Mortal Conditions

I kept the house the way she liked it. Our beach cottage, the one we dreamed of, where she… Anyway. I kept the paintings on the walls, her grandmother’s afghan on the back of the couch, her favorite tea in the kitchen.

I did put all the pictures away, though. Hid them under the floorboards of the staircase. They said she wouldn’t remember much. That it would be easier for her if it all didn’t come back at once.

Naomi liked to write, so I left blank journals on the table. I read them in the in-between times, when she was… absent.

I visited the house every day, careful to leave before sunset. I kept things up for her - dusted, vacuumed, kept fresh flowers on the dining table. Yellow and blue, of course, if I could find them. I pretended to be a gardener. Ridiculous considering the number of houseplants I murdered before. But it was the best excuse I could come up with to be hanging around all the time.

That first morning she was there, I was terrified. So afraid she’d know what I did and hate me for it. The power of my ego that pushed me this far was fizzling out.

But she didn’t know anything. Not yet. I remember her journal entry from that day so clearly: “The gardener stood at the door, his hat in his hand, like in an old movie. He was handsome, worn, his eyes downturned, worry lines on his forehead, streaks of silver in his wavy, dark hair. An unreadable expression.”

I mean, I was such a mess. I suppose it was nice that she still thought I was handsome, even after everything.

Anyway, I ‘reminded’ her that she’d requested some late season marigolds, and I was there to do the honors.

As I worked, I noticed the air around the cottage was different. The colors were so vibrant, almost too vivid. The air felt charged. I couldn’t decide if it hurt, or if I wanted to stay there, basking in it, knowing it was her causing it.

She was absent the next day, and the day after that. But I came back every morning. They warned me she would fade in and out. She was gone so long I worried I’d given up everything for a damn three sentence conversation about marigolds. But then, I decided, maybe even that was worth it.

But late into fall, she showed up again. My heart pounded in my throat as I walked up the familiar path, the air crackling around me. When she answered the door, skin shimmering like a gleam of oil on the surface of a pool, I mumbled something about daffodil bulbs. She tilted her head, asked if it was fall already.

I came close to knocking again, telling her everything, begging her forgiveness if anything hurt or scared her, promising to keep her safe.

All the while knowing I could not, in fact, promise her anything, any more than I could before.

I saw her again a week later. I plastered on my best smile and said I was just there to check on things. She asked if I could fix a clock that wasn’t working.

The grandfather clock in the living room was always running on its own schedule. We’d decided, years before, that the old clock was haunted by a ghost that decided what speed the day would go. We laughed about it then.

It didn’t seem funny anymore.

She said the hands were moving too fast. They told me time may run strangely around her. And I’ve never really been a handyman type of guy. But I figured I’d at least try to look competent. She said she’d make some tea for us and moved toward the kitchen, her feet sliding across the floor with with jerky, alien movements.

That’s when I fully grasped the extent of my naivete. That I’d actually thought what I could keep of her would be unchanged. What ludicrous, absurd arrogance.

Hindsight, right?

But the clock hands were indeed running far too fast and the sun was speeding across the sky.

Just as I was about to climb out the nearest window, since I knew I’d never make it to the front door by sunset with the weird flow of time, she materialized next to me. It was the closest she’d been to me yet, since her transformation. Her presence was all static, electric.

But Naomi was still in there, too. I was sure of it. Her expression was confused, worried. She said she’d felt a bit strange lately, that she blacked out for a bit and forgot to make the tea and she was so sorry she’d made me waste the day here.

I mumbled something about googling clock repair shops as I hurried to the door. She replied not to bother. That some things are better broken, anyway.

God, I wish I just told her then.

That night, I awoke to her screaming. I ran from my apartment a few doors down and crouched in the shadows, watching her disjointed movements across the porch and the tiny yard, past the marigolds and the hibernating daffodils. When she stepped into the street, heading toward the beach just across it, she disappeared. She screamed again from inside the house and back she went, into the street and back to the house, again and again. Her tortured shriek left me cold and shaken.

I know what you’re thinking. From the first moment the doctors told us she was sick, I was such a coward. And it continued that night. I wish I could tell you I comforted her, told her the truth. But I just sat, frozen in the shadows, sinking deeper into the hell I’d created for her, and for myself.

She deserved so much better. She always did.

It was another six weeks before she reappeared. That day I had white callas and yellow roses in a blue vase on the table. Like her wedding bouquet.

When she opened the door, I knew immediately she’d found the pictures in the floorboards.

“Who are you? Why am I trapped here?” she asked. Her voice was fractured, metal scraping metal; her eyes black, rippling, like the deepest parts of the sea. Preparing to swallow me whole.

I told her I could explain everything if she could just keep calm. That I would never do anything to hurt her.

How much of her was still my Naomi? What else was she, now, too? And what sort of trap was I walking into?

She drifted before me into the kitchen. She put on the kettle, pulled out her favorite tea: lavender chamomile. A chill ran through me when she also pulled out mine, that I’d tucked next to it: smoky oolong.

After preparing the mugs, she turned and regarded me with those bottomless eyes. “The flowers,” she said. “They’re from…”

I nodded. I couldn’t bear to look at her anymore. It was like peering into infinity. The kettle whistled. “I didn’t want to hide anything from you. But they said it would go better if you didn’t know everything right away. Less of a shock.”

She filled the mugs and set one on the table in front of me before answering. “Who are ‘they?’” she asked.

It was not Naomi’s voice. 

I inhaled the smoky steam, trying to stay grounded. “I loved you. The human you. You got sick. So, terribly sick. I couldn’t stand to lose you. Before you passed I… I made a deal. That I could keep you here. As long as I’m alive, and I don’t stay with you after dark, you can be in this house. After that, they… collect me.”

She was unnaturally still, and then her voice was like a chime. Like a child’s. “So I shouldn’t be here at all.” Waves of cold rolled off her. Frost began to crystallize on my previously steaming mug.

“No. And I wish I hadn’t done it, if it’s hurting you. I was so selfish. But I love you, you have to believe...”

Have you ever seen an angry ghost? You don’t want to.

She grew bigger, her body filling the tiny kitchen, repeating “You wish, you wish,” over and over. I babbled about desperation, regret, weakness. I knew how hollow it all sounded.

The black from her eyes crept across her pale face like spiderwebs. Her body began to melt at the edges. “You’ve imprisoned me so you can play make-believe with the universe,” she said.

I shivered violently, stammering that imprisonment was never my intention. The deal was supposed to be for her, for us.

But I knew the truth. It had only ever been for me.

And then I noticed the only thing that could make it all worse - the sun going down.

I tried to run toward the front door. My mug of frozen tea suspended where I dropped it, and, like a nightmare, my legs moved as though stuck in hardening concrete. I blinked and time snapped. I was in front of the door, reaching for the knob, the mug shattering on the hardwood behind me.

A man in a pinstriped suit, all sinew, smoke and oily, red skin, stood on the porch. He was lit only by the porch lamp and the gray light of dusk.

“Vathra,” I whispered. 

I told the demon I could explain, but he just laughed. I’d violated the conditions of the contract. That was all he needed to know. He took a step toward me, his heat contrasting with Naomi’s icy cold behind me.

“A soul for a soul, Miguel,” he said. “But not after dark. That was the agreement. And now, I shall have yours.”

Naomi’s ghost was suddenly between me and the demon.

“Little ghost,” Vathra said, “You will go where you need to, and I shall have what is due me. Now move along.”

“Take me!” I cried. “I broke the contract, and I don’t want to keep her here any longer. She deserves… better.”

“Well, that’s a fact.” Vathra smiled, with so many curved, narrow teeth.

“How could it?” Naomi asked, turning her black eyes toward me.

I shook my head, confused.

She turned back to the demon. “How could you take advantage of this man in his most vulnerable time of grief?”

“It’s only business, little ghost. His mortal condition is of no consequence to me. But the contract is broken - a soul must be collected tonight.”

Naomi tilted her head. “Then let it be yours.”

She shimmered and again, my feet were rooted in cement. The tapping of the minute hand on the grandfather clock through the open door behind me was rapid, like a woodpecker’s beak. The demon’s yellow eyes grew wide, and after a few agonizing, paralyzed moments, the first rays of morning sun reflected off the sea and burned into him. Vathra sizzled and crackled until he and his briefcase folded in on themselves and fell to a pile of ash.

Naomi’s body was more transparent by the second. “I’m so sorry, Miguel. I have to go now.” She reached for me but her hand passed through mine.

My Naomi smiled at me. And then she was gone.