AllFreeNovel
Share Us
If you want to know, it takes a long time to strangle somebody. I’d heard that on an episode of Investigation Discovery once. I can tell you it takes even longer when you’re the one being strangled. My throat was on fire. My head was on fire. My chest was on fire. Even my eyes felt like they were burning. I couldn’t make a sound. I couldn’t even see, as the tears poured down my cheeks.
I guess it was taking too long for him, too. Because in the end, he smashed the side of my head against the pavement. After that, everything went dark. The unbearable fire was suddenly gone, along with the chill in the air and the feel of the wet, rough pavement.
When I caught my first glimpse of, well, I still didn’t know what to call it—my soul? My spirit? My echo?—it was sort of like looking at my reflection in a mirror. I wasn’t wafting in the breeze or anything. I wasn’t see-through. I just wasn’t alive anymore. I was still wearing my pajamas and slippers, but they looked clean, the way they had a couple minutes earlier.
As soon as he realized I was dead—which was a hot minute after I realized I was dead—he booked it through my back gate. I was left standing beside my own body and the recycling bin I’d just wheeled out of the garage.
I followed him, finding that I could keep pace with him easily—something I never could have said of myself while alive. I actually grabbed his arm and watched as my own fingers rested lightly on top of his shoulder. I sort of expected them to slide right through.
He didn’t react, exactly. However, he did walk faster, down the dark driveway, down the sidewalk, until he reached the blue Kia he’d left at the end of the street.
When he opened the driver’s side door, I dove inside the car headlong with him. I wasn’t going to risk letting him go if that car door slammed shut in my face.
As I watched him hurry into the car, I knew that I couldn’t do anything for the girl who was lying on the pavement with blood in her hair. I couldn’t do anything for Frank, who was probably still asleep on the big tufted chair in my bedroom.
Nobody else was looking out for me tonight. Nobody else was going to realize that I was missing, let alone dead, until I didn’t show up for work tomorrow. Nobody could do anything to help me now.
Before he drove away, he used a packet of wipes to clean his hands. Carefully. Almost lovingly. Like he hadn’t just used them to wrap a dirty extension cord around my neck by my recycle bins in my side yard until I finally stopped fighting.
In hindsight, that was when I decided I was going to haunt him.
I studied him from the passenger seat while he drove. His amber eyes, black in the darkness of the car, stayed fixed on the road while we made the twenty-minute drive back to his place.
It wasn’t the apartment he’d told me about last year—down to the roommate who left his socks in the kitchen. Instead, it was a little brick 70s-style rambler in Broomfield with one porch light burned out.
I followed him up the front walkway of the house, past a Big Wheel bike tipped over into an overgrown flower bed and a tangle of half-naked Barbies on the steps.
The lone porch light flickered a little as he turned the knob and went inside the house, shutting the door behind him and leaving me standing on the porch for a little while longer, staring at the toys and the riot of azaleas in the flowerbeds I just knew he hadn’t planted.
I found that I couldn’t just walk through the front door, once he went inside. So I was glad I’d gotten into the car when I had the chance.
I stood outside on his porch for a while. Because despite all the scary movies I’d watched, I had learned zero useful information about being dead. Could I make the doorknob move if I focused really hard? No. What would happen if I screamed? I tried it. I could hear myself just fine, but based on the reaction of the guy walking his dog across the street, nobody else could.
Well, that’s not totally accurate. The dog—a little gray schnauzer—stopped walking and looked straight at the front porch.
I got my hopes up. “Hey, buddy! Hey!” The schnauzer growled a little. He sniffed. Then he kept walking. The owner didn’t even look up from the blue glow of his smartphone.
I turned away from the useless dog and sat down on the porch. I studied my hands—the reflection of my hands. I watched the way they rested on the reflection of my knees. The way my feet rested on the cracked concrete. Barely touching, as if I were made of something just heavier than air.
I swiped hard at a leaf on the step and watched it move so imperceptibly it was impossible to tell whether it had been the night air.
You’re dead, I told myself firmly. Feel sad.
When my favorite aunt had died in a car accident, the cushion of denial lasted a solid hour. It was too big. I couldn’t take it in. When it finally hit me, I felt like the wind had been knocked out of me. It felt like that. Only this time, the impossibly awful thing had happened to me.
I could see blurry shapes moving behind the pebbled glass of the kitchen window above the flowerbed. I stepped into the azaleas and watched my reflection scatter through the spaces between the leggy blooms. The plants didn’t move. I did.
It would have been completely fascinating if I hadn’t just been murdered; however, it did give me an idea. I couldn’t walk through walls. Or grab anything. I seemed to have had all the power of the night air. Not the wind, even. The air.
I sat with this idea for a while, watching the azalea leaves shiver in the slight breeze. I lifted my hand toward the nearest flower and reached for a cluster of blooms. This time I watched more carefully as my hand slipped, sort of like smoke, between two large magenta blossoms.
I wasn’t wind: I was air. But air could go places. And that gave me an idea.
I walked around the house until I got to the side gate, which was closed. I could see the side yard—and his recycle bins—through the slats. I focused on the air between the slats and moved forward.
Easily enough, I scattered right through the fence.
My gaze settled on a cat door, slightly ajar, leading into the garage. I went through that too. No problem.
