Welcome Home

He sighed in frustration and clenched his jaw. “That’s it,” he growled. “That’s the last straw.”

It had been five months, five arduous months, since his best friend had passed. True, their relationship had been rocky at times. Sure, they had occasionally come to blows. But, at the heart of the matter, their good-natured rivalry had kept them both sane. Now, only one of the two remained, and he was taking it badly.

The initial, raw absence of his comrade had been almost too much for him to bear. Indeed, for the first several weeks, he had sequestered himself in his room, refusing to speak with anyone or eat. The latter of these self-imposed restrictions became impractical the evening of the first day, and so he stole out that night, after everyone else had gone to bed, to retrieve a minimum of sustenance for himself.

And so he lived, barely.

Eventually, after his fourth week of solitude, he had ventured out. He had grown numb to the pain, the emptiness. Remembering, however, was simply too painful. It crippled him, sometimes for spaces of ten minutes or more, and that drew the attention and, inevitably, the pity of the others. And that was the last thing he wanted now. For now, all he wanted to do was continue with life as usual, and try to avoid things that brought the memories of his dear friend flooding back.

The only problem with this plan was that his friend seemed dead-set against allowing these memories to slip into obscurity. Ever since day one of his reintegration with the outside world, he’d seen vague shadows, glimpses of an ephemeral figure out of the corner of his eye.

It looked eerily like his deceased friend.

He had made up his mind to pay no heed to these visions. He had convinced himself that it was his mind playing tricks on him. He had resolved to pretend to all who saw him that he was entirely sound of mind and body, for fear that they might quarantine him should they pick up on how drastically these appearances affected him. If they did that, then he would be alone again, and there would be no distraction from the specter that lingered on the edge of his sight.

Especially at night. Especially in the dark.

Of course, this tactic only served to make the phantom more determined than ever. It knocked things over, moved chairs, ripped papers, and, if it was feeling particularly irritated, forced the temperature to drop dramatically wherever it went. The others were beginning to suspect a connection, as most of these occurrences happened only when he was in the room.

Today, not ten seconds ago, this phantasm had caused a stack of reports he had been carrying to topple to the ground, scattering them across the floor. He had no patience left.

“Get out here, now!” He was shouting at nothing. People would notice. Funnily enough, at the moment, he couldn’t bring himself to care. “I know you’re there!” No response could be seen or heard. “No,” he said firmly. “Don’t you go skulking around in the shadows. Come out!”

Slowly, the figure materialized. A pale, translucent being in the form of a tall, muscular humanoid coalesced in midair, its feet separated from the floor by about three inches of air. It stared at him gravely, its pointed nose and chin providing an unmistakable air of ruthless efficiency that was all too recognizable. Oh, yes, this was undoubtedly the image – he absolutely refused to call it a ghost – of the one who had died all those months ago.

“How long have you known?” the thing asked. Its voice resembled the familiar growl of his colleague, but dampened and echoing, as though it spoke to him from the other end of a long tunnel.

“That something was there?” he replied with a false, flippant coolness. Inside, he was seething, but he wasn’t about to allow that to emerge in this confrontation. “Since you started bugging me. That it was you in particular? Since about two weeks ago.”

“Then why did you say nothing?”

A good question. Even he didn’t consciously know the answer, but he had an inkling of the turmoil going on in his subconscious. “Because I had this insane, naïve idea that, if I ignored you, you might go away.”

The spirit looked genuinely hurt. “Why would you want that?”

“Look,” he said matter-of-factly, “you’re dead. I watched you die. It was, quite possibly, the single hardest thing for me to watch in my entire life. I see it happen in my dreams, sometimes, over and over again.”

He paused, recalling the nightmare he often suffered: he would be running, sprinting, unable to move as fast as he needed to, his lungs and legs screaming in protest. He would come up over the crest of a hill, then nearly tumble down the other side into a small valley filled with burning trees. The heat and smoke were of no concern to him; time was the enemy here, as was the underbrush.

He would rush pell-mell through the chaos until he came upon a clearing. In the clearing’s center, on the ground, would be his friend, battered and bloodied, at death’s doorstep. He would run forward to cradle his comrade’s limp form, witness his friend’s final, ironic grin, and watch the body in his arms crumble to dust. A figure would suddenly fly at his face, shrieking, and frighten him awake. This was the way the dream went, and it never varied in its details, nor in the gloomy pall it would cast over him for the remainder of the day.

He shuddered and continued, “I hate it. I hate regretting what couldn’t be helped. I hate beating myself up ’cause you went and got yourself killed. With all that taken into consideration, is it really all that surprising I want to forget, or at least to not be actively reminded every waking moment?”

“Did it ever occur to you,” it said with that infamous haughty tone, “that I was trying to procure your attention for a reason?”

“Maybe,” he retorted honestly. “But dead is dead. I don’t need any metaphysical advice from beyond the grave, thanks.”

“You idiot. I wouldn’t give you advice if you paid me.” This phrase struck him like a bucket of ice water in the face. “Frankly,” it continued, “I’m astounded you managed to forget that. Although, considering your penchant for feats of senselessness, I suppose I shouldn’t be too shocked.” It spoke with the cold, harsh accuracy of its once-living self, but it betrayed a glimmer of humor in its eyes. Even more than that, the glimmer was an invitation. A gauntlet. One that had not been thrown in all these past five months.

He could do nothing but stand, stunned, for several moments. Then, of its own accord, a broad grin spread across his face. An image flashed across his memory, of his partner and him whiling away the long hours spent reconnoitering in the field by bickering like children. Granted, at these times, they were like children with unusually caustic wits and large vocabularies, but children no less. Perhaps not the most mature way to spend an afternoon, but it had kept them from tearing one another apart on several occasions.

He’d almost forgotten how much fun banter could be.

With a smirk that had been absent for far too long, he looked up at the form of his late comrade – which towered over him now as it had in life, if three inches taller than usual – and folded his arms across his chest.

“Then what, pray tell, is so important that you had to come back to haunt me just to say it?”

“Funny thing about that,” the apparition said solemnly, barely managing to conceal a grin of its own. “It took so long to get you to acknowledge my existence, I seem to have forgotten what it was I wished to say in the first place.”

“Aw, that is a shame, not to mention entirely characteristic of you. Looks like you’ll just have to stick around until you can remember it, nimrod.”

“So it would seem, fool.”

For the first time in so very, very long, the world felt right again.

“Care for a game of chess while you wait, lame brain? I know for darn sure you can move things, and I have the damaged property to prove it.”

“If you insist, moron. Although, why you would desire to instigate a challenge you are doomed to lose is quite beyond me.”

“Yeah, well maybe five months without a body’s destabilized your thought process a bit, nimrod, and that’s why you can’t comprehend my superior chess-playing skills.”

“You used ‘nimrod’ once already, numbskull. And, as I happen to recall, you couldn’t win a game of chess without cheating; this should hold true now, unless your so-called ‘skills’ have increased at a ridiculously exponential rate since my passing.”

“Psh, whatever. Just make your move before I beat you to the afterlife, you Casper wannabe.”

Oh, yes. It was so very good to be home.

End.