The Circle

its the little things

You can listen to an original audio recording of this story here.

Maggie never sees ghosts anymore.

As a child, she was haunted by everything. The fabric bunnies and birds dangling from the mobile hung above her crib whispered sweet and calming things to her. The huge black crow that lived in her tree house regarded her with wise eyes and hopped around in a pattern, spelling out messages she couldn’t read. But she understood that they were messages from beyond, knew even as a tiny child that life and death weren’t that far apart, that everything around her was part of the same circle.

In elementary school she tried to share her gift, held an impromptu class on the afterlife from inside her mother’s closet, soft fabrics brushing against the gathered children. But the kids didn’t understand, and they cried, and their parents came to take them home. She was alone and despondent in the closet when the clothes finally rustled and began to fall off their hangers in undulating ribbons of cloth all around her. She smiled then, because she was right.

In high school she spent a lot of time alone, the goth girl with no friends. But she wasn’t lonely. There was someone with her always: swirling the leaves in a little tornado ahead of Maggie’s steps, nudging her to turn her head to catch the perfect moment of a sunset, blowing clouds into fantastic shapes only Maggie could see. The little boombox in her bedroom turning on by itself, because ghosts like music and they never get to hear it.

As a young adult, Maggie worked in a cafe that was famously haunted. She chose the job for that reason, signed up for all the closing shifts, because she wasn’t afraid and because she liked to keep the spirits nearby. At night she would walk through the dining room blowing out the candles, and when she turned around they would all be lit again, winking at her, waving goodbye. She would smile, say goodnight, and they would blink out in a flash.

But now, in middle age, she had lost her gift of seeing, or the spirits had simply stopped coming around. She wondered if she was supposed to have practiced something, studied some dusty old book on necromancy, boiled up herbs and potions to keep them hanging around. She worried she missed a sign, the thing she was supposed to do for them, and now they had given up on her, left for someone new. She wasn’t anyone’s fascinating witchy neighbor, she was just a single middle-aged woman, hanging around spooky places and scaring everyone else away.

Now, when there was a creak from the attic she knew it was just the house settling. Now, when a huge black crow landed near her and cocked its head, she knew it was just a bird, looking for food. And now, when she stopped her car on a snowy night to help a stranded motorist, she knew he wasn’t a ghost reliving his death on the side of the road but a real person, whose fingers were numb from trying to wave down cars, whose lips were blue from the cold.

She didn’t have any warning from the spirit world that he was a killer. And when he stabbed her in the stomach and left her for dead in that snowy ditch, when he stole her car with her blood still in it and her purse with a useless canister of pepper spray sitting in the back seat, no spirits came to her aid. No lost souls comforted her, and she knew for certain her gift was gone.

She lay alone and forgotten in the dirty snow, feeling the life drain out of her with every weak heartbeat, looking up at the sky and seeing nothing. Until. A lightness began in her limbs and grew through her body. She felt her three dimensional self fading, evaporating, her frozen solid body being replaced with light and air. The souls from her youth were back and they were lifting her up to Heaven! A soaring kind of feeling filled her chest and the ice and snow around her melted away in golden light.

She blinked. Suddenly she saw herself at two years old, sitting in her crib crying. Maggie didn’t have hands to hold the baby so she gathered the air around and inside her and used it to make the birds and the bunnies on the mobile sway, a surprisingly difficult effort that left her exhausted. A sob caught in her incorporeal throat and she whispered its going to be alright to make the little girl smile.