Kira the Ghost

Kira Simonian was 32 years old when she died. She was an art student on the brink of finishing her MFA when she was bludgeoned to death by her husband, Matthew Gretz, in her own apartment. He stabbed her 15 times in the chest, and if you thought that wasn’t enough, he also smashed her head in with a hammer. Her body was found lying in a pool of blood in the living room, next to the murder weapons, also covered in blood. Her husband had fled to New York, and in the weeks following her murder, he relished in playing the role of grieving husband. Nobody suspected a thing, until the police recovered his suitcase in Chicago, where they lived, which tested positive for blood samples belonging to both him and Kira. He was locked up, and sentenced to 16 years in Minnesota State Prison. Friends and family lamented the immense loss of their beloved Kira, and all they had was a shrapnel of comfort in the fact that to them, justice was served, despite her not being alive to see it. The truth is that Kira could have seen it all – the vigil, the trial, the grief that lay in her wake – because Kira was a ghost. But instead, she chose to have a cigarette.

Her death was physically painful of course, but only for a moment. As soon as the knife cut through her, Kira felt herself begin to rise from her body. She couldn’t believe it. Her own husband, slashing away at her chest like a cabbage picker. She always thought death would envelop her consciousness like a vacuum, but this was worse. She sat in the corner of the living room with her head in her hands crying, hoping it was just a bad trip. As the sun started to rise and the smell of her decomposing body began penetrating the apartment, she knew that she was gone for good. 

The first thing Kira wanted to do after she died was smoke a cigarette. Death smelled like the inside of a Goodwill, and she longed to distract herself from its stench with the burning of tar filled lungs. After a few hours of sitting in the living room and staring at her dead body, she finally gathered the strength to get up, and move towards the door. She noticed that instead of walking she was floating, which would have normally elicited some sort of reaction from her (or anybody for that matter) but she was so traumatized she just let herself pass through the walls uncaring, like a zombie, until she ended up at the 7-Eleven on 8th Street and Polk. 

“One pack of Newports please,” Kira said to the man at the counter, who was reading a newspaper. He did not look up from his paper.

“I said, one pack of Newports please,” Kira repeated. “Hey, can’t you hear me??” The man let out a soft grunt that settled into the fatty rock formations that encompassed his neck. Oh shit, Kira thought. I forgot I’m dead. Fine, she thought, I’ll just go get them myself. Kira snooped for an entryway to get behind the counter and saw that there wasn’t one – just a door behind him that she assumed led to a back room. She began to hoist herself over the counter when she remembered she could just float through. Free cigs and biological transparency, she thought. Being dead is kind of the shit. Just as soon as she grabbed the cigarettes, the doorbell chimed. 

“Hey boss,” the customer said. “How you- WOAH, WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT?” He was interrupted by a flying pack of cigarettes above the store clerk’s head. The clerk looked as if he was having a heart attack and fell out of his seat, hitting his head against the counter and making his paper fly into the air, exposing the obituary section. The customer stumbled backwards, eventually tripping and falling into a display case of Hot Cheetos, causing the bags to spill everywhere. “AHHHH!!” the customer yelled. “It’s a ghost!! A GHOST!!!”  

Fuck, Kira thought to herself. Fuck, shit and piss. First day of being a ghost and I can’t even get a goddamn pack of cigarettes. She sighed deeply, and attempted to leave the commotion beneath her by floating through the store windows. The cigarettes, unfortunately, did not pass through the glass, and hit the window pane before dropping to the floor haphazardly. Kira screamed, although no one could hear her, and went back inside to retrieve her cigarettes, this time exiting through the front door, and shutting it very hard. 

She floated on until she got to a small bridge overlooking a lake. Kira sat herself down on the concrete, letting her legs hang from the height while her thighs painlessly passed through the steel bars. She reached in her pocket for her lighter, and found it covered in a viscous goo. She tried to light the cigarette, now wet from her grasp, but it would barely catch a flame. After multiple attempts she finally managed to tame a spark, but when she went to inhale, she found she couldn’t even pull the smoke into her mouth. Defeated by the cigarette, she threw it into the lake and began to cry. 

“First day, huh?” 

Kira heard the voice from behind her and spun around. “Who said that?” she said. “Where are you?”

“I’m right here,” the voice said, this time coming from her left. Kira snapped her neck and there she was, another ghost, sitting right next to her. “It’s your first day being dead, isn’t it.” 

“Yeah… I guess it is,” Kira said, startled by her sudden appearance. “Who the hell are you?”

“My name is Tuesday,” the ghost said. “Come with me, I’ll explain everything.”

“Come with you,” Kira scoffed. Then she thought about it. Do I really have anything better to do right now? “Will you get me a pack of cigarettes?” she asked.

“Sure,” Tuesday said.

“Okay,” Kira said. Tuesday outstretched her pale hand and she took it, and the two floated on together towards a city bursting with life.

While moving against the background of the bustling streets of Chicago, Kira noticed that Tuesday was very beautiful. She had long, silver hair that drifted in the wind like the echo of a flame, and her sullen cheekbones and exposed collarbones glistened in the June sunlight. She wore a long and flowy white dress, which would have made her look angelic had it not been for the visible bullet wounds in her back. Kira, on the other hand, looked a bit too much like the Basket Case from The Breakfast Club.

“Why is your name Tuesday?” Kira asked.

“Because I died on a Tuesday,” Tuesday said.

“Oh,” Kira said. She thought it would be rude to ask why she changed her name after she died or how she managed to get shot in the back several times on a Tuesday, of all days, so she didn’t. In the corner of her eye, a sanitation worker descended into a sewer. “How old were you when you died?”

“Wrong question,” Tuesday said. The two passed by an abandoned church. “What you really wanna know is how I was when I lived.”

Kira rolled her eyes. “Okay,” she said. “How were you when you lived?”

Tuesday chuckled into a graceful smile, as if the question came naturally and she had not just planted it herself. “I was a model,” she said. “A nude one. I posed for many famous photographers in my life – my lover, Amelie DeLavie, took the most astonishing photos of my career. She made me very happy. And then she took my breath away. Literally,” Tuesday sighed. “I miss her.” 

The two passed through a park where the leaves began to fade from emerald green to copper and oak. An old woman on a park bench fed crumbs to a posse of birds. She looked familiar. Was she a childhood friend? A schoolteacher? She couldn’t be too sure. “I was an artist,” Kira said, looking off into the distance. It was freezing now.

“That’s lovely dear,” Tuesday said, as a snowflake landed on her nose. “What did you paint?”

“Biology,” Kira said. “Didn’t you say you were going to ‘explain everything’?”

“Did I say explain?” Tuesday asked. Kira nodded. “Oh, well I meant show. Speaking of, we’re here.” Kira felt herself come to a halt as Tuesday stopped in her tracks. They were somehow connected by a magnetism Kira did not feel needed to be explained. They stood together in front of a vast flight of concrete stairs that led up to a museum. Its dark metal frame contrasted with large, square glass windows repeating across its face, cherry blossom trees that bloomed around its perimeter, and the sky, a blushing cobalt blue. The spring air was so fresh and crisp, you could breathe it in and be transported somewhere back in time, somewhere in your youth, and anywhere from the first time you woke up in the woods after an overnight camping trip, to an overcast school morning clouded by teenage rebellion and an ephemeral music taste.

They did not say a word to each other as they floated up the concrete, nor as they swirled around the fibrous looking seafoam green beam that connected the first floor to the top. Kira watched as museum goers traveled up and down the winding staircase that circled them, occasionally listening into their conversations. Did you hear, one man whispered. One of the security guards here died a week ago. Only 27. Crushed to death by a sculpture that fell over. Anyways, wanna get coffee? A little girl jumped down every other stair, any second to overestimating her stride. Fleeting moments overlapped each other like decaying lily pads in a still pond. 

As soon as they reached the top, Kira noticed a puddle of humans pooled around the entryway to an exhibit. Kira Simonian: Cellular Deconstruction, was printed in large arial font against an equally austere white door. The two passed right through all the people and the door, and were greeted by Kira’s final paintings of various biological organisms superimposed on architectural structures. The largest painting, which featured a cluster of lively blue cells that held together the remains of a four story building with torn windows and doors, was placed in the center of the room. People spilled around it like water beneath a rusty fridge, pointing and nodding.

“Here’s your cigarette,” Tuesday said. “Now smoke.”

Kira inhaled the life around her and exhaled into a temporary smile. No one could see her, but it didn’t matter. She saw herself, and that was enough for her.