SPIRITS

In the attic of his childhood home, breathing in the dust and mildew, Russel Garfield would read his father’s old science fiction novels. He was a shy, awkward child, wearing glasses since the age of ten, who never felt like he knew what he was supposed to say to people. As a result, he often remained silent, and his reticence won him few friends. Heinlein, Asimov, and Clarke were his closest companions, and as a teenager, he drafted a novel of his own, but never showed it to anyone he knew.

Between his sophomore and junior years of high school, Russel spent the entire summer vacation holed up in his room, working on his story. The novel was a messy mash-up of all the tropes and ideas Russel had absorbed from his father’s books. The protagonist, Rusty, lived an ordinary life until he stumbled upon a device that allowed him to open portals to alternate realities. At first, Rusty used his powers just for fun, exploring alien worlds where dinosaurs roamed, and the technology surpassed anything in his own mundane existence. Naturally, a threat emerged, a dimension hopping villain bent on conquering the multiverse. Only Rusty, of course, had the power to stop him.

Russel spent long hours hammering out the nuances of his fictional multiverse, drawing intricate maps detailing the alternate realities and populating them with a myriad of strange creatures and societies suspiciously reminiscent of the Star Wars franchise. Writing was Russel's passion, a respite from the anxiety that often left him tongue-tied in social situations. Developing complex characters, thinking about what made them who they were, gave him his first insights into the classmates and adults in his life that he had always found baffling to be around.

When he was a junior in high school, Russel started posting his fiction online. It was not well received. The discouragement was so severe that he gave up writing, and refocused his efforts toward a career in engineering, a decision that his parents greeted with relief.

A natural aptitude for science and physics led him to his new passion. As he delved deeply into his studies, he found comfort in the objective truths that governed these fields. Science wasn’t about opinions or liking or disliking something. And no one told him that his papers were bland and unoriginal. The work was wrong or right, and if it was wrong, he could learn how to do it right, because a clear standard was in place. Throughout college, he excelled academically, and as he transitioned into the professional world of aerospace engineering, he found satisfaction in the ability to solve complex problems and contribute to the creation of machines that reminded him of the science fiction novels he had loved as a child.

Russel's first engineering job was at a satellite technology company. He thrilled at seeing his designs transform from sketches on graph paper to real machined parts and electronic components. He was more diligent than brilliant, and his hard work earned him a management position. It wasn’t as engaging as design, and while deadlines and budgets were discussed, Russel's mind often drifted to memories of his own imaginary worlds. He kept those thoughts to himself.

Though Russel's path had diverged far from his youthful dreams of literary acclaim, he still cherished those stories, and remained an avid reader and fan of the genre, regularly attending conventions around the country where he could meet other people who shared his passion. He was nearly thirty when he met Emily at a Dragoncon.

She was a barista moonlighting as an author of supernatural romance novels. They weren’t his favorite stories, but they were perfect for helping his mind defuse after a taxing day of corralling prickly engineers. He had read her books, and though he hadn’t brought them with him, he bought new copies for her to sign. They spoke about one of her characters, an engineer, and Russel struggled with his desire to make a more personal connection, but his old shyness won out. It wasn’t until the next year that they met again, and he had her sign a new book, that he asked her to lunch.

They discussed their favorite novels, movies, and television shows. Russel could hardly believe how much they had in common, or that he was carrying on a lengthy and successful conversation with a woman he found attractive without saying something off-putting or trailing into an uncomfortable silence. They remained in contact after the convention, gradually growing closer over the course of the following months, and their friendship developed into a long-distance relationship. Russel’s work was demanding, and they only met in person again a handful of times before he joined her at her booth for the next Dragoncon. It was as much a surprise to him as to her when Russel asked Emily to marry him.

Emily quit her day job and moved across the country to be with Russel. After a few years together, they had their first child, who they named Ethan. A few years after that, they had a daughter, Violet. Emily continued to write, and Russel’s career remained on an upward trajectory. Their life together was unremarkable in many ways, with its own share of stress and anxiety, but they remained happy and close, and raised their children to share in their love of imagination and the wonders of the natural world.

Emily would read books aloud before their son and daughter went to bed, an exercise Russel enjoyed as much as the children. Her own novels never became runaway bestsellers, but she attained modest success, and a devoted following. They would often plot stories together. It was the closest Russel ever came to reigniting his former hobby, and they would laugh over his wilder ideas, which would have been better suited to an episode of Rick and Morty than the kind of books she was writing.

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When their children got older, the Garfields began a tradition of attending DragonCon as a family. Ethan and Violet helped them man her booth, often in costume, and their parents introduced them to the many friends they had made there in the past.

The tradition ended in a crash. A truck driver, struggling to remain awake after several sleepless days at the wheel, dozed off and drifted into their lane. Russel was the only survivor.

After recovering from his injuries, he returned to an empty home. He could still hear Ethan and Violet’s voices in their rooms, and the sound of his wife’s fingers on the keyboard. Sometimes, he would follow those sounds, only to stare in confusion at an unoccupied desk, or a bed that had been left unmade months before, and never returned to.

Russel’s position allowed for an extended leave for his bereavement, but after he returned to work, he found himself unable to focus on the project backlogs. The numbers and names, the intricate designs, held no meaning for him. He struggled to maintain focus, to understand the problems that had once been second nature to him, and ultimately tendered his resignation. His personal and professional ties atrophied, and the visits from relatives became less frequent.

The hoarding began as a simple refusal to change anything from how they had left it, or to throw any of it away. He already had all of Emily’s books, of course, often multiple copies, and he bought more. His rare outings were to bookstores, where he would collect the handful of her works that had made it into mass market production. Messages accumulated on his phone, and eventually, he stopped replying to them.

Ethan had played a card game, Magic: The Gathering, and Russel had enjoyed it as well. It had an intricate system of rules, developed over decades, which had always appealed to his analytical side. He did not play it anymore, but he began picking up more of the cards and storing them in his son’s room as if they were gifts that would one day be opened.

For his daughter, he would buy plushies. Her room was already decorated with them, leftovers from when she had been a little girl, and every time he received a new one, it gave him a small sense of fulfillment to add to the collection. His wife’s family tried to keep in contact, sharing his grief, but the connection he had once had with them felt frayed. Somehow, the objects that he associated with Emily, Ethan, and Violet were more real, more substantive, than the other people who had cared for them.

People could change, they could move on. Objects did not. The mementos, like photographs, represented a piece of his family that was frozen in time and therefore could not be lost.

Russel grew a beard, gained weight, and stopped showering. The house was paid for, and his company had allowed him to keep his severance package. A few of Emily’s books were still selling, though that dwindled away soon after she stopped producing them. Eventually, the hoard that had once consisted of only those treasures that connected him to his family began to be diluted by other things. As he grew older, it became difficult for him to let go of anything, even trash. Slowly, like the tide encroaching upon a sinking world, every room and hall of the home he had once shared with his wife and children filled with garbage. Magazines, paper plates and empty cans; cardboard shipping boxes, packing materials, soiled clothing—all of it. Nothing left the house.

Then there were rats.

His health declined, and his wife’s remaining family attempted an intervention, but he would not be moved. One day he discovered that he could no longer ascend the stairs. He had blocked them off completely. Gradually, the livable space in the house dwindled to a few narrow corridors among the mounds. It was at that point that he made a change, though a small one. His most precious treasures, those objects that he associated most strongly with his family, he brought into the solarium. It was his wife’s office, a room with a ceiling constructed entirely of glass. Over several days, he excavated a small clear space for an end table where he could place his treasures on display beneath the sun.

Emily’s last manuscript, unfinished, and handwritten. Ethan’s orange knit cap, which he had worn nearly constantly through grade school. Violet’s journal, which Russel had never been able to bring himself to open. He placed them there, and afterward, his days took on a steady rhythm, the complete circuit of what remained of his life. From his couch in the living room there was a thin path to the half-bath, which had also become his kitchen after the rats took the real one over. A second path led to the solarium, a journey he made several times a day, like a Shinto monk maintaining a shrine.

In his late sixties, and in ill health, he was not particularly active. He had a phone and a tablet he kept charged with the only accessible plug, using them to read stories online about being reborn in another world.

One day, a rat startled him. He tripped and fell into a pile of newspapers and magazines that he had stacked nearly to the ceiling. It toppled on top of him, and one collapse triggered another. He could not reach his phone, and no one was coming for him. He was within sight of the end table, of his treasures, and his hip was broken. Three times he saw the sun rise and set over the shrine, too weak to free himself, and then he saw no more.

********

There is magic in every world, even in worlds like this one. The spirits of Russel’s family had long passed on, going wherever spirits went when they were no longer bound to flesh, but other spirits remained. There is power in attention, in care, and in meaning. Across the earth, spirits are born and die each day, only a fraction persisting long enough to notice what they are.

Russel had become a priest, though he had not known what he was doing when he did it. He had worshiped objects, and new spirits had been born, or otherwise, awakened from dormancy. They had grown as he cared for them, nourished by his devotion, and come to love him in their way. When they saw him die, those spirits cried out. With silent voices, they petitioned, begged, and argued on behalf of their Negi, their solitary clergyman, drawing upon their ephemeral essences until they too were lost to the nothing from which they had come.

But something heard them. Something answered, and in another world, a dragon was born, the first of its kind.