Darkroom [18+]

00 | Prologue

AURORA

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The night I witnessed my first ghost, I'd been propped up against the stomp of a red cedar at Fischer Union cemetery, a faux-hide journal settled on my thighs. We were in the middle of June; the weather was supposed to be calmer in the summertime, but winds thrashed and fought with the branches above. I think I had written for at least an hour until my pages started getting tossed back and forth, words crumpled up as if they weren't significant enough to be written before I wrapped up the twine and gave up.

It was also my birthday that night. I was turning twenty-two. A Hostess cupcake with a single candle wedged in the middle, I celebrated the way I'd been doing since I was twelve. Cupping the slim wax stick with my hand and striking back the spark wheel on my lighter, I started a flame and made a wish. Just not sure what for. I do remember burning myself at one point, a small flat scar forever stamped on the web of my thumb to prove it. There was a growing bite to my skin, yet all I did was laugh. Told the earth to battle harder. I've felt worse than this.

The taste of plastic chocolate and airy frosting left on my tongue, I wasn't happy, but I was fine. I chewed on my cake and looked around, noted how much a place full of the dead can take on the likeness of a remote preserve with the overgrown lawn and the way the solitary evergreens reached out and touched branches. My eyes moved past the corroded iron-rod gates and anchored onto a newly constructed jungle gym across the way. I always thought it was an odd place to stick a playground, but there wasn't much land in Creymore to choose from anymore, and the kids still needed somewhere to play. I remember asking my little sister, Scarlett, about it. If she had the chance to visit yet or make friends with the other kids. Ran around and played tag. Scarlett never answered me, but I never expect her to. I can only hope she has her fun.

The rest of that night was supposed to pass as it always did, ordinary and even a little pathetic, but then the current picked up again, and the cold forced me to drag my sleeves down over my fingers. I curled my legs tighter against my chest, thought about the lighter in my pocket. The heat would feel nice. It had always felt nice. Then the harsh balm of cigarette smoke flushed through my nose, stamped out the smell of wet grass along with the departed. My head shot up, scouring for the culprit. The cemetery had been long closed. Barely any moments later, the storm hit, the murky night haze made way for the rain to spill, and that's when I spotted him standing right next to the spiral slide that finished off half of the jungle gym, the glow of the tip of his cigarette bright beneath his hood despite the downpour.

Watching a stranger enjoy a quick smoke wouldn't have phased me, but this wasn't that. He was not a fluke. I remember seeing him move to toss the butt, assuming he would leave soon after, that he would disappear right back into the fold of shadows. When he only continued to stand there, my body dropped into a tonic state, and it wasn't long before I started to question if he was there for me.

Instead of rushing to my car, locking my door, and driving back home that night, I so lucidly decided to stay and let the full branches above catch most of the rain for me. I asked Scarlett if she could see what I was seeing. Of course, there was no answer. All I could do was stare, and though far away, my phantom stared right back. Pummeled by a summer's storm, he watched me. Took me in. Consumed me whole. We stayed like that for the whole of ten minutes before the rain cleared away, fog veiling him from me again.

I remember thinking his presence felt like a weighted blanket of warm static, my phantom a live wire. From then on, it's how I'd make him out, how I'd know he was near. When I finally got to know him, he would carry the same wild heat, and I would often wonder how someone could be so soft yet possess the true ability of killing me at any given moment with a single shock.

For weeks after, I worked myself into believing he hadn't been standing there. I convinced myself that he was a real ghost, a shadow from the haze. This wouldn't last long for me. I'd begin to look for him everywhere. Visit Scarlett more. Spend my nights on the roof. Wherever I went, I'd wait a little longer before returning to my life just to feel his static, the live wire rooted in his veins, ready to send a million volts through my body.

My brain would split in half in the months leading up to what felt like the end. He would turn me inside out, open my mouth wide, and make me honest. I would learn one day that he tried hard to kill me. With rebar as bones and his heart buried under a vicious layer of resentment, he would try to bleach the sight of me from his mind and shred my namesake into a million pieces in hopes that I would forget myself as well.

He would fail at this. Too self-destructive, too impassioned, he had realized we were one and the same, both cut from the same hysterical, blood-soaked cloth. Every drop of my misery would then start to spill out in billows from this very body of mine, whether I wanted it to or not. I would begin to hemorrhage all over the floors and stain the furniture, and my phantom would have no choice but to make himself known.

He would patch me up, douse my infernos, take on my grief. This would be his biggest mistake. We would be moments away from the payoff. The reality of who he was and who I was would bubble up to the surface, spill everywhere, and damage everything as we thought we knew it. I would lose him because of this.

Time would pass, too much time. The thought of seeing him again materialized itself as a pipe dream. I would wonder if he was dead. Think, maybe it would be better if he were. Though I wouldn't stop, not for him. I would return to the cemetery, dig up the graves we made, exhume every secret, set them on fire, and screen the smell with freshly squeezed lemons from the garden. And when the grave keepers find their field empty, their remote preserve desecrated, they would soon find out: I was the phantom first.