Restless Souls

                After the accident, I thought the first spirit I saw was a hallucination, a side effect of the pain meds they had me on. It happened to be the lady from the room across the hall, who’d been hospitalized with a harsh, wracking cough.

                I’d been limping to the bathroom when she passed, her soul rising out of her body, dressed in a fine black dress that hugged her hips, the full skirt sparkling as if full of the night’s stars, meeting a man in midair, dressed in a fine gray suit. And then they disappeared, as if they’d never been.

                And then I heard the high-pitched squealing of her machines. “The patient has flatlined!” A doctor walked down the hall at a brisk clip, gray eyes grim and dark.

                I tried to shake off the woman’s death, but something inside of me lingered, worrying at the memory like a kid with a loose tooth. It had to have been a crazy dream, a side effect; people didn’t really see ghosts. Or perhaps I was going crazy. I’d lost everything in the car crash that had killed my family. Maybe my mind just couldn’t take the strain.

                Once I was out of the hospital, I forced myself off of the meds, even when the pain was enough to nearly knock me out. When the hallucinations didn’t persist, I thought I was home free.

                But that was before The Cataclysm, before the Veil thinned, and the death numbers climbed. Everywhere I went, souls departed from their bodies in pale, opaque clouds, and I wept, hearing their voices, feeling their emotions, receiving flashes of their memories. I stayed in my bed for three days, my job be damned.

                But unfortunately, I wasn’t crazy, cracked, or mad. It was our world’s rules that had gone all screwy. Our world’s balance had been thrown all out of whack, and by some strange twist of fate, I was dealing with the fallout of it all.

                I couldn’t make it stop, no matter how I tried. I tried to sleep, tried to lose myself in my hobbies, anything to distract from the constant, discordant noise within my own head. It was tempting to call the doctor, beg for some more medication. I’d denied it at the hospital, but the thought of an escape was so sweet that I got halfway through dialing the number before I changed my mind.

                Then I noticed that a spirit was hovering over my head, a young woman who looked a few years younger than I.

                I blinked, and my mouth opened as I met her eyes.

                “You can see me!” She said, and her voice was a low, quiet rasp. “Oh, my God, you can see me! Finally! I’ve been so lonely!” She was in a wedding dress, the pristine white fabric marred by something dark and tacky, and it was completely at odds with the sunny smile upon her face. She was still holding her bouquet: roses, lilies, baby’s breath and peonies.

                “What happened to you?”

                “Oh, my ex murdered me on my wedding night,” The ghost said airily, waving her free hand as if shooing away an errant butterfly. “But that’s all right, because now, I finally found someone to talk to!”

                What had I gotten myself into?

                **