The velvet black sky had collapsed, crumbling like gold leaf, raining down like ash, and dissolving like candy floss.
In its place was an overcast sky. A featureless, unbroken sheet of mist, diffusing a cold, sterile light.
The girl sat cross-legged in a thick, liver-colored mud of congealed blood. She watched absentmindedly as little somethings scuttled about on its surface. She couldn’t quite call them flies. They moved too erratically to identify, and only seemed to sit still in her peripheral vision. A glance, and they would take to the air, leaving behind tiny clusters of carefully deposited eggs.
At least, she assumed they were eggs. To her, they resembled miniature tapioca pearls, only a millimeter or two across.
Suddenly, the girl piped up. She asked, rather casually, what it would take to convince the spirit to let her go.
The girl looked skyward. Roughly fifteen feet up, directly above her, the spirit hung motionlessly in the air. Balled up. Back to the ground. Hiding ineffectually behind the thick leather of her sheepskin jacket. She spoke drearily into her folded arms.
There’s nothing you can do to convince me, rabbit.
Her voice was coarse, dry, and disillusioned. A prickly static in the girl’s ears.
The girl thought on this a moment, before abruptly proposing a bargain of some sort... a trade, perhaps?
You have nothing to trade, rabbit.
Not on her, the girl admitted. But if the spirit were to let her go, she could retrieve something. Anything the spirit wanted.
The spirit sighed softly. Too softly for the girl to hear. The girl waited patiently for an answer, but she did not receive one.
How about a favor then? A task to carry out? Surely there was something the girl could do in exchange for her freedom?
The spirit balled up tighter, burying her face in her knees. She hung silently in the air, save for the gentle creaking of leather against leather.
Again, the girl prodded. What was it going to take? She was willing to make a deal with the devil.
The spirit uncurled, slowly. She swiveled around. Body first, with her head lagging behind. She squinted at the girl.
I’m not a devil, rabbit!
The spirit’s voice was saturated with incredulity.
I’m not a demon!
I’m not a fiend, or a monster!
I’m not trying to hurt you!
I’m not trying to make you unhappy!
The spirit lurched forward with each statement. She reached out toward the girl with one hand, resisting the urge to touch. Her fingertips hovered mere inches from the girl’s cheek. Her hand trembled with frustration, then snapped into a fist.
Wh...
The spirit inhaled softly, her jaw trembling. She tilted her head in genuine, wounded confusion.
Why do you hate me so much?
Now, this was a question that caught the girl off guard. This spirit really had no idea. She was naive. Completely naive. Naive to the way people work. How they think. How they feel. Naive to pain. To empathy. To human suffering.
This spirit had never conceived of a point of view that ran contrary to her own. Never had any inkling of the existence of an outside perspective. And now that she was face to face with a girl who embodied this concept fully, her worldview and confidence were beginning to corrode.
The girl simply stared at the spirit. In disbelief. In pity. All she could think to do was ask her: What did you expect?
The spirit’s breathing began to hasten, and shallow. Huffing quietly through her open mouth like a dying animal. She averted her eyes. Not in shame, but simply to allow herself time to think. She raked her fingers awkwardly through her drifting, ethereal white hair. Swallowed an uncomfortable lump in her throat.
The spirit began wagging her index finger, as if she were trying to summon a thought from deep in the folds of her brain.
You and I, w-we were supposed to...
She retracted her finger. Bit her lip betwixt her bladed jaws.
We were going to be happy together. I th-th-thought...
The girl squinted narrowly, watching in silence as the spirit, for the first time, struggled to find words.
I-I thought you would fall in love?
This was not worded as a question, but it was certainly spoken as one. It was less of a question for the girl, and more of a question the spirit was asking herself.
The girl answered it nonetheless, with a question of her own. A question that caused the spirit’s diaphanous muscles to tense, and her heart to visibly palpitate: With you?
The spirit appeared reluctant to look the girl in the eye, but the penetrating silence slowly forced her hand.
The girl shook her head in disbelief, uttering a question so blunt and direct as to fracture bone: How could you possibly have thought that?
The spirit remained quiet for a moment. Her thoughts seemed distant, and her psyche fragile. She chattered her mandible rapidly, a strange tic that caught the girl off guard.
She was thinking.
Eventually, the spirit drifted a ways away. She rolled up the sleeve of her sheepskin aviator jacket, reached deep into the congealed blood, retrieved the girl’s sketchbook from the muck with an unpleasant suction noise... and rose silently into the air.
The girl returned to her pondering. The little tapioca pearls peppered the ground now, like tiny hailstones after a brief and gentle storm.
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A closer look revealed something moving inside. Nearly imperceptible threads, wriggling about wildly like little stop-motion dancers. The girl watched them intently, for there was little else to do.
Over time, she began to grow almost attached to them. She watched as they turned from a pale, translucent white to a deep, oxygenated crimson, and grew from the width of a silken thread to that of a horsehair plucked from a violin bow. She watched as they grew increasingly snug in their little gelatinous wombs, and wondered what they must be thinking. Or if they thought of anything at all.
One of the pearls burst, splitting along an invisible seam like a wine grape squeezed between two fingertips. Its occupant wriggled free of the deflated pearl, and out onto the vast expanse of gelatinized blood.
Why do you draw these, rabbit?
The girl was yanked suddenly from her thoughts. She apologized. She hadn’t quite heard what the spirit had said.
Why do you draw these?
Again, she asked the spirit to clarify.
The spirit turned a page of the girl’s sketchbook. The pages were delicate, and saturated with blood. Yet the graphite drawings were still clearly visible, and the spirit’s fingers were nimble enough not to tear them.
These... romances.
The spirit’s voice was wistful. She caressed the cheek of one of the figures on the page. It was a girl, not entirely unlike the one who drew it, in a passionate embrace with a spirit, not entirely unlike herself.
The girl briefly pondered why she drew such things, but she quickly brushed those thoughts aside, convincing herself that she didn’t know. In the silence that ensued, she became vaguely aware that she may have whispered her thoughts aloud.
She shook her head dismissively, assuring the spirit that they were just drawings. That they didn’t mean anything.
The spirit tore the page from the sketchbook, wadding it up like a wet paper towel. She squeezed the excess blood from the page, and tossed it into the girl’s lap.
Look again.
The girl uncrumpled the drawing. Stared at it. Reminisced on the feelings that had spurred its creation. If she were being honest with herself, this drawing had come from a place of longing. Of loneliness.
There are a hundred drawings just like that one in this book of yours, rabbit.
The spirit snapped the book shut with a wet slap, brandishing it in one hand as if to draw attention to it.
You spent time making these.
The girl asked the spirit what her point was, in a tone both sheepish and standoffish. She knew as soon as the words left her mouth that she had failed to mask her embarrassment.
My point is, rabbit, that you’re a liar.
The spirit tossed the book in the girl’s direction, and it landed in the sludge with a sickening splat.
You say these drawings mean nothing. It’s not true.
The girl gathered her sketchbook and held it protectively to her chest. She stared at the spirit, brow furrowed.
They must mean something!
The spirit’s tone was accusatory, that was undeniable. But it betrayed a desperation. The staredown that ensued made it clear that behind the posturing, and the arguing... the spirit was pleading with the girl.
But the girl refused to back down. Her eyes were intense, and their contact, unbroken. How long this lasted, neither could say. But it felt an eternity. The spirit began to squirm.
She shuddered violently, as if she were struggling to tamp down an outburst that was welling up inside her. But instead, she swiveled around, and went silent.
The girl rested her palms on the ground behind her. It was more worms than blood at this point. The tapioca pearl eggs had long since hatched, and their occupants grown, consuming and replacing their curdled blood substrate. All that was left were tangled clots the color of red wine, undulating gently, and contracting suddenly when disturbed.
The girl wondered where the time had gone, and why the sensation of sitting cross-legged in writhing worms didn’t seem to bother her as much as she thought it should.
She closed her eyes, and exhaled.
Do you know why I chose you, rabbit?
The girl inhaled sharply. The spirit’s voice had come from directly over her shoulder, and it startled her.
I’ve watched people wander that graveyard for decades. They’d come with expensive cameras. They’d come with rolls of paper, and colored wax. Occasionally, they’d come with flowers, if they were very old. But not you, rabbit... You came because you were lonely.
The girl began to fidget uncomfortably. She assured the spirit that was not the case. Why would she go to a place so empty if she were lonely?
You’re lying again, rabbit. I know what loneliness looks like.
The girl sighed softly, her lip quivering.
You sat on the same bench, time and time again. Drawing ghosts, and spirits. Each day I’d watch you draw another. Another daydream. Another intimate fantasy.
The girl’s cheeks flushed red with blood, and she turned her face away from the spirit’s voice. The spirit sidled closer. Close enough that the girl could feel her cold breath in the crook of her neck.
When you came to that graveyard each day, you were hoping, secretly, that a phantom would sweep you off your feet... weren’t you, rabbit?
The girl cringed in embarrassment. As silly as it sounded when spoken aloud, the spirit was correct. She had hoped for that. Precisely that, in fact. Of course, she never believed that such a thing might actually happen.
There was a long, lingering silence. The spirit swiveled around, turning her back to the girl’s.
Anyway, rabbit. That’s why I chose you.
The girl muttered under her breath. You can’t just choose someone. They have to choose you back. A nearly imperceptible grimace flitted across the spirit’s face.
So I’ve learned.
And with that, the spirit kicked off the ground, ascending quietly back into the sky.
Had she? The girl wondered this question aloud. The spirit drifted to a halt, and hung in the air. She swiveled around, and gave the girl a quizzical look.
The girl repeated herself: Had the spirit learned?
Are you deaf, rabbit? I’m not going to say it again.
The girl insisted that if that were true, and the spirit really had learned from her mistakes, then she should just let her go! Find someone else, who actually wants all of this!
The spirit began to sink lazily back to the ground, headfirst, like a salted baitfish through glycerin.
In the distance, there was a deep groaning sound, followed by a cracking, and a splintering. The pale, branchless, needle-like trees on the horizon had begun creaking, and toppling, their trunks the last thing to be consumed by the matted expanse of worms.
The spirit snapped her fingers, so as to attract the girl’s attention without touching.
Their eyes met, and with that, the two were face to face. The girl, right side up, and the spirit, hanging upside down, as if from an invisible thread.
The spirit’s expression was almost tender.
I can’t let you go, rabbit. You’ve been without oxygen for several hours. You don’t have an intact enough brain to go back.
The girl was struggling to understand. The spirit could see it in her eyes. She put it more bluntly.
You’ve begun to decay, rabbit.
The gravity of the situation finally began to dawn on the girl. What had once been an idle thought was now cementing itself in her mind as an irrevocable truth. This really was death.
She began to breathe heavily. Her larynx began to ache. No. The girl repeated herself. No no no no no. This couldn’t be happening. She stumbled to her feet. Began pacing.
Listen, the girl said. Listen. She told the spirit she didn’t need a body. Just let her go. She could live with being a ghost.
The spirit shook her head dismissively.
There’s no such thing as ghosts, rabbit... once a soul dissipates, it’s gone.
The girl couldn’t believe what she was hearing. What was the spirit, if not a ghost?
I’m just me, rabbit.
No. No no no no. She pleaded with the spirit. There must be something she could do to fix this! There had to be some way to undo what she had done! Please!
Listen, rabbit. The hocus-pocus it would take to unrot that brain of yours would literally kill me.
In the distance, another tree began to creak, and fall.
Your program is running on my hardware, rabbit.
The spirit tapped her temple knowingly.
So get used to it.