The sun peeked over the horizon, bathing the world in soft light. Pinks and oranges bled across the sky, sending away the blues and purples of the night. The flowers bloomed and opened as the shadows lengthened and stretched across the tombstones; the radiant glow of the sun chased away the monsters of the night. 

I sat on a bench near the church, holding a bouquet of daisies in my blue translucent hand. I had felt cold the night before, when the monsters ignored me and howled at the moon or when they pawed at the giant spruce doors of the building. I still felt cold that morning, even as the sun climbed higher and higher in the sky.

Baby birds chirped in hunger, and the church bell rang seven times. Attempting to smooth my ripped jacket, I stood up. I retraced the steps I had taken every day from the moment I died, killed by those vile monsters. Daisies in hand, I made my way over to a headstone — it was my headstone. I placed the dull flowers on the grave and prayed. I prayed to whatever god might be out there to send anyone who remembers me to visit my grave, my dead body locked in a casket deep under the ground.

I didn’t want to be forgotten, and I didn’t want to move on to the next world. I had spent too much blood, sweat, and tears on the ones I loved to abandon them like this, even if they abandoned me. 

The other headstones had vibrant, gorgeous flowers and candles that would’ve smelled amazing if I could’ve smelled anything. The world had long since become a palette of faded hues. The vivid red ink that stained my fingertips had turned into a rusty brown, and my bright blue tie was now a faded navy.

I sat down on the damp grass and cradled my head in my hands. Silent, invisible tears rolled down my face and dripped onto the clovers, still wet with the morning dew. Moss covered my neglected grave, obscuring my name. The name I’d tucked away into the darkness of my thoughts during the sad purgatory that is my existence. 

Something blocked out the sun, and a shadow stretched over me. A young adult, wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat with a faded pink ribbon matching the rest of their outfit. I looked up from my grave, eyes sparkling with liquid. Their skin would have been the color of caramel, but looked like a slightly warmer shade of gray to me. 

“Why are you crying?” They asked, squatting down next to me, “Did you lose someone?” Their words were laced with sympathy and understanding, yet straight to the point. Good with people, yet tired of comforting them.

“How…” I started, rearranging sentences in my head, “how can you see me?” I dared a glance over to the human sitting with me. Their eyebrows were furrowed, and their  lips pursed. 

“What do you mean, ‘how can I see you?’” They blurted out, raising their free arm in confusion. Thin linen gloves trimmed with lace covered their hands. Bracelets fell down their arm with a clatter.

“People can’t usually see me.” I looked down, afraid to see the reaction of this person I had just met. The person who sat down with me in front of my grave when no one could even see me.

“So you’re a ghost?” They looked at me, studying me, taking in my torn jacket, the blood on my shirt, and the eerie translucency of my skin. Their eyes flicked to the headstone we were in front of. “Is that your grave?” I nodded my response, focusing on the daisies lying on top of the dirt. 

The soil covering my body, my skeleton. “I can see why you’re so sad now,” they said simply. “No one can see you, and by the looks of it, no one has bothered visiting your grave. If I were in your shoes, I would be bawling my eyes out too.”

“I’m glad you aren’t in my shoes,” I raised my eyebrows, and the corners of my mouth lifted infinitesimally. I looked down at my tattered loafers and continued, “They’re very much destroyed now.” The person in pink laughed a brief sound that was music to my ears. I had made them laugh. They had laughed at me — no, they had laughed at my joke. 

“If you don’t mind me asking, what did you do in your life?” They asked. I leaned back, resting my hands on the ground behind me, and thought about their question. 

“I think I was a poet.” That seemed to fit the visions flickering in my eyes. The candlelit desk and blood-red ink, the fountain pen and wax solidifying on the wood.

They laughed and looked at me out of the corner of their eye. “You think?”

I nodded, twirling a daisy between my fingers, “I hardly remember anything from my life other than my wife resenting me for not bringing in enough money for her and our daughter.”

“That seems awful.”

“It was.”

“What did you write poems of?”

More pictures flashed in my head. Childhood daydreams of ships, pirates, life on the open sea, and sailing about without a care in the world. “When I was younger, I wanted to be a pirate, because pirates didn’t have to do what others told them. So, I wrote about that feeling of being free.”

The human and I continued our conversation until the sun dipped under the other end of the horizon. The graveyard was bathed in golden orange light, and the shadows of the woods were stirring again.

“You should leave soon. I wouldn’t want my new friend to die the same way I did,” I grinned until I realized what I’d said. Did I really consider this stranger a friend?

But they just laughed and smiled, “I’ll get going. My friends should be coming soon anyway. Just switch out those dead flowers for new ones, okay? There are some over by the fence you can pick; your grave will look much more alive if you do.”

I froze, my incorporeal body getting colder than I thought possible. Dead flowers. Of course the flowers that I had been picking and arranging for so long would be lifeless. I could hear talking, laughing, coming closer. Why would you laugh in a graveyard? Why feel any emotion other than despair?

“Ghost man? Are you okay?” The human asked, worry etched on their face and ever-present in the way they scooted closer to me, attempting to grab my hand but failing as their gloved hand passed right through, “Did I say something wrong?”

My heartbeat would’ve sped up at the sight of my new friend trying to comfort me, but my ghost body was not allowing it to. More tears ran down my face, splattering on the human’s hand, water drenching the fine linen of their glove.

“Wait,” my voice trembled with desperation and sadness, now aware of what was happening to me, the graveyard I was going to leave, my new friend left with no memory of me. “What’s your name?”

“Mazie. What’s yours, ghost man?” Their voice cracked. They knew of what was to come; they knew soon I would be a breeze in the air, a tale thought up by a grave covered in dead flowers.

“Briston,” I smiled, a sad smile, a feeling collecting in my chest, a sharp pain. Not unlike the feeling of the monster’s talons in my chest all those years ago. “Thank you, Mazie.”

Mazie also smiled remorsefully. “Do you want a hug?”

Memories sped through my mind, children avoiding me, people averting their gazes when I passed them on the street. I had been different from them, and they were scared of what the Lord would imagine of someone like me. Someone who spent their days daydreaming about starting a new life instead of focusing on my current one. Memories that were mine yet also weren’t mine. A life that was completely different from the one I thought I had. Maybe existing forever in this dilapidated graveyard was a much better existence than what I had before I died.

“Yeah,” my voice cracked, “Yeah, I do.”

And so Mazie hugged me.

Warmth. I hadn’t felt it in eternity. Tears threatened to pool over as the world blurred and darkened. The church bell rang eight times. Mazie’s friends were nearing. The daisies on my grave were dead, dead, and decomposing, just like my body six feet below. I despise this cruel trick of fate, how the flowers I had been collecting were all lifeless and rotting, how the one time I started to experience warmth, I had to go. 

Mazie’s grip on me tightened, and I wondered why until I saw the light. The immaterial body that I had cursed for so long was breaking apart in front of me, splintering into fragments of pure light. I smiled at my human friend and thanked them over and over as they cried. Whether they were happy or sad or maybe a mix of both was anyone’s guess. 

The pain in my chest subsided and was replaced with peace. A peace that I had not felt for ages. This peace wasn’t present in my life even before I died. Even before my wife and my daughter left me. The colors of the sky were so bright, so vivid it made me delirious as the warm oranges bled into the cool navy and purples of the night. I could see the world clearly now. The pink of Mazie’s bow and the smooth caramel of their skin. The ugly, rotting daisies on my grave. My heart broke at the sight of them, the flowers I thought I was decorating my grave with. I saw my name on the gravestone now, Briston Hemstone 1847-1873. The words that had been obscured by plants now waving in the wind. Time slowed down as Mazie’s friends neared, and the darkness in my vision grew. I couldn’t hold on any longer. 

“Goodbye, Mazie,” I whispered as my ghostly body disappeared into nothingness and the world faded from underneath me, daisy petals traversing the air.