[May 4th, 2017]

The girl liked to watch scary movies. Slasher-flicks, gore, movies with vampires, movies with zombies, movies with demonic possession, movies with aliens, giant spiders, werewolves, or homicidal leprechauns — as long as it was a scary movie, no matter its quality or premise, the girl loved it. She loved the tropes, the costumes, the bad CGI, the hammy acting and the gratuitous sex-scenes that abrasively interrupted the pace of the narrative. She watched scary movies in her bed, on her phone in the wheelchair, sometimes when she was strong enough, with her family on the living room couch. No matter the circumstance, her eyes would be glued to the screen with a wolfish smile upon her lips.

“Hey, why do you like these corny things so much?”

The girl's younger brother asked her this question one evening many years ago, as he hit play on the third consecutive B-movie starring evil witches the pair were watching this evening. “I mean, you’re smart. You know they are mostly cheesy and bad. So what’s up? Because you watch so many of these sorts of movies.”

“I don’t know,” the girl said. “I’m just happy when I watch them.”

The girl’s brother shrugged, leaned back on the couch, ready to experience The Bald Witches of Blood Alley: Resurrection in glorious HD.

The girl loved all scary movies, but there was one genre that she adored the most: movies with ghosts. Ghosts — mysterious, incorporeal, and graceful. They could go through walls, and whisper vague and threatening warnings into the ears of the living. They could move objects with their mind, and change their own appearance to suit how they felt on the inside. They were like superheroes, and the girl idolized them. She owned a night lamp with a design of a cartoon spirit. Once she intended to go as a ghost for Halloween, at least until she collapsed on the doorstep, scattering plastic prayer beads across the asphalt. Most importantly to the girl, ghosts could live forever, at least until some exorcist came along with a pocket full of salt and a talisman engraved with runes.

The girl would not live forever. The girl was dying. She had been dying her whole life. And now, she began to die very fast.

First, when she was very young, there was a murmur in the heart that bothered the doctors and a spreading coldness at the ends of her toes. This began a slow and fatal process, of her body slowly freezing and stopping its natural processes. Over the years, the girl began to lose control of her legs. Next, her arms began to lose strength. The muscles around her neck tightened, and then she could no longer go to the bathroom on her own. Only her bright blue eyes remained active and her own, the pupil and iris free to move atop the circular tissue.

With these eyes, she liked to watch scary movies.

They made her heart race, and her blood alight with passion. When a ghoul jumped out from behind a gravestone, or a masked killer appeared behind the drunk college student, there was a certain rush through her body that she couldn’t quite describe. When she became a motionless thing lying upon a bed, the girl imagined this rush was what it would feel like to move about on her own again. Thus, watching scary movies was like a prayer to God for the girl. She did not pray for life. She only prayed to at least experience a flawed simulacrum, and she did so every night.

Near the end, the girl’s father cried. Crying was practically all he did. He was an important man, and a wealthy one. But the girl never thought of him that way. Her last memory of him was him standing in the frame of a doorway, wet tears of his face, with an expression as if there was no longer anything tender or beautiful in the wide world.

Near the end, the girl’s mother got angry. She yelled at doctors. She yelled at the girl’s father and her brother. She yelled at herself, sometimes, in the mirror. She threw things, and they shattered windows or broke against walls. The girl’s last memory of her was her face, red like a pomegranate, but not because she was angry. Like her husband, she had been crying.

Near the end, the girl’s brother peeled apples. He sat by her bed, peeling the fruit carefully with a pocket-knife. Sometimes he offered a slice to the girl, or ate it himself — but often the apple slices would end up in the trash or in the refrigerator. He didn’t seem to know what else to do. Occasionally, he held her hand. That was her last memory of him — the feeling of his warm palm on her, squeezing gently.

Near the end, the girl wrote this in her diary: “I didn’t like the idea of heaven, since my family wouldn’t be there. But I was watching a movie the other day and it hit me, the obvious solution! If I was a ghost, then I could be with my family, even after I was dead. Then, when the time is right, we can go to heaven at the same time, all together. …I don’t know, maybe that’s overly optimistic. Maybe I won’t get to heaven in the first place. If I think about it, I don’t think I’ve done anything truly good for anyone else. All I’ve done is stayed alive — and I didn’t even manage to do that for very long. I guess I’m pretty pathetic.”

The girl died in the first days of May. Her body sank below the dark earth, but her soul stayed still. It filled with darkness, and then filled with light. Sometimes, the girl thought she heard a voice saying her name softly, as if in comfort. Once, when she opened her eyes, she saw that she appeared to be falling down a thin rivulet of glowing air, and every atom was sparkling.

She fell for days, years, eternities.

Oh God, she thought as she fell, oh my dear, dear God. All of my life I have done naught but inflict pain to myself and grief to those who loved me. Let me now become less than nothing, if I am destined to never become anything else, and scatter what remains outward into the universe. Make from the absence a joy that perseveres.

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The next time the girl opened her eyes, she was floating in the middle of a room. It was a golden autumn day with a steady breeze. Dust lazily floated in the vibrant sunbeam that entered through the window. There was no more life and more death.

It was not heaven, for heaven was surely an empty movie theater.

Oh, the girl thought.

…I’ve seen this premise in a film before.

[September 5, 2042]

“I can’t believe I agreed to this. I’m supposed to be going to sleep around now.”

“Put the disk in! Put it in there! You never press the button!”

“Okay, okay, relax, this thing is like 35 years old, okay?”

Cal finally navigated the disk into the DVD player, and the movie’s title and menu popped up on the old television. He hit PLAY clumsily with the remote he had found. It had taken him a good half-hour to find the DVDs in the closet under the stairs and to figure out how to install the DVD player properly, a task not made easier by Mel yelling at him over his shoulder, despite not knowing how to do it properly herself.

Now that the movie was playing however, Mel was quiet. She floated above a cushion of Otter Manor’s living room couch, as if she was about to sit down. In fact, the lower part of her body actually went into the couch and disappeared.

“Killer Clowns In Miami 4,” Cal read the title skeptically from the DVD case, which Mel had personally selected. He sat down next to the ghost girl and glanced at her, bemused despite himself at her childish excitement. “Do I not need to watch the previous three movies to understand this one?”

“Huh? Shhh, no of course not! I’ll give you a run-down of the premise.”

“I mean, I think I figured it out from the title.”

Ellie, who had come home early that day, popped her head into the room. Her hair was wet from the shower. “Yo, Cal. Watcha doing?”

“Watching a scary movie. You interested?”

Ellie grinned. “Dude, I haven’t watched a movie in forever. I’m game.” She plopped down next to Cal, on the opposite side to where Mel hovered. Her eyes focused on the DVD player and she laughed. “What?! Ha! Where did you find that thing? It’s like three thousand years old.”

“In the closet under the stairs,” Cal fibbed, “it was on top of a bunch of old DVDs. That’s where I got this movie.”

“Hey, Ram!” Elli called into the hallway, swinging her body over the back of the couch to face away from the television. “You’re there, right?”

“...Y-yes…” came a terrified voice.

“Do you want to watch…” Elli turned her head, and read the title card that had now appeared on the screen after the opening credits. “Do you want to watch Killer Clowns in Miami 4?”

“Okay…” said the voice, sounding like it was only agreeing in order to avoid the social confrontation that would come from saying no. “But… I’ll watch it here. From the hallway.”

Ram’s enormous curly hair appeared around the wooden corner of the room. She seemed intent on watching the movie from a safe distance.

“Do I not need to watch the other movies in the Killer Clown franchise?” asked Ellie.

“Eh,” said Cal, “I think you’ll figure out the basics pretty quick.”

The movie was terrible. Cal had only seen a handful of movies in his whole life, but even he could tell the objectively horrible quality of the film. The actors were stilted. The effects lame. It was more boring than scary. The killer clowns didn’t even show up until twenty-five minutes into the movie, and once they did, they mostly just honked their noses and stabbed scantily-clad women.

Yet, as the film progressed, and Ellie fell asleep next to him, Cal found himself watching the film less and the ghost girl next to him more. Mel seemed to be expanding and solidifying as the film progressed, gaining shape, texture, color — as if if he reached out, he could touch her thin arm.

Mel’s blue eyes were wide, reflecting the chroma of the television, which was the only light in the room after Cal remembered to turn off the lights in the living room and hallway. Mel’s short black hair was swallowed by the darkness of the room, which only served to illuminate her pale face. Her mouth was open slightly. The movie was terrible, but she looked happy. The only time that expression changed was at a particularly tense part of the movie (the main character was hiding from a killer clown in a laundromat), when she made a motion as if she tried to grip Cal’s sleeve, and then seemed to remember it was a pointless motion.

The movie, which Cal thought had dragged horrendously for the first forty-five minutes, was suddenly over. He wasn’t sure where the time disappeared to.

As the credits played, Mel continued watching the film, and so Cal didn’t move to switch it off or turn on the lights. Then, once the last lines of names vanished from the screen, she looked over at Cal, and smiled.

“Next, we can watch the rest of the “Killer Clown” movies,” she said. “We’ll go in reverse chronological order, the way the creators intended.”

Cal face dropped. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

“Nope!” Mel rested her cheek on her hand, tilting her head to the side as she looked at Cal. “And then, we need to do a ghost movie! You told me you’ve never seen a horror movie starring a ghost! That’s insane!”

“These days, my entire life feels like a horror movie starring a ghost.”

Mel threw back her head and laughed, the force of which shook her shoulders. It was sweet and infectious, and even Cal couldn’t help smiling a little bit.

“Oh…” She said, catching her breath. She adjusted her dress.

Then Mel looked at the screen again, which had looped over to the title menu again. “This is nothing,” she said in a wistful voice, “but it’s still nice, isn’t it?”

Cal looked at the screen, too. “Yeah,” he said at last, “you’re right, Mel. It’s nice. I think I could grow to like scary movies. Maybe.”

She laughed again, and her eyes sparkled like blue fireworks. “That’s good. After you realize that, everything else comes so much easier.”