thoughts! The next one for this month might take some time, since I have some catching up to do. Thank you, all my readers, for your support and encouragement! <3
Truly a triumph! I look forward to more!