Once, a long time ago, and also not so long ago, there was a young ghost named Anna. Anna had been a ghost longer than she could remember. She was pale and transparent. She floated from place to place, she walked through walls. She was lonely.

Anna was a young girl, and older than America. She was fourteen, and she had been a ghost since the Jamestown settlement. She had watched the world unfold with sad, monochromatic eyes, she had stood in the middle of Civil War battlefields, and once frightened John F. Kennedy late at night in his dining room. But she was not interested in the nation’s history. She was fourteen.

Anna was a lovely ghost. Her hair was light and wavy.  Her eyes, when not gray, were pale blue. Her slender form tapered and faded into nothing. She liked to think she resembled a white silk flag, waving in the breeze. Sometimes she would let go and let the breeze take her, let herself drift upward into the sky, holding her thin arms out like a bird, closing her eyes, smiling. She had died peacefully in her sleep. Yellow Fever had consumed her organs.

 ~

One morning in 1981, Anna met a boy. She found him playing at a park in a small town somewhere in America. He was a small, skinny boy, around four years old, with pale skin and dark brown eyes and hair like earth. He was playing in the sand with two metal trucks, ramming them together and making crash noises. Anna floated down in front of him and smiled.

"Hello," she said.

The boy looked up at her. "Hi," he said, and squinted. "Are you an angel?"

"No," Anna said. "At least I don't think so."

"Oh," the boy said, and looked down at his trucks again. He raced them around in a circle, spinning on his knees and making engine rev sounds. Anna watched him in silence.

"My name is Oliver," he said, not looking up from his toys. "What's your name?"

"Anna."

The boy's parents walked up to him then and started talking to him. Anna couldn't understand what they were saying, but they sounded upset. They took his hand and made him stand up. They started to walk away with him. The boy twisted around and waved at Anna. "Bye," he said.

"Bye," Anna said, and waved back. A breeze kicked up off the grass and she began to drift backwards.

Frowning, the parents asked the boy who he was talking to.

"My friend," he said.

Anna gave in to the wind and floated away.

 ~

Time was soft for Anna. She was not tied to it in any concrete way. She had to concentrate to stay tethered to any certain moment, and if she wanted to, she could relax her hold and time would blur. Time would stream, and years would flutter past. This is how time was for a ghost.

One day, while she was floating on a mild summer breeze, drifting over some suburbs with a flock of geese, she saw the boy again, far below. He was leaning on the sill of an open second-story window, resting his chin on his hand, staring up into the sky. Anna floated down to him in a lazy circle. He saw her, and his face lit up.

"Hi!" he said.

"Hi," Anna said. She stopped just outside his window and hovered there, smiling. Her teeth were perfect white, despite the hygiene practices of her day.

"I remember you," the boy said. "Your name is Hannah."

"It's Anna," she said.

"Oh, sorry. Do you remember me?"

"Of course," she said. "Your name is Oliver."

He smiled. He had nice teeth too. Anna realized a few years had passed. The boy was around seven now.

"You're a ghost, aren't you," he said proudly.

Anna blushed. "I guess."

"I saw a movie about ghosts. They were scary. They tried to hurt people."

Anna's face fell. Her eyes became sad, and their pale blue drained to gray. She remembered some of the things she had seen in her long past, the wars and murders, people with holes in their faces and blood everywhere. She had never met another ghost, but she didn't know why they would ever want to hurt someone who was alive. People who were alive were so beautiful.

"I don't want to hurt people," she said.

The boy considered this, then nodded. "You're not scary. You're nice."

Anna smiled. Some color returned to her eyes.

Someone in the house yelled something, a harsh, ugly sound, and the boy turned his head to look inside, then looked back at Anna. "I have to go now," he said. "I have to go do some chores."

"Ok," Anna said, and looked down at the ground.

"It won't take me very long," the boy said. "Will you wait here for me?"

Anna nodded. The boy disappeared into the house, and Anna tried to wait, but a strong gust of wind blew her away, and she drifted off into the sky amongst spirals of leaves and dandelion seeds.

 ~

The next time she saw the boy, he was in school, and he was older. She flew in through his classroom window and hovered in the corner, watching him. He had grown much taller. He was about the same age as her now. Fourteen, not four-hundred. Anna waited in the corner, waiting for him to notice her, but the bell rang and he got up and got his books, and he did not notice her.

She followed him out to the playground where his class was having recess. He was playing Four-Square with his classmates, slapping the ball with great vigor, grinning and hooting and breathing hard. Anna smiled as she watched him. He was very alive.

She waited in the trees while he played with his friends. When he finally separated from them and began walking back toward the school, she came out of the trees and appeared in front of him.

"Hi," she said, smiling shyly.

But the boy didn't seem to notice her. He missed a step, hesitated, looked around, but then kept walking. He walked straight toward Anna, and walked through her. She shivered.

The boy did not look back. Anna watched him disappear into the school. Her eyes went gray, and she closed them. She sank halfway into the ground, and lost her grip on time. Time slipped away from her, and the school disappeared, became an empty field, then condominiums.

 ~

Anna did not need to sleep like people who were alive. She did not get tired, or hungry or thirsty. But sometimes she would close her eyes to let years pass, when the present was too sad. She had once skipped eight decades this way. When she opened her eyes, everything would be different, and she would find herself in a time and place she didn't know. It didn't matter. Every time and place was the same. This is how it was for a ghost.

But now things had begun to change. Time was not passing like it used to. She was opening her eyes to the same place every time, now, the small town where the boy lived. This made her happy, but also very sad.

Even though the boy could not see her anymore, she continued to watch him, drifting through walls and ceilings to hover in the corner of rooms, smiling with a strange sort of pride. He grew taller, stronger, more handsome. The boy slowly became a man. One day in high-school he met a beautiful girl, and they kissed under the football bleachers. Anna turned away, and wished for a strong wind to blow her far from there, but the air was still. She floated into a mountain instead, moving through the rock for miles until she reached the mountain's heart, and closed her eyes there, feeling the warm, dark crush of the mountain's life grinding around her. The mountain was far older than Anna. It was as old as time, as old as God. It embraced her, and told her to be silent and patient. These were two things the mountain knew about.

 ~

Whenever Anna opened her eyes from a long sleep, she knew she would be near where the boy was. This was how things worked now. She was tethered, if not to a time then to a place, or a person. She accepted this, although she cried often.

The boy continued to grow up. He graduated from high school, and Anna wiped her eyes and smiled as he walked the aisle in his robe and square hat. His parents were there, watching in the seats, and for once they were smiling too.

It was hard for Anna, watching the boy live his life. He found and lost a long series of girlfriends, and began filling his body with alcohol and drugs. And there were the times when the boy and his girlfriends would kiss and touch each other and take their clothes off. She had never learned about any of this during her short time on the Earth, but it made her very sad. During these times she would go as far away as she could, flying high up into the clouds, or burying herself in the earth, or in a tree, or inside a concrete wall. This was comforting to her, to have her view of the world immersed in something solid and impermeable. To open her eyes and see nothing but atoms.

 ~

One day, in the boy's senior year of college, during one of the lowest points of his life, sad and lonely and thinking so many bad thoughts, the boy filled himself with more drugs than he ever had before. He sat alone in his dark apartment, and stared at nothing. Anna was there in the corner like she often was. Her eyes were dark gray and wet. She drifted into the middle of the room and stood in front of the boy. She said his name, but he didn't hear, as he never did, so she raised her voice. He continued to stare blankly. Anna squeezed tears out of her eyes and screamed at the boy. The mirror on the wall shattered. The boy looked at the mirror, then he looked at the place where Anna was standing, and his dilated eyes focused.

"Oliver?" Anna said.

The boy's mouth moved a little, but no words came out. Staring at Anna very hard, he wobbled to his feet, and took a step toward her. Anna smiled a big smile, showing her perfect teeth, and said, "Hi, Oliver."

He took another step forward, and put a hand out in front of him like a blind man. His mouth moved again, but there was no sound. He reached out to touch her cheek, but his hand passed through her. She reached out to take his hands, to squeeze them and pull him toward her, but her hands were vapor. She dissolved around him, and touched nothing. She was a ghost, and this is how it was.

As her hands dropped to her sides, the boy's eyes lost focus and drifted. His arms fell, and he stepped back, looking left and right. He slumped back against the wall, and closed his eyes. And he had not said a word the whole time. So the last thing he ever said to her  was, "Will you wait here for me?"

 ~

After that day, Anna closed her eyes often and tried to let decades flow past. But the flow of time had congealed. Occasionally she would skip a season or two, but mostly she watched the world move one year at a time. The boy graduated from college, and fell in love with a very pretty girl. One day, as he and the girl were walking in a park near the ocean, the boy surprised both the girl and Anna by getting down on his knee and asking the girl to marry him. Anna had not been expecting this, and she ran away. She shut her eyes, trying to make it all disappear, but when she opened them again, she was standing on a hill overlooking the boy's wedding. She buried herself in the hill and cried, feeling the wet, creaking groan of the earth around her. The worms and moles and beetles cried with her in sympathy, though they all had problems of their own.

 ~

Years went by and Anna pulled hard against her chains, wishing to be far, far away from the boy and his wife. But she was not allowed. She was always pulled back. Sometimes there were surprises, and she would wake to find herself in England, in the house where she was born, her body imprisoned in some antique piece of furniture or doorframe while a family she did not know moved around her. Or she would open her eyes in the tangled depths of a dark American forest, surrounded by moss and undergrowth, and notice an ancient, rotted cross rising crookedly from the earth. She knew this was her grave, but she never dared look inside.

 ~

When the boy's first child was born, Anna became bitter. Her longsuffering love for the boy finally began to twist. Watching he and his wife cuddle with the little girl, cooing and tickling, Anna's eyes drained to gray, and then to black, and she began haunting the house.

 ~

She started with small things, opening and shutting doors, pushing spoons across the table, rearranging the boy's bookshelf. But none of them seemed to notice. They were so busy feeding the baby and making quiet, tender love in the bed or on the couch or against the wall, they never thought it was strange that the curtains were always closed in the morning and opened at night, or that their wine glasses kept cracking and spilling dark red liquid over the floor.

~

Anna had once let herself sink deep into the ground, down amongst the great shifting plates and inverted mountains of the inner earth, and she had watched a diamond form. Time had lost all shape, and she had watched a soft vein of coal crushed and squeezed for millennia, until it writhed and twisted and clarified, until it become the hardest, sharpest thing in the world. Now she felt this happening inside herself.

~

The boy woke up one day and Anna threw the dresser against the ceiling. The five hundred pound piece of oak crushed a deep hole in the drywall, then fell and crunched halfway through the floor.

The boy and his wife stared in astonishment, but they did nothing. They pulled clothes out of the available upper drawers, dressed, and got ready for work.

When they came home, Anna shattered all the windows in the kitchen. She threw dishes that skimmed over the boy's head. She made all the food in the cupboards rot.

The boy duct-taped plastic over the windows. The girl swept up the glass and went to the grocery store again.

The daughter was frightened at first. "What happened?" she asked with eyes wide. She was four now. She was beautiful, and looked like her mother.

The boy knelt down in front of her and pointed a finger at her mouth. "I think it was the tooth fairy, honey," he said. "She must have flown through the window like those birds always try to. She's not very smart, that tooth fairy! Why else would she pay so much for old teeth?"

The daughter giggled and clapped her hands at this idea. Her front teeth were almost all gone.

That night while the daughter slept in her parents' bed between the two of them, Anna smashed every glass object in the room—all the windows, the lamps, perfume bottles, vases—and made the glass swirl in the center of the room in a huge, glittering cloud. The boy and his wife huddled together in the bed, shielding their daughter with their bodies. The daughter screamed.

Anna stopped abruptly, and let the glass fall. She looked at the boy's daughter, who was sobbing uncontrollably, and saw a small red cut across her forehead. Anna's eyes swept back to pale blue, and filled with sudden tears. She retreated to the corner of the room and huddled there, shrinking down to a small, pale wisp. The boy and his family fled the house, and Anna was left alone.

She wondered how long she would be here. She wondered how long she would be tied to this silent Earth. Would she still be here when everything else was gone? When all the people were dead and nature was dust, would she be left to wander endless deserts? When the planet itself crumbled and collapsed in on itself, would she be left here, with no ground to stand on, floating in empty space with the stars?

 ~

The boy and his family did not come back to the house for a week. They stayed with some friends, and somehow, Anna kept herself away from them. She kept herself locked in the windowless house, never closing her eyes or relaxing her grip on time or space. After a few days, a group of men showed up at the house with video cameras and strange equipment. They moved from room to room, setting up cameras and taking readings on instruments. Anna wandered among them, looking scornfully at their notes and video screens. She knew the boy must have called them here. To find her, to somehow clear the house, to make it safe again. She hoped they were successful. She hoped they would find some way to expel her. She teased them, tipping over their coffee cups, playing with their shoe laces, making the air go hot and cold, but they did nothing. Eventually, they left. The house became empty and quiet again. Anna hovered in the dark, pale and sad.

Eventually, the boy and his family returned to the house. They came in a big truck, and began putting all their things into boxes. They barely said a word to each other. Winter wind rushed in through the broken windows. They all wore coats.

While the boy knelt on the kitchen linoleum, wrapping dishes in newspaper, Anna slipped in beside him. Down low on the refrigerator so that the daughter could reach them, there was an alphabet of rainbow letter magnets. Anna reached out and moved them.

The boy took the wrapped dishes and stacked them in a cardboard box. He taped the box shut. When he looked up, he saw the message on the refrigerator.

IM SORRY

The boy knew his daughter could not yet spell. He knew. And as he stared at the magnets, Anna thought he might even remember something. So while he stared, she took other magnets and moved them. She wrote:

I LOVE YOU

The boy did not react at all while the magnets moved before his eyes. He knelt there for a long time, just looking. Then he reached out and scattered the first message, smearing the letters all over the fridge. Only "I LOVE YOU" remained. Anna watched him with sudden hope, but he turned around, and continued boxing dishes. Two days later, he and his family moved a thousand miles away.

 ~

The boy's new home was three states west of where he grew up, but to Anna's dismay, this changed nothing. She was dragged along with him once again by the invisible chains.

On the first day they arrived, while the boy and his wife were hauling boxes into the house, the daughter sat outside in a sandbox. Her toys were all still packed, so she just played with the sand, throwing handfuls of it and letting it sift through her fingers. A small Carebears Band-Aid covered the cut on her forehead.

Nervously, looking down at the ground, Anna floated up to the sandbox and sat on the edge. The girl looked at her with wide eyes for a moment, then smiled.

"Hi!" the girl said.

"Hi," Anna said, looking up shyly.

"Are you a ghost?" the girl asked. Her eyes were bright with excitement.

"Yes," Anna said, and looked away.

"Daddy said there was a ghost in our old house!" the girl said, jumping to her feet and beaming with delight. "Do you want to play in the sand with me?"

Anna smiled. "Ok." She sank her hands into the sand and made it shift and spin. Intricate castles stacked themselves up and then dissolved.

"Wow!" the girl said, and clapped her hands.

Anna's smile warmed. "What should I make?" she asked the girl.

"Make a starfish!"

"That's easy," Anna said, and made a starfish.

"Make a puppy!"

Anna made a shaggy pup like the one she had owned as a child in England, centuries gone. She wiggled her fingers and made it move. It wagged its tail and silently barked. The girl squealed with delight. "Make something else!"

Anna did not move. She looked at the girl. She closed her eyes. "I'm sorry," she said.

"Why?" the girl said.

Anna brushed a wispy finger across the Carebears Band-Aid. "I'm sorry I got mad and broke your windows."

The girl's smile did not flicker. "That's ok! You must have been really mad! Look, I got an owie!"

"I know. I'm sorry."

"That's ok. Make something else!"

Anna put her hands into the sand again, and pulled out a house. It was the boy's old house, perfect in its detail. Its windows were empty black holes. The house shifted, became a Sixteenth Century English cottage, then a crude log cabin, then the boy's new house, identical to the real one looming up behind them. While the daughter watched, mesmerized, Anna made the house grow wings, which flapped in slow, graceful strokes. The house rose into the air, spun slowly like a music box ballerina, then dissolved into fine grit, which fell back into the sandbox with the gentle hiss of sleeping breath.

The girl stared at Anna with wide, wondering eyes. Anna reluctantly met her gaze, her eyes fading back and forth between gray and blue.

"You're so pretty," the girl said. "Maybe you're an angel!"

Anna giggled, and looked down at the ground. A cold breeze rushed in, like it so often did. Anna drifted up off the sandbox.

"You have to go?" the girl asked sadly.

"Yes," Anna said. "I guess so."

The girl frowned.

"You've very pretty, too," Anna said. "You're the prettiest person I've ever seen."

The girl grinned. "Really?"

"Yes," Anna said. "You're beautiful. I have to go now. Goodbye!"

"Goodbye!" the girl said, and waved.

Anna let the wind pull her away, up into high gray clouds that churned and boiled darkly. There was snow and ice in the clouds. The flakes and crystals swirled around Anna and whispered cruel things in her ears. She shut her eyes, and listened, but did not cry.

 ~

Years trickled by again. The boy's daughter grew up. Something happened between the boy and his wife, and they began to drift apart. Years became decades. The boy and his wife fought and screamed at each other, like the boy's parents used to do. The daughter left home angrily at age seventeen and moved to the other end of the country. Anna embedded herself in ancient redwoods and let the dense eternity of their wood muffle the noise of time.

Once, in the later years of the boy's life, in his late forties, she saw him leaning on the sill of the open second-story window, resting his chin on his hand, staring up into the sky. She floated down and hovered in front of him, although he couldn't see her.

"Hi Oliver," she said, although he couldn't hear her.

His wife shouted something from inside the house, a harsh, ugly sound, and the boy turned his head to look, then gazed out at the sky and sighed. Anna moved in close, and kissed him on the lips. She was vaporous and couldn't touch him, but she held her face where it would be, and placed her lips where they would go. She closed her eyes, and kissed him.

The boy blinked a few times, then turned and disappeared into the house. Anna smiled after him, and drifted away into the evening clouds.

 ~

As the decades passed, Anna's chains grew longer, and she spent less and less time hovering over the boy. She drifted in a distant orbit around him, sleeping in rocks and trees and under stream beds in the mountains. She joined a family of deer and walked with them through their narrow trails in the brush. Their big, dark eyes regarded her peacefully. Even the vicious ones, bears and packs of wolves, looked at her like gentle puppies, and she stroked their fur with her soft, magical hands, making them roll on their backs with pleasure. She thought that maybe, after mankind was gone and the earth was bare, there would still be a few of these left to keep her company. She held out this hope, and slept with them in caves.

When he was fifty or sixty years old, the boy's wife took her clothes off with another boy at a hotel. During one of their fights where they yelled and screamed at each other, she told her husband about this, and then drove away. She never came back, and a little while later she and the boy went to a courthouse and quit being married. The boy lived alone.

His daughter came back and stayed with him for a few weeks. She had a daughter of her own now, a beautiful baby, but she also lived alone. She stayed with her father there in the old house, and they sat on the couch and talked about their lives late into the night. As the days passed they began to cry often. Anna floated near them and whispered kind things in their ears, hoping that some deep part of them could hear.

 ~

One day, many years later, when he was very old and had been in the hospital a very long time, the boy died.

 ~

His funeral was held in the evening, on a day when gentle rain sprinkled through sunlight. There were nearly a hundred people there, dressed in black and all very sad. Anna watched from far back in the trees.

The boy's daughter was there in the front, in a black dress, and her daughter stood beside her, holding her mother's hand. Although she was still alive somewhere, the girl that the boy had married was not there.

The priest was talking, but Anna could not understand what he was saying. He sprinkled dirt onto the boy's casket. Anna found it difficult to stand. She drifted down into the earth and bobbed back up. The ground could not seem to support her. She found it difficult to hold on to time. She found it more difficult than it had ever been, and she feared where she would wake up if she let her eyes close.

As the men lowered the boy into the earth, his granddaughter looked up at Anna. The girl was probably about ten years old. She squeezed her mother's hand and pointed at Anna. Then they both looked at her, and both of them saw her. Anna wiped a tear from her eye, and waved.

The two girls slowly smiled, and waved back. They were both crying too.

The funeral ended, and men began shoveling dirt into the grave. The boy's casket slowly disappeared into the earth. Anna imagined herself drifting down through the soft, brown dirt, and into the casket. She imagined closing her eyes and pressing her face against the boy's neck, holding him tight and not looking, ignoring the fact of his withered, gray husk. She imagined this, but she didn't do it. She knew he was not there. She knew there was nothing down there but cold, damp earth.

She stayed until the grave was filled and the last mourner had left. A mild breeze rushed in across the grass, and she nearly lost her footing, but she stayed. When the sun began to set, she turned away to go, and saw the boy standing out among the cemetery trees. He was pale and transparent. His body tapered down to nothing, like a white silk flag. He stood with his back to the grave site, looking off into the sky.

Anna let the breeze carry her to him, fluttering like a dry leaf.

"Hi, Oliver," she said.

He turned around, and saw her. He smiled slowly. He didn't look any particular age. He was a boy and a man and a grandfather. He was like Anna, who was a young girl and older than America. Time was soft. Time didn't matter. This is how it was for a ghost.

The boy reached out a hand. Anna reached out and took it, and squeezed. She smiled. She was happy. She closed her eyes, and let the wind take her. She and the boy drifted off into the clouds like feathers. They fell asleep in the sky, and time flowed.

~ The End ~ 

Isaac Marion, 2007

Isaacinspace at Gmail.com

www.burningbuilding.com