"Millennial Ghost Story" by Sheila Mulrooney

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She only sees him at night. This is the one classical part of her haunting. Darkness swirling around her bedroom’s solitary lamp, flickers of light. If he was going to return, he would do so at this time, in this place. When she first finds him in her bed only a week after the funeral, she’s not surprised. She’s triumphant that she can predict his actions this well, even after he’s dead. 

She also knows that if they had spoken on the day he died, this would not have happened. He is no coward; he would not willingly choose the liminality of ghosthood. But he loved her. He would not leave her so abruptly, as if the world had the final say in their relationship, not them. It seems beautiful to her—that the force of their love is enough—and she tells him this. 

“It isn’t love,” he says. “This is a haunting. The rules are different.” 

She giggles and teases him. Oh there were rules now, were there? How important he must feel, belonging to a secret club she could not join. Too bad he was dead, she laughs. Then he tackles her on the bed. 

“A dead man can’t do this, can he?” he growls. She shrieks with pleasure. 

Later he will look at her sadly and say, “We shouldn’t joke about that kind of stuff. I don’t know what I’m doing. One wrong word and it could all go away.”

***

Summer comes. Sometimes she feels like he does not want to see her but has to. Small things tip her off. He encourages her to miss their dates some nights, saying she should get out more. He refuses to tell her what he does during the day. She has the suspicion that he’s seeing someone else, waiting for her to move on so he can as well. When she says this, he groans. 

“You can’t be serious. You’re mad because I can’t tell you the secrets of the dead?” 

“Can’t or won’t?” she shoots back. 

 He smiles. “Both.” 

He only comes Tuesday, Wednesday, and Saturday evenings. She pretends to herself that he has an unusual job, like a travel nurse, to normalize seeing him on these select nights. She begins lighting scented candles and shopping for lingerie in preparation. It helps pass the time between visits. 

“You seem happier,” her mother says that Christmas. “It’s good, right on schedule. A year in, and things start looking different.” 

Had it really been a year? The horror of death feels so far behind her now. It seems her life has always been like this: constantly returning to a place where no one can see her, like a car on a Ferris Wheel that always stops at the very top. 

***

She only worried about sex the first time. But it was natural, as easy as breathing. The only difference was she came much faster and he never did. He orgasmed, but instead of something shooting from him, he flickered, like a candle. If he’s inside her when this happens, the pleasure is indescribable, layers of warmth seeping into her skin. She often thinks the sex was never so fulfilling when they were both alive. 

“Is that ironic?” she asks, snuggling into him. 

They’re sweaty and exhausted; they’ll fall asleep at the same moment. In the morning, he’ll be gone.  

“No.” He presses his lips to her hair. “It’s honest. That’s one good thing about being dead,” he muses. “There’s nothing left to lie about.”

***

But they did lie. She still does not know where he goes during the day, but she’s almost certain it’s on earth, in this city, just someplace she can’t see. He slips up sometimes, revealing he knows things, like the construction on Bay & Bloor was finished, or the homeless man outside their favorite Starbucks had a new dog. 

 “If you’re here, why don’t you stay with me?” she demanded. “Why does anything have to be different?”

Often he insisted he wasn’t there, he just knew these things, like the sixth sense but backwards. Only once did he forget to deny it. 

“Well what should I do?” he yelled. “Sit around all day waiting for you? I want more than that, I want my own life!” 

She yelled back, called him a selfish asshole who wasted her time by refusing to commit. The argument petered out after that, and he was gone the next morning. She spent the day wondering what it meant, for someone dead to have their own life. She imagined that his soul was somehow tethered to her own, and she was dragging it through the world until it became tattered and unrecognizable, like Peter Pan’s shadow but larger, more fleshy, and far beyond repair.  

***

A new sales division joined her office and a man called Adrian began visiting her desk in the afternoons. He was a good salesman, famous in their company for landing Microsoft as an account. He also played the harpsichord. 

“I studied music too,” she told him. “Musical theater. That was before I realized I needed money.” 

The next week he bought her tickets to Hamilton. A Friday night showing. She said yes. It had been about two years since the accident. 

***

Nothing changed and another year passed. Every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Saturday she saw him. He was warm and young, and they talked late into the night. Other nights she spent with Adrian, always at his apartment. He cooked Italian dinners for her, and they listened to music. He liked opera and she liked Barbara Streisand. They drank red wine and had sex in positions she hadn’t heard of but enjoyed. 

One night he told her he dreamed of leaving the city, moving to the suburbs. 

“I know it’s bourgeois,” he said. “But at least it would mean something. We could buy a house and have a kid, and then the house would be a home for somebody.” 

It took her a moment to realize he was talking about marriage. 

“Don’t you think we’re too young?” 

He shrugged. “I’m almost thirty-five and you’re twenty-eight. If not now, when?” 

At work the next morning she examined herself in the mirror for a long time. She didn’t think of herself as twenty-eight. She was twenty-five, just finished grad school and soaring around Toronto. The city they had chosen to start their adult lives, to make their home. Somewhere in her grief and her haunting she started to believe that she stopped aging with him. His ghosthood had become her own, so they would always be together, untouched by time.

“Do you think something like that is possible?” she asks him. “That I’m becoming frozen like you?” 

“Not to be all traditional, but I think you have to die to become a ghost.” 

“But are you really a ghost?” she presses. “Not to be all traditional, but ghosts usually can’t have sex.” 

“I’m definitely dead. What more proof do you want?” 

She does not respond. Instead she thinks of Adrian, his fancy risotto dinners and his silvery kitchen. Then he flickers. 

“Why do you do that?” she demands. 

“Dunno. I don’t control everything, it’s not my life anymore,” he says. “They take that away from you.” 

“Who’s they?” 

“I’m not sure. But they’re around.” 

He speaks steadily, his eyes studying her face. He knows, she thinks. He knows I was thinking of someone else and that’s why it happened. Briefly she wonders if this happens to him when she and Adrian are having sex.

“So I’m definitely getting older?” she asks after a moment. 

“You’re definitely getting older.” He reaches his hand and runs it through her hair. When he pulls back, a few gray strands are caught on his fingers. She stares at them, horrified. 

“Don’t be upset,” he says softly. “I see the way age is blossoming on you and I think it’s lovely.” He smiles and strokes her cheek. “That’s what we wanted, remember? To grow old together.”

He flickers as he says this. For a moment she’s afraid he’ll disappear. When he doesn’t, she’s stranded somewhere between disappointment and relief. 

***

Adrian is promoted, manager of sales for North America. He stops visiting her desk and begins wearing thin ties with polished shoes to work. He has his own office and never invites her inside for ‘the sake of professionality.’ People call him late into the evening.  

Three months later he buys a house. It’s a forty-five minute commute from the office in a nice suburb where there are parks and playgrounds every few blocks. The kitchen has new appliances and an island counter, and every room has high ceilings with tall windows. 

“It’s beautiful,” she says, and she means it. The empty rooms seem full of potential; they fill with her exuberance. She’s never desired money per se, but now that it was before her, so tangibly available, she feels incredibly sexy. Her heart beats faster in her chest. 

“It’s yours,” he responds. “I bought it for you—for us.” Then he kneels down and pulls out a golden ring. 

If he were here, they would laugh, she thinks. When he was alive, they were both too cool, too self-aware to respect romance. But then again, she realizes, when they were together they could afford to mock such things. They were twenty-five, desperately in love. She does not have that anymore.  

“Yes,” she says, and Adrian kisses her. 

***

“That’s a good looking ring.” 

He’s on her bed, even though the sun hasn’t set. She’s just home from work and is still wearing the panties from last night when she and Adrian fucked on the house’s empty floors. She’s caught and she knows it, so she joins him on the bed. Together they sit in silence. 

“It’s okay,” he says after a while. “I knew something like this would happen.” He pauses, then says in a strange voice, “I have a Tinder profile.” 

The sentence is so shocking, she laughs. “What? How?” 

He shrugs, examining his fingernails. “Dunno. One day I came to in a coffee shop with a phone in my hands. I unlocked it and the only app was Tinder. My first instinct was to visit you, I swear,” he adds. “But somehow I knew that I couldn’t, that I was supposed to scroll through the different profiles. I can’t really explain it.” 

“How many dates have you been on?”

“Dunno,” he says again. “Fifty? Maybe more? I only get the phone twice a week.” A grin flashes across his face. “I think they rotate it around the guys.” 

“The guys? There are more of you? And—you know them?”  

Even though she’s the one sleeping with someone else, she feels totally betrayed. So all this time he had a life, one sequestered from her, that he never talked about, never shared. Why did he keep coming to her at all, she thinks bitterly, and he flickers softly before her. 

“C’mon,” he says. “Don’t be like that,” and he strokes his fingers against her cheek. Her eyes fill with water. 

“But—if you were here—we could have been together—these years—you can be seen—you’re not really dead—” 

She stops, her breath caught in her throat. But he only shakes his head and says, “That wouldn’t have worked. I can’t explain, but I’m sure of it.” 

She looks at him. His almond eyes are wide with concern and kindness; his hair is greasy and sweat is opening his pores. If she lets herself, she can truly believe no time has passed, this night the same as those before the accident, when they were stupid horny and immune to catastrophe, the kind of people whom fate left untouched. He’s so warm before her. There’s no reason he shouldn’t be alive, other than the fact that he’s dead. 

He asks about Adrian and she tells him everything in a dull monotone. It all seems unimportant now, anticlimactic. The sun sets, disappearing into low grey clouds, and all she can think is how she wants to shower, needs to change her underwear, exhausted and sleepy. But she keeps talking, dutifully informing him of every detail, as if she is a witness to a crime. 

“Thank you,” he says when she’s done. “You know that’s the first time since my death you’ve told me about your life? Your real life, out in the world,” he says gesturing vaguely toward the darkened window. “It’s nice to hear about you. What you’ve been up to.” He smiles. “I still care about you.” 

Later that night, after she’s showered and they’ve made love, she’s falling asleep in his arms and he says, “That’s what I do on my Tinder dates. Try to get the other person talking. I feel most alive when that happens,” he whispers. “When they’re so enrapt in their own story, they forget I’m there.” 

She curls herself into him, so he encircles her body as if she’s a child. 

“I’m going to marry him you know,” she says into his chest. 

“I know,” after a pause. 

She falls asleep to the rhythm of his flickers. 

***

In the morning, he is gone. She knows he will not come to her again. Why this is she does not understand. What is the point of a ghost if it doesn’t stay with you? What is death, if not a final separation? Why should it be impossible for him to visit her, hold her, see her through her days? Is it true, as she believed up until now, that she wants nothing on this earth as much as him? 

All of these things she thinks while lying on her bed, letting the first streams of sunlight glare through her window. Beside her she can feel the indentation his body made mere hours ago. When she looks it is not there. She laughs. 

***

She and Adrian are married on a warm October morning. The reception takes place under huge white tents besides a lake. Guests are served expensive desserts filled with French jams and every few feet silver space heaters stand, around which people drink and dance. She and Adrian escape halfway through and have sex in the dark by the water. When they return no one has missed them, and for some reason, this fills her with inexplicable joy. 

Only once more does she see him, three years after the wedding. It’s a bright afternoon at their favorite Starbucks; she’s just come from a gynecologist appointment. She’s pregnant, four months and just beginning to show. Today was an ultrasound. She’s thinking of her baby’s little fingers, his alien head, as she pours cream into her coffee. Then she turns to leave.

He’s looking right at her, wearing a white button-down and a backwards baseball cap. Across from him sits a small woman covered with freckles. She’s vivacious, animated, her hands moving quickly, her voice pleasantly high in the coffee shop’s chatter. It strikes her how young they seem, almost childlike, and instinctively her hand flutters down to the bulge in her belly. His eyes are wide and kind. He glances down at her baby and smiles. Then he flickers. 

No one else notices. His date keeps talking and eventually he looks back at her, laughing at something she’s said. He does not meet her eyes again, and after some time, she steps out of the shop into the sunlight. Absently she fiddles in her purse and throws a five-dollar bill in the homeless man’s basket, then bends down to pet his dog. Everything around her is teeming with life. 

Featured Art: “Twilight Burst” by J7MC925

Sheila Mulrooney is the lead editor of Autofocus, an online publisher of autobiographical writing. Her work has been nominated for Best Small Fictions, and has appeared in numerous literary journals including Okay Donkey, White Wall Review, Rejection Letters, and elsewhere. You can find her on twitter at @SJosephine10.