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November 1st, 1999.
The day my world ceased to exist. The day when the ominous and baleful mood of halloween was supposed to dissolve into the enchanting and festive season of Christmas. But that sinister feeling of October never stopped for me. It was what carried me through life. Kept me on my toes. Alert and awake at all times. Until one night when I let my guard down. The one night where it was the most important to keep it up.
That was five years ago. It is the eve of November 1st, 2004. I have never come to this place before. Staring down and seeing the engraving of my name on the headstone, I imagined some type of dissociative feeling, but this was just another rock to me.
I looked up at the tall, ominous trees that outline the graveyard. They seemed to be waving in the wind, but I couldn’t feel the breeze. My dead eyes traveled around the landscape. There were some people coming and going. Sitting on the benches with their heads in their hands. Mourning those they lost. I couldn’t tell if there were others like me around. We can’t see each other, just like how the Actuals can’t see me.
Yes. I said “The Actuals.” That’s what I call them at least. Those that are still actually alive. Unlike me. Unlike the soul sitting six feet below in the capsule to my left. You may be wondering what I am if I’m not an “Actual.” I do not appreciate the word “ghost,” but who am I to tell you what to call me. I’m dead. It’s as simple as that. However, if you would like a proper term, I prefer “phantom.” By definition, a phantom is a figment of the imagination, and who’s to say what is real or not real.
I decide to take a walk around my new home. I occasionally stop at a stone or two and read the names. I found a handful of people I once knew, but it is not easy to find evidence of my past due to my unexpectedly short time with the living.
When I approach the finality of my evening stroll, I begin to find the way back to my own engraving. I look up the hill to where my final place lies, but freeze in my tracks at the most pretryfing sight.
The silhouette of a man stands over my tomb. His demeanor presents itself as demanding but depressed. His head hung but his shoulders stood tall and broad as if he was proud to be there but had some regrets.
I slowly approached the man, momentarily forgetting we existed in two different realms. As I came up behind him, his presence remained perfectly motionless. I was not more than five paces behind him when he spun around in alarm. His eyes wide with disturbance and discomfiture. The look of disorientation quickly shifted to an expression of perturbation. Our eyes locked in silence and something in the air changed. His features looked so familiar to me but knowledge of my life on earth slips away everyday that it was almost impossible for me to figure out who he was.
Then a realization hit me. I could see him which meant he was an Actual, but he was looking at me. In the eyes. He saw me.
Impossible.
“You can… see me?” my voice was raspy. I haven’t used it in five years. I’d almost forgotten how to talk.
He nodded, not releasing his glare from my face.
“And you’re alive?” I asked.
That question seemed to knock him out of his trace for a moment.
“A-alive? Y-yes. What kind of question is that?”
I suddenly became aware that, to him, I was a living human being. There was no reason for him to presume me to be dead.
“How are you-” he started. He seemed to remember something and turned around to my name on the stone, “but I… I mean you’re…”
“Dead?” I finished his sentence. “Quite correct. Which is why this situation baffles me.”
He gave me a peculiar look and seemed to be absent of words.
“You are of the living, yes?” I tried to explain. “Well,” I pointed at my gravestone, “that information is correct. 1980-1999. I died five years ago. November-”
“First,” he interrupted me.
I eyed him suspiciously. How could he have possibly known that? Who was this guy?
His focus constantly darted from my grave to me as if he was trying to piece together a puzzle of information that simply didn’t match. “So… I’m not crazy? You’re really dead.”
“Well, yes, but if anything, that makes you even more crazy.”
He stared at me blankly.
“You are correct in believing that I died, but here you are now, talking to a-uh- well how you would put it-a ghost,” I stated bluntly.
His eyes fell to his feet, as if he were trying to see through the soggy dirt and wooden box below him to find my corpse. I looked down too and my gaze stopped at something familiar. His shoes. More specifically, his black leather boots. I know I had seen them before but nothing was coming to mind. My deteriorated memory was screaming at me but there was a wall blocking any flow of information.
The moon was fully awake now and the clouds began to depart from the sky. A streak of moonlight landed perfectly on the man’s face. It outlined his features in such a way that petrified me. A gateway opened in the wall in my head and memories flooded through.
I staggered backwards.
The man seemed to notice and looked up. He must have solved the look of consternation my face held because his expression hardened to a soft, desensitizing glare.
“What are you doing here,” I mumbled in a soft tone, not knowing how to process the recent evocation.
A soft smile tugged at his lips, but I couldn’t tell if it was sympathetic or pathological. “I was wondering if you knew.”
I was at a loss for words. My head was exploding with information and questions.
“I-you… why are you here?” I demanded.
“I think a more valid question is how are you here?” He smirked.
My face hardend. “You need to leave. Now.”
His eyes fell soft and he turned back to my grave. “This is my first time here, you know. I was never sure if I’d get myself to do it.”
My gaze never left his face. I remembered every feature. Every freckle. Every misplaced hair. A victim never forgets.
I became aware of a silver stick poking out of his trench coat. A knife. The knife. I was suddenly aware of the October breeze brushing against my shoulders. A dangerous thought crossed my brain. I’d never tried to touch anything that existed in the living realm, but that didn’t stop me from thrusting forward and seizing the weapon from him.
The head of the knife burned in my palm as I pulled away from the man. In utter shock, he stared at me, wide-eyed.
I fidgeted with it back and forth between my hands. This knife was my demise. My life divisor. My murder weapon.
“What are you-,” he stammered, “what are you doing?” His ice cold focus on the knife.
I studied the fear in his face and pleasure arose within me. Without an answer, I lifted the knife under his chin.
“You-you’re dead. You can’t kill me,” his voice wavered.
“Then why are you here. Why can you see me? Hear me?” My skin was growing warmer and I pressed the point against his neck, drawing blood.
“It’s impossible!” He sounded as if he was trying to convince himself.
“Try me.” I took another step forward. We met eyes and I saw that same lustful sparkle I saw five years ago.
“You are playing a dangerous game without so much a glimpse into the rule book,” he warned.
“You did that the night you murdered me.”
With that, I sliced his throat.
The clocktower down the road struck 12:00am on November 1st.
“See you in the afterlife,” I whispered, “Happy Halloween.”
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Hey Lauren! It's me, Rocky, from the Critique Circle.
This process is new to me, so forgive me if I'm doing this wrong.
I really enjoyed your story “Foe and Phantom”! We submitted for the same prompt, but I especially love that you didn't have an “obvious” take on it.
I also really like the way you handled the back-and-forth between phantom and foe, with the initial confusions, the realization, and the turn to revenge.
I love how much you accomplished in a short span.
All that said, here are some notes/critiques/whatever you wanna call them:
- The opening is good, but the way it's set up makes it feel like the story is going to be about how the narrator died. Especially in a short story, if you're not setting a scene with description from the outset, I find it best to immediately hint at the central conflict/hook. An example for this story would be to open with something like this: “For five years, no one visited my grave...until one night, someone did.” Obviously a lot of my critiques are SUBJECTIVE, but I feel that an opening like this that immediately tells you 1) The narrator is dead, 2) The story is set in a graveyard, and 3) the hook is “whoever” is visiting their grave, and why, and that gets the reader going.
- My main issue with the prose was the tense was inconsistent. The opening lines put us in past tense for the story (“That was five years ago.”), then immediately goes to present tense in the following ones. Which would be fine if it stayed there, but then the paragraph ends in past tense again (“this was just another rock to me.”). It wavers back and forth (“There were some people...”; “I decide to take a walk...”; “The silhouette of a man stands...”; “I slowly approached...”), until finally it settles, more or less, into past tense when the conversation begins. These kinds of things make it really difficult for the reader to feel grounded in the scene.
- Some of the prose can tend toward overflowery. Purple prose, if you will. One example that really stuck out was this: “His eyes went wide with disturbance and discomfiture. The look of disorientation quickly shifted to an expression of perturbation.” Not that I don't know these words—I do. But they feel out of place; no one really talks like this, especially not a young person who grew up in the 90s and died at 19. If you’re highlighting his disturbance slipping into being perturbed, remember that in the previous sentence, he just “spun around in alarm,” which is also redundant; you might say something like this: “I wasn't more than five paces away when he spun around with wide eyes. But when his alarm passed, he still looked uneasy.” Another example is this: “He must have solved the look of consternation my face held because his expression hardened to a soft, desensitizing glare.” You might rewrite this as, “Noticing the change in my face, his expression hardens into a soft glare.” A last example is this: “When I approach the finality of my evening stroll, I begin to find the way back to my own engraving.” Instead say, “Near the end of the evening, I started back toward my own grave.” The most important thing to remember, ESPECIALLY when writing First Person, is to adhere to your character's voice. Try to use vocabulary and diction that matches their point-of-view and personality and life experiences.
- Near the beginning is a paragraph where you lay out the term “the Actuals,” plus the fact that the narrator is a ghost. This is really the only place where you address the audience directly, I think (“You may be wondering...”; “...who am I to tell you”, etc.), and it feels out of place. I like the creativity behind the term “Actuals,” but I would get rid of this whole paragraph since 1) the term doesn't affect the story, 2) the shift in tone is abrupt, and 3) it's much better, instead of telling the reader that the narrator’s a ghost, to let them deduce it from everything else happening.
- It's more than a little weird that the narrator has “never come to this place before” (the graveyard), yet the murderer also says “This is my first time here, you know.” So they just happen to both visit the graveyard on the same night, five years after their death? I would keep it as HIS first visit, with the narrator having been there on many occasions.
- I like the part about the narrator grabbing hold of the knife, and that it burns in their palm, but I would add a drop of foreshadowing of this somehow earlier on, some hint that the ghost thinks they MAY be able to influence certain physical objects, but they're unsure how.
- When describing things, just know you don't have to say that the character is “looking somewhere” or “becoming aware” before you mention the description or action. Remember since it's their POV, anything you describe we already know is something THEY are witnessing. Example: “I looked up at the tall, ominous trees that outline the graveyard. They seemed to be waving in the wind, but I couldn't feel the breeze.” Instead combine these and say something like, “The tall, ominous trees surrounding the graveyard were waving in a wind I couldn't feel.” Another: “His eyes fell to his feet, as if he were trying to see through the soggy dirt and wooden box below him to find my corpse. I looked down too and my gaze stopped at something familiar. His shoes. More specifically, his black leather boots. I know I had seen them before but nothing was coming to mind.” Instead: “His eyes searched the ground as if to find my body in the coffin inside it, and something caught my eye. His black leather boots. They were familiar—I knew I'd seen them before—but nothing came to mind.”
- Nitpicky thing: whenever you're breaking off dialogue, try to use a proper em dash (or ellipsis) instead of a hyphen. So this line should read (with some dialogue edits): “You’re right; I did die. But here you are now, talking to a, uh...Well, you know—a ghost.” This is just one example but makes it easier to read the dialogue as imagined.
I liked the story a lot! You have a great STORY idea, which is really the hardest part. I really liked some of the descriptions, such as saying the moon was “fully awake.” The prose and dialogue only improves the more you practice and read! I still have a long way to go too.
Anyway, I really hope this comment isn't disheartening at all, and if you have time, I'd love it if you can check out my own story, “Unfamiliar Haunts”! :)
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