What's Written on the Walls

Here in November in this house of leaves
We'll pray

Poe, 'Haunted'

***

The past is a lump in my throat.

The past is a story written on my arm in Braille. Close your eyes, slide your fingers over my skin, and that’s my life.

None of that means anything, now that I’m dead.

***

I wrote a poem, a long time ago. It went like this:

The halls rustle, tonight –
ghosts, meeting.
Their sheets whisper as they kiss –
whisper secrets as they kiss.

‘Scratch I’m ruined into your arm’
the ghosts whisper and taunt me.
Their gauze whispers haunt me
as I crawl down the hallway.

It’s not a great poem, not even close, but I like the irony of it. My entire life I was haunted – by shadows, by the past, by love – and now I’m the ghost, rattling the loose bones in this awful, bloody place.

***

There are so many of us here. We all died the same way, cut down on the dance floor, gutted like pigs. We all died in the name of something that I understand all too well. Nihilism, chaos, emptiness. Despair. I only got a glimpse of the ragged children, our murderers. They should have let me join them. I would have left with them.

I heard the howls. I still do. They’re trapped, just like us.

***

There is plenty of reading material here. It helps pass the time.

***

It’s always a mistake. It’s always a bad idea. It always ends like this. It always ends here. I am forever here. We are forever here.

Dear world. I have fallen in love again! And this time, it’s for real. He’s not a loser. He has a job. He bought me flowers yesterday! I won’t let him hit me. I’ve promised myself that. Signed, a new me.

She is a fucking Goddess. There is nothing I won’t do for her, in this moment.

My dad brought me here when I was a little girl. That was the first time I met his friend Elias. There were lots of friends after that, too many to count, but Elias was the first. Tonight he will be a different kind of first, when I find him. Goodbye.

Here I am. Where are you?

I just saw him with her, tonight. Stupid cunt. I fucking hate him. I am done. Never again. No one will ever hurt me again.

***

Sometimes we have visitors. First, it was the police. The detective in charge of the investigation was tall, thin as a barn cat. She moved like a cat, too. Every step taken with such deliberation. When she was still, the whole room went quiet. Even us, wild ghosts screaming as loud as we could, desperate to be heard, stilled the tremors in our useless throats when she stopped to examine a knife that had been left on the floor. I had already looked at it; it was covered in crude symbols, nothing that made sense to me. She looked at it closely, tilted her head closer and closer to the sticky blade. ‘Someone get me an evidence bag,’ she said, and the spell was broken. We ghosts went back to our frantic keening.

It was a comfort at first, to make noise. We learned, soon enough, that the living cannot hear our screams, so we stopped. A trick that we learned from the Dogs, when they came sniffing around, is that the living can, sometimes, hear our whispers.

I should have known that. I was taunted by whispering ghosts for years, after all.

I liked the detective. I tried to help her. I whispered things in her ear about the Dogs, everything I had learned. After death there was no division between Us and the Children. She brushed me away like I was a fly, so I stopped. She didn’t need to know the Truth of it, anyway. Truths are best left to the dead, I know that now.

After the police lost interest, the thrill-seekers came. The ones who heard the murmured rumours and some who were here when it happened. There is much to see here, and I don’t blame them. The walls are bloody. Redder than red. We ghosts have some powers, nothing extraordinary. But we do keep the walls red and sticky. Sometimes we make the broken lights bleed for visitors; it’s a good trick. The thrill-seekers bring the bones of strange animals and leave them for us. I am not sure why. We have no use for bones here. This is our City of Blood, now. But we appreciate the thought.

***

We first met, right here, leaning against this wall. An hour later we were fucking standing up in the alley, me pressed up against the cement wall. It was the best day of my life, which is sad.

I don’t have a love story to leave here.

once upon a time there was a handsome prince and he fell in love with a beautiful princess and they lived happily ever after the end until the princess got pregnant and had to have an abortion because there was no way she could support him herself and a baby on a stripper’s wages not to mention his new habit that was costing more and more every day when he found out he gave her a black eye and almost broke her arm but luckily it was only a sprain and she couldn’t leave because no one would ever love her the way he loved her and they lived happily ever after the end

She fucks my friends, and she knows I know it, and I love her anyway. I think ours is the purest love. No one else sees her the way I see her. She is the sun and I lift my face hungrily to hers.

He wears me. I have
stitched my body to his –
slid pins through his skin,
joined us limb to limb –
braided my hair into his –
left nothing unattached.
He wear me – a
crochet, I loosen daily –
deft hands tear my masterpiece.
My threads unravel.
He will soon be gone – my cold
statue, my beginning,
my zero.

There is no better truth-teller than a pitcher of beer. Ask me at the end of the night what I think about love.

***

No one has ever come looking for me. After the thrill-seekers and the blood-lusters came the Beloved. The ones who were left behind after we died. Some of us, if we had visitors, tried screaming, but gave up quickly, reminded that we cannot be heard. It’s better to whisper.

I would have liked a visitor. I came to the City to find something – happiness, love, something – and all I got was this. Trapped in the house of love, forever whispering.

***

A man came here, one day. By that time the police, the thrill-seekers, and the Beloved were long gone. It was only us ghosts, rattling the bones, reading the walls, whispering amongst ourselves. The man opened the door and walked in, trailing a cloud of cigarette smoke behind him. His long black coat was dusty. He was barefoot.

He walked to the back wall and stood there for awhile, reading.

I drifted, peered over his shoulder.

I am her prisoner, but I fastened the chains myself, it read.

Not my favorite, to be honest, but I’ve had months – maybe years, I can’t remember – to study the psalms (as some here have taken to calling them) and puzzle out their meanings.

The man looked right at me.

Prisoners do not write on walls.

I heard his voice inside me, inside the whorls and folds of my ghostly self. For the first time in so long, I felt warm.

You can leave now.

His voice was the sun. The sun is a brilliant egg, I remembered. A yellow thing, new every morning.

‘Thank you’, I whispered.

He left.

***

The past is a story that I am whispering. Soon, I think that I will be leaving.