Dusk or Dark or Dawn or Day(14)

“Oh.” We’re almost to Sixth and Broadway. We should be seeing signs of the ghost gang by now. The dead know the presence of the dead. Ghosts change the landscape around themselves, not in any way permanent or prominent enough for the living to really notice, but enough that once you know what you’re looking for, it’s just this side of impossible to overlook.

And there’s nothing. The cracks in the sidewalks are normal cracks; the leaves that fall from the hedges and domesticated trees are just leaves, falling where they will, not forming initials or strange glyphs or the abstract faces of long-dead lovers. There’s no out-of-season frost in the corners of the windows, no hidden messages written in the lingering morning dew.

We are on an unhaunted corner, and that is terrifying.

Delia’s face falls as she looks around, confusion giving way to bewilderment, and finally melting into fear. “Where are they?”

“I don’t know,” I say, and I don’t know, and suddenly, the world is a smaller, more frightening place.





5: Don’t Change Your Number


Brenda has my number but I don’t have hers, and I don’t know where she spends her days; I’ve only ever seen her at the diner, hair rimed with neon light, fingers moving on the neck of her guitar. I’ll have to wait until tonight to see her, and that means waiting until after my shift at the helpline. I think, briefly, about calling in and saying I can’t make it, but I can’t even reach for the phone. The people who count on us to get them through the slow hours between sunset and dawn, they’re not dead yet. They still have a chance to hold out until the sun comes up.

I don’t mind being dead. I did, for a while, in the beginning, when I realized my life was over and that nothing I could do was ever going to bring it back, but that was a long time ago. I stopped mourning for myself when my brother was born and my parents stopped mourning for me. That seemed like long enough. That seemed like a good time to let go. But the living . . .

The living have the chance to stay that way, and they should stay that way for as long as possible, because life is amazing. There’s so much the living can do that the dead can’t. If I can keep someone alive by going to my night job, then that’s what I have to do.

My day job is another matter. Delia doesn’t charge her dead tenants as much as she charges her living ones—charges us just this side of nothing, in fact—but I still have to buy cat food and pay my share of the gas bill.

I make it to the coffee shop four minutes before the official start of my shift, already dressed for work, even down to the green apron with the chain logo on the pocket. We’re not supposed to take those home, and technically I never do; my “real” apron is hanging in my locker, where it’s been since the day it was handed to me. But spills during my shift are inevitable, and if I never wear the real thing, I never need to wash it. Ghost clothing doesn’t get stained. We can always re-create it clean when the need arises.

My manager is behind the counter, steaming milk. He barely glances up as I position myself behind the register. “You’re late,” he says.

“Not quite,” I reply.

“Time is money, you know.”

I don’t reply, just plaster a smile across my face and turn to wait for a paying customer. He loves that phrase, “time is money,” and uses it every chance he gets. Sometimes I wish I could make him understand how wrong he is, that time is time and that’s enough, because time is more precious than diamonds, more rare than pearls. Money comes and goes, but time only goes. Time doesn’t come back for anyone, not even for the restless dead, who move it from place to place. Time is finite. Money is not.

A man walks in, tailored suit on his shoulders and caffeine craving in his eyes, and my shift begins.

It’s not so bad, slinging coffee for a living. I don’t mind the minimum wage; unlike my coworkers, I don’t eat or go on vacation or have kids to clothe and feed. I have no college loans to pay. Sometimes I envy them those things. They get to live, and I got to drown while I was still in my teens. No matter how much my existence looks like living, it’s not. The absence of food in my refrigerator and clothes in my closet attests to that. I work to pay the rent and keep the heat on and feed the cats, but I could stop tomorrow, and I wouldn’t suffer for the change.

The customers are a steady stream, never quite overwhelming, never going away for more than a few minutes. It’s soothing. I let myself sink into the rhythm of punching orders and scrawling names on cups, passing them to my manager when he’s behind the counter with me, filling them myself when he’s not. Some of the customers smile and drop their change in the tip jar. Others barely peel their eyes away from their phones, locked in the increasingly fast-paced race of text and response. It looks exhausting. Nothing makes me feel the age that’s on my tombstone like watching people who look older than I do spending their lives staring at a screen.

My dislike of modern technology is a me thing, a lack-of-exposure thing. Danny has a smartphone, prepaid so that it didn’t require a credit check, and he loves it like a child. He spends more time reading comic book news and swearing at strangers than seems strictly healthy to me, but it makes him so happy, who am I to judge?

I pause with a scoop of coffee beans lifted halfway to the grinder. Danny has a smartphone. Danny has a phone number.

This could change everything. I finish the drink I’ve been preparing on autopilot before turning to my manager and saying, “I need to take my break.”