Blackout
I walked into the theatre halfway through the performance. The ushers were all on their phones, and no one stopped me.
All the way down the aisle, in the dark, I dragged a heavy-duty black garbage bag filled with things he had left behind in my apartment. Sacks of flour and white rice he had purchased at Albertsons. Sweaters he didn’t wear. A half-empty tube of toothpaste. Things like that.
There was a claw hammer somewhere in the bottom of the bag, and a silver tea kettle, and they clanked against each other with every step.
I was at the bottom of the stage when he finally turned. The woman standing opposite him couldn’t help letting her eyes flick down to me, but she stayed in character, her hand on her hip, the words from the script still flowing, a cascade of them surging past me and under the doors into the empty hallway until they were gone.
He called my name. Then said something else.
“I can’t hear you,” I said.
I’d been dead for several days, and the sounds around me were increasingly muffled. I let go of the bag and held my arms out toward him.
“Boo,” I said, and I meant the whole thing as a joke, but nobody laughed.
Before I’d left the apartment, I’d put on a long white nightgown for maximum effect. My feet were bare.
We hadn’t seen each other in a couple of years, and it seemed that he no longer remembered what made me tick.
He looked helplessly at the woman on stage with him, who was a fleshy sort of person, bursting at the seams, thick and beautiful and alive, and unbearably curvy in a tight mid-length skirt and low-cut blouse with a pair of sexy black D’Orsay pumps. I almost swooned when she turned at last toward me.
“Get out of here,” she said, in a scolding tone, as if to a pet.
This was something I couldn’t get used to, the lack of regard for the person I had been for decades. It was as if I had never existed in that form.
After a second, with what I hoped was regret, he shrugged at me. They turned to face each other and began the scene where they had left off, and I didn’t need to hear every word to understand what that meant.
I grasped the bag and turned back toward the exit doors, followed by the sound of metal striking metal as I walked up the aisle. No one made eye contact with me except for a young woman in the last row, sitting alone, who shot me a sympathetic glance and then buried her face in her program.
Whiteout
I almost tripped over the dog on the way into my parents’ house. It was dark in the kitchen, even with a light on over the stove, and as I shucked off my boots and tiptoed in I could see my reflection in the window over the sink. The other side of the pane was white with snow, the flakes swirling so fast that it wasn’t possible to see the familiar streetlight outside, the deep bow of its swan neck obscured completely, along with the amber glow of the light illuminating the snowfall from behind.
My feet were cold in thin socks, and I reached down to caress the dog’s head, the dog who was following me past the drying rack stacked with clean dishes and the empty sink, where my mother had wrung out the sponge and left it to dry. We walked down the hall, and I heard with relief the sound of the heat clicking on, the sigh of warm air being released through the vents. The living room was gray in the muted light from the picture window, discoloring the sofa and armchairs, the set dressing on a stage whose actors had exited the scene.
When I looked more closely, though, I could see eyes blinking open here and there, watching as we passed by. I stopped to stroke their ears, the little apricot poodle and the golden retrievers, moving slowly around the room, not forgetting about the pit bull mix at my side, his patient, dignified head and smooth gray back. It had been almost a year since I’d died, but my fingers still craved the sensation of touching things.
There were a few more dogs and a black and white cat farther down the hall, in the guest room, and we made the rounds, Rocky and I, pausing as the others lifted their faces expectantly. When we moved on toward the bedroom, they followed us, nails clicking on the hardwood as I turned the handle and opened the door.
My parents were just faint outlines in the darkened room, their profiles muffled by the lack of light and sound. Gingerly, I crawled from the foot of the bed into the blank space between their bodies. They did not stir. I lay on the quilt between them for hours; time was as fragile as the most delicate glassware, and I didn’t want to shatter it. The dogs and the little cat crowded around our legs and feet, nuzzling me, and I held my mother’s hand gently as my parents slept, and all night, they went on dreaming of me.