A Ghost in Time's Shadow

(The story contains themes of death, loss, and grief:)

Color. Vision. Overwhelming. I stared into a blue abyss, unblinking. I… I didn’t need to blink. My eyes didn’t water, they just stayed exactly the same, as I continued staring forward. I turned my neck and looked around, still seeing everyone crowded around me. They were all screaming and crying, and a couple were on the phone. 

“What’s going on?” I said, touching my neck, and realizing that I was no longer choking, gasping for air. “I’m all good now, why is everyone still so freaked out?” No response. It was as if I was invisible. I stood up and started waving my arms around, seeing if someone could see me. They couldn’t. I turned back to see what everyone was looking at, and I felt like I couldn’t breathe again. A shiver went down my spine as I stared right into myself. It was my body, lying lifeless as could be on the floor. It hit me. I was dead. I had no idea what I was now, some kind of afterlife ghost or something, but clearly, I was still alive in some sort of way, even if I couldn’t actually blink, or breathe. I dropped onto the floor, knowing that if I could’ve cried, I would have. So, I did the only thing I could; I screamed and screamed. I screamed to the top of my lungs so that somebody could hear me, so that I could let out this grief, and so that I could make sense of all of this. I continued hollering as I saw the ambulance roll into the school, quickly wheeling my body away. Suddenly, I closed my mouth. I saw a familiar face rush to the ambulance, a face wetter than the ocean, screaming just like I was. It was my mom. “This is going to crush her,” I whispered to myself. I ran up to her, and as I was doing that, I noticed that my feet were not touching the ground. Interesting, but a problem for a different time. When I got to her, I could feel the heartbreak radiating through the air. “I’m so sorry,” I cried, hugging her as hard as I could. But the second I tried, my arms went straight through her. It felt as if I was hugging the air. I scrunched my eyebrows and tried something else, punching the ambulance with all the force I could muster. My arm went straight through. I stared at everything, which was happening at a thousand miles an hour when it finally hit me. Not only was I invisible, but I wasn’t even able to interact with other people or physical objects. I couldn’t touch the floor, I couldn’t touch anything. I truly was a ghost, watching from the outside. I turned back to my mom and saw her put a jacket around her shoulders, shivering, in the blistering 90-degree heat, as she entered the ambulance and it sped off. I watched as my body left, and so did my mother. I sat down on what felt like the floor, and stared into the distance, trying to figure this all out.

The sun went down, then up, then down again. People rushed around and through me, shivering every time they walked through my icy ghost body. I heard my friends mourning, and others going about their regular day. Meanwhile, I never saw a single person who saw me back. My brain throbbed thinking about where the other dead people were. Where were all the other ghosts? Is there truly a god? Is this the afterlife? Am I special in some way? Am I going to die eventually? Is someone watching me? I was prepared to stare into the distance until the sun never came back up pondering these questions, but perhaps someone in the universe was watching me, and it had other plans. 

On a random Noonday, while I was contemplating everything, I heard a screeching loud sound, jolting me from my seating position. I looked around to see if anyone else heard it, but it seemed they didn’t. Maybe this was only something that I could hear, finally, maybe someone would tell me what I was supposed to do. I looked around, and the loud sound started again, digging into me, carving me, torturing me. I shrieked and howled in pain, squirming, waiting for it to stop. Eventually, I looked up and saw a golden watch with purple and green lines intertwined inside of it. The watch was floating in the air and the pain continued wounding me as I used the pain to jump up and grab the watch. To my surprise, the watch came down with me, and the pain immediately withdrew. The watch instantly latched onto my wrist, and I narrowed my eyes, suspicious of this weird watch that dropped from the heavens. It didn’t display the time and only had a menacing photo of the galaxy on it. I started playing and turning it, first turning it backward. My eyes widened and I immediately stopped as the day darkened and nighttime fell, people around me going in reverse and being replaced by other people as daytime emerged. I kept going and heard many different sounds of people talking, laughing, and to my surprise, crying. Amongst the crying, as I turned the watch back, I heard my friends, Alex and Erica, bawling their eyes out. “Sounds like how they cried the day after my death,” I murmured, turning it back slightly more. My theory was right, and I immediately took my hands off of the watch as I looked back to the entrance of the school where my mom had dropped me off all those days ago, and saw a crowd of people huddling, bawling, and screaming around one poor child. I walked over to them and saw the exact same events unfold as I saw earlier. The ambulance came, and so did my mom, everyone cried, and the ambulance sped off with my mom and my body. An idea abruptly popped into my head as I tried turning the watch even further back. Maybe I could stop myself from dying. “Come on, come on come on,” I said, the hope building inside of me, almost bursting my head. I saw the crowd of people slowly dissipating as I continued turning the watch, and then, as it was about to happen, everybody suddenly froze. I looked at the watch and all it displayed was some text: “Time travel to a point prior to the moment of death is not permitted.” All the hope emptied out of me in an instant, and I took off the watch and threw it into the distance, not surprised when it reappeared on my wrist, but still angry. “What is this?” I shouted into the sky, waiting for a response I knew would never come. “What is this watch, and what is it doing here?” I asked again. Eventually, I gave up, the rage building up in me again. “Alright, let’s see how far into the future I can go,” I muttered angrily, rolling my eyes at the watch. I began turning the watch forward, watching everything speed up, as people rushed through me. I heard so many voices echoing through my head, filling it up in its entirety. Amongst the voices, I heard Alex and Erica, some random voices, and to my shock, my mom’s voice. But her voice wasn’t calm, it was pained. I listened to her voice as I heard her scream and cry. 

“I don’t feel very good,” she groaned. 

“Help, she’s collapsed!!” A random voice said.

“Call 911,” another one chimed in. The voices were panicky. I continued turning the watch. I heard the familiar sound of the ambulance rushing in. My eyes were closed at this point, as I locked in on that one specific voice. The voices kept colliding, I couldn’t even hear my mom’s voice anymore, but I trusted that this was the right path. All of a sudden, I opened my eyes.

“Jane Bueller, time of death, November 11th, 2024, at 9:14 AM.” I stopped turning the watch and looked around. Nobody was outside, but I could see students through the window listening to the teacher. All of them unaware of what just happened. My mom died. More accurately, she was about to die, in about a week. I looked down at the watch and it showed, November 11, 9:05 AM. “No, NO, no no!!!” I panicked, unsuccessfully trying to punch the school wall. 

I stared at the watch for what felt like years before finally snapping out of it. “Ok, ok, I have to do something, I can’t just let her die. She’s such a great person, she doesn’t deserve this, she never deserved any of this,” I told myself, rocking back and forth, trying to make sense of all this. A plan was formed in my mind, and I was determined to make it work, no matter what. I put my right hand on my left wrist and slowly moved the watch backwards, until it said that the date was November 10th at 9:00 PM. That gave me 12 hours to stop her from doing anything that could potentially hurt her. It didn’t matter if I was alive or dead, a ghost or a human, I was not going to let anything stop me from saving my mother. 

I ran back to my house and rushed inside, going through walls until I made it into my mom’s room. This was the second time I saw her after I had died, but this time was so much more important. More than a week had already passed after my death, and my mom still seemed to be grieving the same amount. Her room was an absolute mess, with wrappers and tissues all over the floor and bed. It looked like she hadn’t showered in a while, and her face seemed permanently wrinkled and wet from her constant crying. She had deep dark shadows under her beautiful blue eyes that were now filled with moisture and redness. She wasn’t on her phone or computer, and after about an hour, she finally closed the lights and went to bed. Even through the darkness, I could see her anguish, and I listened for another hour while she cried herself to sleep. I wished with all of my heart that I could have said something to her, or even cried next to her. But I knew that being closer to her would only make her colder, not warmer. I no longer needed sleep, so I kept guard in my mom’s room the whole night, my entire body shaking from fear. I kept pacing and moving, hoping with all of my heart that I would be able to stop her death from happening.

When the next day arrived, I was ready to do whatever I could with my limited powers to stop her from doing anything dangerous. As she got out of bed at 7:00 AM, I knew that all I had to do was keep her alive for two hours. I waited while she got dressed, finally showered, brushed her teeth, and ate breakfast. I walked next to her as she got ready to drive to work, quickly realizing that I wouldn’t be able to go in the car with her. Instead, I decided to run beside it. It seemed that since I couldn’t breathe, I also couldn’t get tired, so I could run as fast as I needed to. As I continued running beside the car, I noticed my mom was still as asleep as when she was in bed. Her face still looked messy and awful, and it was clear that she was about to burst into tears again. After a couple of minutes, I noticed her speed was only increasing. I began to almost float as I maintained her increasing pace. Then, I remembered something that she had told me.

“You see this intersection? It’s really busy, so you never know when there’s going to be a car whizzing by or a random pedestrian. Slow down a bit.” That intersection was coming up, and she was not slowing down one bit. Her mind seemed very unfocused on the actual driving. I didn’t know what to do. I had almost no physical presence in the real world. So, I did the dumbest and only thing I could think of. As the car was speeding, rattling toward the intersection, I sped up and went through the car and the driver's seat, touching my mom’s hands and trying to break her out of that trance she was in. I did this about two times as the intersection was approaching, and then, all I could do was wait. I waited and waited, as the car continued barreling down the street, about to hit this very busy intersection. She was about to run a red light, and then out of nowhere, the car jolted to an instant stop. A massive smile of relief flew onto my face as I watched a massive black truck zoom across, thankfully, with no obstacles in the way. Whether or not she stopped because of my strange actions I could never know, but one could hope. The rest of the drive was a breeze, and she made it to her job at 8:30, a couple of minutes early. 

“Only about 30 minutes left. I think I did it,” I said, giving a slight chuckle as I followed my mom into the building where she worked. Hope, a feeling I hadn’t felt for a long time, began rising in me again. For the first time as a ghost, I felt happy, I felt energized, and I felt like I had just saved the world; more specifically, I had saved my world. As my mom walked through the office, I watched the murmurs surround her, people saying sorry about the fact that her child died, and asking what they could do to help. My mom tried to maintain a brave face, but I could tell that she was about to break. As she walked to her office cubicle, I noticed something. Her entire cubicle was riddled with photos of me and her together. This was too much for her, and I saw the tears start pouring down her face again, silent as can be. I hated this with all of my heart, and my fists clenched up. All I wanted to do was hug her, tell her that I loved her, and tell her that I was sorry. The hope began to slowly pour out of me, quickly replaced by fear as I watched her clutch her chest, instantly crumpling on the floor. It was 8:37. 

“Help, she’s collapsed,” one of her coworkers said, rushing to her side.

“Someone call 911,” another person said. Just like with me, an entire crowd was formed around her collapsed body, as people began crying and panicking. By the time the ambulance came and brought her to the hospital, it was far too late. 

“Jane Bueller, time of death, November 11th, 2024, at 9:14 AM,” one of the doctors said painfully. As the doctors and nurses dealt with my mother’s dead body, I remained still, fixed on my mother. All of our 16 years of memories together flooded through my head, but I did not feel sad. Instead, I only felt anger and disappointment, in myself and the universe. How could they let this happen? How could the universe let such a good person such as my mom die when other people like serial killers and bullies ran rampant? And even worse, my mom’s pain would never be relieved, because now she, like me, would have to live in a world alone, still dealing with the grief, with no end in sight. No matter how hard I tried, there was nothing I could have done to have stopped her death. All I could do was observe; a more painful fate than anything, even choking to death. My mom’s voice echoed within me one last time.

“You can’t change time, and you definitely can’t change what the universe wants.” I guess she was right. There is no changing fate, and there is no stopping it. 

Time passed, the days faded and changed, moving in a rhythmic path; Light, dark, light, dark. I did nothing, moved nothing, only wallowed in my guilt over my mother's death, and thought and contemplated. Every once in a while I would go back in time to try and change her death, but no matter what, the outcome was always the same. As the clock continued to tick, I watched my remaining friends and family slowly die as well. Whether they also became ghosts I will never know, for it seems I am alone in this world. I watched as humans slowly killed themselves off, destroying themselves and everything they stood for. Stars collided, the earth exploded, but my body remained intact, suffering from the poison of immortality. Not only did I suffer from death, but now I suffer a fate worse than death; eternal living as an observer. I’ve witnessed the destruction of this universe and the beginning of a new one, as a ghost in time.