The following is a ghost story. Fair warning to the sensitive. That said, there are no spooks. No hauntings as such. No jump scares. No scares at all. In fact, I would say it’s a sweet story about grief, unfinished business, and self-realization.
And please give a huge shout-out to the author! This is Lindsey’s first publication, so be sure to tell her everything you loved in the comments.
Content warning: indirect depiction of suicide and death
Last Word
by Lindsey LeBlanc
The day of Hisayo’s funeral, Devarsh came home to find her waiting in his bedroom. She lay supine atop his duvet, flipping through his journal where she held it aloft. Devarsh’s suit jacket slipped from his fingers and fell with a whisper of fabric to the floor.
Hisayo tilted her head back to look at him. Her bangs fell away from her smooth, pale forehead. The mark on her neck, of which Devarsh had caught a glimpse beneath the makeup powdering her corpse, emerged from beneath the jut of her chin.
“Hey,” she said, sounding just like she had a week before, when Devarsh last saw her. “You must be Devarsh.” She leafed through the journal until she found the front page, and pointed at his name scrawled across the top.
His feet carried him across the room to stand beside the bed. Numbly, he reached out and grasped Hisayo’s forearm, testing its tangibility beneath his fingers. She watched him, expressionless. A bar of the setting sun’s light shone through the window and pooled, golden brown, in her iris.
“It’s rude to stare, you know,” she commented.
“Hisayo,” Devarsh breathed. “You’re alive.”
She quirked a thin brow at him. “Is that who I am? You write about me a lot.” She turned back to the journal. “‘Hisayo made me go see that new Scream with her. She said it was boring, but she says that about every movie. I thought it was good.’”
“What?” His grip on her arm tightened. She was cold. “Hisayo,” he repeated, “what the hell were you thinking? I— All of us thought… We should call your mom. She needs to know you’re—”
“Alive?” Abruptly, Hisayo sat up, bouncing slightly on the mattress. “I wouldn’t be so sure about that part.” Leaving the journal in her lap, she lifted the arm that Devarsh held, her fingers splayed in the light from the window. “Last I checked, living people aren’t see-through, Devarsh.”
Uncomprehendingly, Devarsh stared at what should’ve been the space occupied by her hand, but instead he found only the street outside his window, lined with parked cars and evenly-spaced trees. The phantom shapes of her fingers wiggled at him, near-invisible in the bright evening light. He opened his mouth, but his lips only moved soundlessly, unable to form the shape of speech.
“That is your name, right?” Hisayo asked. “I assume this is your depressing room, and your depressing diary, which makes me the chick who kicked it”—she flipped through the journal in her lap—“last Sunday.”
“Stop that.” Devarsh took the journal from her. “Don’t mess with me, Hisayo. You’re right in front of me. I can…” He shifted his grip to her wrist, studying her hand. Her fingers were visible in the dark of Devarsh’s room, away from the light of the window. “I can touch you. You have to be alive.”
“Believe whatever you want.” Hisayo’s hand slipped from his grasp. She slid from the duvet and crossed the room without a sound. Stopping before Devarsh’s desk, she pulled down one of the polaroids pinned to his wall. “All I know is I don’t remember any of this. My name, my family, the person I was… Nothing.” She flipped the photo to show Devarsh: a snapshot of the two of them from his fourteenth birthday, fighting to coat the other in cake and frosting. He couldn’t remember who’d started the brawl, but he did know that Hisayo finished it. “The girl in this picture is gone. I’m just, like, an imitation. Or something.”
“Then, you’re…” Devarsh stared between the picture and the journal in his hands. He sat heavily on the bed. “What, you’re a ghost?”
Hisayo shrugged, toying with the corner of the polaroid. Now that Devarsh looked closely, he could see hints of the other pictures on the wall behind her through her body. Instead of the stiff pantsuit she’d been dressed in for the funeral, she wore a pink floral dress that stopped just above her knees—the same she’d been wearing the day she died, sans her black leather jacket.
“You really don’t remember anything?” Devarsh asked faintly.
“Like I said, nothing.”
“Why are you here now?”
The creaking of Devarsh’s door interrupted Hisayo before she could respond. Ma’s head appeared in the doorway.
“Devarsh?” Her eyes, dark and worried, swept the shadows of his room. They passed over Hisayo as if she wasn’t there. “I heard your voice.”
“Just on the phone, Ma,” Devarsh assured her.
“Oh.” Her manicured brows furrowed. “With who?”
“Um,” Hisayo, Devarsh almost answered, because he was never on the phone with anyone else. “Aditi.”
“Your sister’s awake at this time? It must be midnight in her timezone.”
“Oh.” Belatedly, Devarsh closed his journal. He folded his hands over it in his lap. “I must have woken her up. I wasn’t really thinking about it.”
Ma’s face softened. “That’s okay, dear. I’m glad you’re speaking with her. Especially…” Her gaze drifted to the polaroids above Devarsh’s desk. At some point, Hisayo had set down the picture she was holding, likely so that Ma wouldn’t notice it floating in midair. Ma’s eyes lingered on it. “I’ll leave you alone now.” She retracted from the doorway.
“Wait.” Devarsh stood. Ma reappeared, her expression expectant. “Do you know anything about ghosts?”
“Ghosts?” Ma’s eyebrows climbed her forehead, wrinkling the bindi there. “What brought this about?”
“Just something Aditi brought up. She… she’s researching afterlife mythology.”
Ma hummed thoughtfully. She stepped further inside, leaning on the doorframe. “Your dadu was a firm believer. He used to swear up and down that my ma had come back to haunt him after she passed. That may have been the dementia.”
“Why would a spirit come back to haunt someone?”
“Unfinished business, improper funeral rites…” Ma counted the possibilities on her fingers. “Or a violent death, of course.”
“Right,” Devarsh muttered. His eyes strayed to Hisayo’s neck.
Ma frowned, following his gaze to the polaroids. “You shouldn’t concern yourself with folk tales, Devarsh. They’re only stories.”
“I know,” Devarsh said. Hisayo pursed her lips. “Thanks, Ma.”
Ma nodded and ducked back out of his room. “I love you, Devarsh,” she said, muffled through the door.
“Love you, too.”
Her footsteps whispered down the hall, then creaked softly down the steps. Hisayo stepped back into the dying sunlight. It carved two neat lines across her face and hips, through which Devarsh could see the picture abandoned on his desk.
“Unfinished business, funeral rites, or a violent death, huh?” Hisayo mused. “Which of those do you think it could be?”
“I don’t know.” Devarsh stowed his journal back under his bed, then busied himself with straightening the duvet. “Does it really matter?”
“You were the one asking why I’m here. Shouldn’t we try to find out so that I can move on or whatever?”
Devarsh drew a breath, in through his nose and out through his mouth. “Yeah. Okay. Unfinished business. You… You’ve never had a boyfriend, or a first kiss or anything. That was something you wanted to experience, I think.”
“Did I like anyone?”
“This guy Reuben. He’s on the swim team.”
“Well, then.” Hisayo crossed the room and sat on Devarsh’s bed just as he smoothed out the last crease. “Introduce me.”
*
Behind us, with the blue hair, Devarsh scrawled out in the margins of his notes.
Hisayo turned to look. “Freckles?” she said. “He’s handsome.”
Lounging sideways in her usual seat beside Devarsh, she appraised Reuben Javorsky where he sat a few rows back, watching attentively as Ms. Aitken dotted a line of bullet points onto the whiteboard. With sea-blue hair to match his eyes and white, speckled skin, he reminded Devarsh of the beach. At a pause in writing, Reuben looked up and met Devarsh’s gaze.
Devarsh faced forward and busied himself with catching up to the lecture. Ms. Aitken was saying something about the eighteenth amendment that he lacked the context to understand, so he simply copied down the notes and resolved to go over them later.
“What’s he like?” Hisayo asked.
Nice, Devarsh wrote. Like, really nice. Acts like he’s friends with everyone.
“Dreamy. It’s as good a place to start as any in terms of resolving unfinished business. Problem—how do I confess if he can’t hear or see me?”
Pensively, Devarsh rolled his pencil between his fingers. He was falling increasingly behind on the notes. I might have an idea.
*
“I think it’ll be innate, like something I can do instinctively,” Hisayo theorized.
They stood alone in an empty hallway that branched off the old wing of the school building, dimly lit and lined with unused classrooms. Glinting staples pierced the walls, pinning up fliers or student-made cell diagrams or nothing at all, simply stuck into the plaster. Hisayo looked more solid than ever before in the dark. A draft from the wheezing air conditioning vent above brought goosebumps to Devarsh’s arms.
“Just do what you have to do,” Devarsh said, rubbing the back of his neck. “I’m your willing vessel. Also, I don’t think we’re allowed to be here, so we should hurry.”
Hisayo placed both hands on his shoulders and closed her eyes in concentration. Wondering how he was supposed to brace himself for something like this, Devarsh closed his own. He waited to be possessed, whatever that meant or felt like. For a long, tense moment, there was only the sensation of Hisayo touching him, cold through Devarsh’s shirt, and the distant rumble of students migrating to lunch. Then, the feeling of Hisayo’s hands, along with all feeling in Devarsh’s body, disappeared. His eyes opened to the poster-papered wall before him, no Hisayo in sight. His vision fell to his hands, which held themselves aloft and flipped up their palms, wiggling their fingers.
Hisayo let Devarsh’s hands drop. She walked his body to the cafeteria and scanned the sea of heads until she sighted the boy’s sea-blue hair.
Reuben sat with the other members of the swim team, smiling at something another boy said. He looked up as Hisayo approached.
“Devarsh,” he said in greeting. His teammates quieted, eyeing them with an air of anticipation. “What’s up?”
“Hey,” Hisayo said with Devarsh’s mouth. “I need to talk to you.”
The boy next to Reuben elbowed him, smirking. “Oh, of course,” Reuben said, standing. He followed Hisayo out onto the cafeteria patio and around the side of the school, where a small patch of lawn used primarily by students skipping class existed between the main and athletic buildings. A swath of clouds blotted out the sun. Wind that Devarsh couldn’t feel tousled Reuben’s hair.
“What was it you wanted to talk about?” Reuben said.
“What did you think of Hisayo?” Hisayo asked.
“Oh.” Reuben looked down, fiddling with one of the buttons on his letterman. “I thought she was cool. I mean, she always said exactly what she wanted to say, you know? I admired that.”
“You think she’s pretty?”
Reuben blinked. Distantly, Devarsh began to recognize the dangers of giving Hisayo free reign of his body, but, watching the scene as if it were a dream, didn’t feel any urge to intervene. He didn’t feel much of anything.
“Hey, man,” Reuben began, “are you doing alright? I mean, we all know you were closer to Hisayo than anyone. If you ever need to talk or just to be distracted, I’m here, you know?”
Hisayo was silent for a long moment. “I’m alright,” she responded. “Thank you.”
“Of course.”
Wind whistled between the buildings, buffeting long, dark strands of Devarsh’s hair around his peripheral vision. Hisayo brought his body two steps forward to stand before Reuben. She put a hand on his cheek and closed her eyes as she leaned in to kiss him.
Reuben’s face was blank with shock when she pulled away. Hisayo stepped around him and turned into the athletic complex. She wandered between buildings until she found the underside of a set of bleachers that overlooked the football field, barricaded by a chain link fence. Set apart from the sports buildings by a wide stretch of grass, the spot was empty of anyone else.
With a sensation like ice water trickling through his skin, Hisayo left Devarsh’s body. He stumbled, catching himself against the fence. Hisayo brushed her hands down her dress.
“I don’t think that worked,” she said.
“I think,” Devarsh began, his tongue numb in his mouth, “that you might’ve given him the wrong idea.”
Hisayo hid a grin behind her hand, eyes twinkling. “Was that your first kiss?”
Devarsh glared at her. “Seriously. I’m never letting you possess me again.” A deep chill had found its way into Devarsh’s very core with Hisayo’s possession and now refused to leave. He crossed his arms around himself.
“I thought you were my willing vessel.” Hisayo joined him in leaning against the fence, gazing up at the clouded sky. “If that wasn’t it, what else could get me to move on?”
The tilt of her chin bared the angry red line marring her neck. Bile rose in Devarsh’s throat.
“To be honest,” he said, swallowing, “I have no clue. What do you want to do?”
The clouds shifted for a moment, and Hisayo’s face was see-through before it went back to solid. “Let’s try a movie.”
“A movie?”
“Yes.”
“What kind of movie?”
She smirked. “Something better than Scream. What’s showing?”
With numb fingers, Devarsh fished his phone out of his pocket and brought up the local theater’s website. “The Equalizer 3, Hocus Pocus, Saw X…”
“Let’s do Saw.”
“I thought you said better than Scream.”
Hisayo’s smile dropped. “What, you’ve already seen it?”
“No.”
“Then how can you know? C’mon, don’t be boring.” Hisayo pushed off the fence and twirled to face him, hands on her hips.
Meeting Hisayo’s deadpan expression, Devarsh felt a familiar mix of exasperation and resignation that had followed him throughout sixteen years of proximity with her. The words rose naturally to his lips: “Okay. Saw. Why not?”
*
Devarsh got popcorn for himself and a coke Icee at Hisayo’s insistence. He wandered down the colorfully-carpeted aisle of the movie theater, searching the screens above each door for their showing.
“Can you even drink an Icee?” he asked once they were out of earshot of the concession worker.
“I can touch stuff,” Hisayo said. “Why shouldn’t I be able to drink it?” She leaned over and took a noisy slurp from the cup in Devarsh’s hand. He avoided eye contact with a family that passed them and slipped into the theater labeled Saw X.
They were the only ones there, likely because they were thirty minutes early and it was one PM on a Monday. The large projector screen was still unlit. Devarsh chose two seats toward the middle of the theater.
“So, was that your first kiss?” Hisayo pressed. There was almost a glow to her in the dark.
“Shut up about it already,” Devarsh griped. “Even if it was, it doesn’t count.”
“He really is handsome, though. I don’t see why you’re complaining.”
“Not handsome enough for unfinished business, apparently.”
“It was worth it just to see the look on his face.” Humor seeped into Hisayo’s voice. “I can’t wait to see how this develops. That’ll be what gets me to move on—watching the romance blossom between you two, building up to the day that Reuben finally confesses—“
“Stop it,” Devarsh said, laughing despite himself.
“Tell me about myself,” Hisayo requested.
“Like what?” Devarsh asked.
“Reuben said I was straightforward. Do you think that’s true?”
“Well, yeah.” Devarsh nibbled on a bit of popcorn. “Your personality’s pretty much the same.”
“Did I like horror movies?”
“I don’t know. You didn’t like much of anything.”
“You don’t know a lot. I thought we were supposed to be close.” Hisayo took a handful of popcorn for herself. “In your diary, you wrote that you don’t know what to do now that I’m dead. That your life was one long road trip and all four tires just blew out at once.”
“Hey.” Devarsh’s brow furrowed. “Just how much did you read?”
“So I must’ve been pretty great, right?” Hisayo’s voice lifted in a way it rarely did. “Except I’m not. I’m kind of a bore, aren’t I? All my crush had to say about me was that I was blunt. You’re supposed to be my closest friend, but you don’t know anything about me. So who the hell was I, Devarsh? Why am I here?”
An advertisement for a local carpet-cleaning agency flickered to life on the screen. Devarsh stared at Hisayo, his eyes wide. “I am your closest friend,” he managed. “At least, you were mine.” He gazed down at the popcorn. “Only, I wasn’t sure that you ever cared about me. The day that you died, we went out for boba and I dropped you off at your house and you didn’t say a word to me about anything. I only found out you were dead the next morning, when your mom called mine and she broke the news.
“So maybe you’re right. I never knew anything about you. I never asked. Since then… it’s like nothing’s been real. I can’t move forward. I’m just stuck on the side of the road.”
“Am I real?”
Hisayo watched him, her elbow propped on the armrest between them. The light from the projection couldn’t seem to decide whether to dance across her face or seep through her, flickering through an array of reds and blues. “I…” Devarsh trailed off.
“Do you want me to be real?”
“Yes. No. Not… as you are now.”
A pause stretched between them, punctuated by canned endorsements of M&M’s.
Hisayo plucked her Icee from the cup holder and slurped it meditatively. “I wonder if I’m really meant to move on.” Her voice took on a familiar, flat tone. “Maybe I’m here for no reason. A memory.”
“No. No, there must be a reason.” Devarsh grasped her wrist, cold as the drink in her hand, but solid. “Funeral rites. We still haven’t tried funeral rites.”
Slowly, Hisayo blinked at him. “Okay,” she said. “Was there something wrong with my funeral?”
“Well, no. But rites are more about what’s done with the body, right? So, we should check on your body.”
The projected advertisement flooded with pink, sending a wash of rosy color over Hisayo’s profile. “And where is that?”
*
Mrs. Yoshinaga ignored the doorbell on Devarsh’s first two rings of the button. He shifted uncomfortably, leaning sideways to peer through the frosted glass of the window beside the front door.
Hisayo reached over him and held down the doorbell. A non-stop chime began to ring through the house, audible through the front door. Devarsh twisted to glare at her over his shoulder.
“Stop that,” he said.
“Maybe she isn’t home,” Hisayo suggested airily.
“If she is—”
The door swung open. Devarsh straightened hastily, knocking his head on Hisayo’s arm on the way up and nearly falling over. Mrs. Yoshinaga stared down at him, her expression distinctly unimpressed. She was dressed in a simple beige blouse and neat, white slacks. From her short, black hair to her elegant facial features, the woman bore a striking resemblance to her daughter. The difference between them, Devarsh recalled as he met Mrs. Yoshinaga’s gaze, was the sharp judgment the woman passed through her presence alone.
“Devarsh, isn’t it?” she greeted him. “One ring of the doorbell is typically sufficient.”
“Yes Ma’am,” Devarsh blurted. “I mean, I’m sorry. I fell.”
Mrs. Yoshinaga frowned at him. “I see.” Her gaze swept critically over his loose jeans and T-shirt. “Did you need something?”
“Yes. Ah, I’m sorry about your daughter,” Devarsh began.
“Was it you who killed her?” Mrs. Yoshinaga asked.
Devarsh’s heart dropped. He tried several times to speak, but his words failed him, so he simply opened and closed his mouth like an asphyxiating fish.
“An awful lot of people have told me they’re sorry, lately,” the woman continued. “And yet, none can tell me what for.”
She watched him as if waiting for a response, so Devarsh managed to say, “Just that it happened.”
Mrs. Yoshinaga sniffed. “Is that all?”
“No.” Devarsh glanced sideways at Hisayo, where she studied her mother as if looking for something familiar. “We—I was wondering what you were doing with her ashes.”
Mrs. Yoshinaga watched him for a few moments in silence. Finally, she turned and strode into the house, leaving the door open behind her. Devarsh ducked inside.
Aside from one brief visit several years before, Hisayo’s house was unfamiliar to Devarsh beyond the driveway and glimpses in the backgrounds of Facetime calls. High, sloped ceilings carried the whisper of Mrs. Yoshinaga’s house slippers sliding over the white granite floors. She led Devarsh past a set of stairs to a living room devoid of any decoration besides a short, beige couch and twin urns over the mantle.
“She’s beside her father.” Mrs. Yoshinaga picked up the urn on the left. Black with gold detailing, it was identical to the one beside it apart from its shape, being slightly shorter than the other vessel. Hisayo brushed past Devarsh as her mother turned, the urn clasped between the woman’s thin, pale fingers. Hisayo reached out and ran a finger along the bright stripe along the vase’s lip.
“Her ashes will be staying here.” Mrs. Yoshinaga said.
“Kind of a depressing eternity,” Hisayo said, withdrawing her hand. Weak sunlight, filtering through a set of narrow windows near the ceiling, turned her hair translucent. “Trapped in a jar. Not like I’m actually in there, though.”
Devarsh frowned. “She didn’t ask to have them scattered?” he asked Mrs. Yoshinaga.
The woman shrugged. “Hisayo left me no instructions on what to do with them. I never knew what that girl wanted from me.” She set the urn back on the mantle. “I’m sure she wouldn’t care either way what happens with them. ‘I’m already dead, Mom. Just donate them to Goodwill.’”
Mrs. Yoshinaga gazed at the urn, then her late husband’s beside it. Devarsh studied her—the stiff slope of her shoulders, the faint wrinkles lining her face. With a tilt of her chin, her hair curtained her face, concealing it from Devarsh’s view. “Why don’t you come look through her things?” She turned and strode straight through Hisayo back the way they’d come. Stunned, Devarsh was left to hurry after her, up the stairs and past abstract monochromatic paintings to a door at the end of a dim hallway. Mrs. Yoshinaga opened it to a large bedroom that Devarsh vaguely recognized as belonging to Hisayo.
There was little to the space aside from a low, queen-sized bed, a vanity, and an open closet. A lavender duvet was tucked neatly over the bed’s mattress, accented with beaded pillows in various shades of brown. A diverse collection of lip gloss, concealer, and eyeshadow palettes were slotted into an organizer atop the vanity. A single, large window allowed feeble sunlight to seep into the room and tint the scene a dull gray.
The tidiness struck Devarsh as unnatural. Hisayo had never cared enough for presentation to make up her bed or put away her makeup. The only thing out of place was the closet, where clothes spilled over the edges of a hamper to lie rumpled on the floor. A lone coat hung from the rod—the same leather jacket Hisayo had been wearing the last Devarsh saw her.
Mrs. Yoshinaga waited in the doorway, allowing Devarsh to enter the room and look around. Hisayo drifted in after him. Devarsh kneeled and peered under the bed. He pulled out a shoebox and pried off the lid to find a small collection of seashells, most of them missing chips or split down the middle with hairline cracks. Hisayo was standing in front of the closet. She ran a finger along the material of the jacket, but was careful not to move it.
“Is there anything that I can’t take?” Devarsh asked Mrs. Yoshinaga.
The woman shook her head. “Take whatever you like,” Mrs. Yoshinaga said. “I’ll have to get rid of that hoard beneath her bed one way or another.” With that, she turned and walked back down the hallway, disappearing down the steps.
Devarsh walked over to the closet and took the jacket from its hanger. Thick and fraying around the hems, Hisayo had worn it everywhere, with everything. Standing in front of him, her spirit’s shoulders seemed bare without it.
“Here,” he offered her the jacket. “Wear this.”
“Why?”
“Just take it.” Devarsh pushed it into Hisayo’s hands, and she relented, shrugging it over her shoulders.
“Happy?” She twirled, her dress swirling around her knees, before following her mother’s path back in the direction they’d come from. “Now let’s get what we came for.”
Mrs. Yoshinaga was nowhere to be found downstairs, presumably somewhere down the dim hall opposite the bottom of the staircase. Hisayo plucked her urn from the mantle and strode cheerfully back out the front entrance into the feeble sunlight.
“Is that really okay?” Devarsh asked. “I mean, your mom might want to have it.”
“I don’t think she cares,” Hisayo said. “Besides, they’re my ashes. Where do you think I would’ve wanted them scattered?”
Devarsh took a moment to think about it. “You liked the ocean.”
“Sure, let’s do that.” The vase tucked in the crook of her elbow, Hisayo opened the passenger-side door to Devarsh’s car and ducked inside. Hoping none of the neighbors had gotten a glimpse of a floating urn or automatically operating car doors, Devarsh slid into the driver’s seat.
“I feel like that’s a little too quick of a decision,” he said as he started the engine. “Shouldn’t it be somewhere, like, significant?”
“Like where?”
Devarsh grimaced as he put the car in gear and began driving aimlessly out of Hisayo’s neighborhood. “I don’t know. You weren’t the kind of person to put much sentiment in anything.”
“Right. So, the ocean.”
Devarsh relented. As he drove in the direction of the beach, a faint drizzle began to fall, frosting his windshield with beads of water. Hisayo fiddled with the stereo system until gentle indie pop fizzled through the speakers, then fiddled with it some more until she found a station playing rock. She stared out the passenger side window as the sea came into view, her urn cradled in her lap.
Devarsh pulled over at their usual spot, his tires rumbling over the gravel on the side of the road. Hisayo popped open her door and walked down the short sandy slope to the dock—a short thing of water-laden wood and barnacles. Taking a moment to lock the car, Devarsh followed.
Storm winds roiled the ocean surface. Steady mist blended the gray sky and deep, dark sea into one, swallowing the horizon up in water. The rain picked up, pattering Hisayo’s jacket and tracing down the side of Devarsh’s face.
“Alright.” Hisayo took the lid off of the urn. “Time to move on for good.”
“Wait.” Devarsh stopped her with a hand on her wrist. She was almost warm, solid beneath the steadily darkening sky.
“What?” Hisayo looked at him expectantly. The waves roared, lashing the sides of the dock and spraying them with salt. A car sped by on the road.
“What if… What if this is really it? It could be the last time that I see you, talk to you…”
“Isn’t that the whole point?” Hisayo frowned at him. The wind pushed her bangs back, then plastered them flat to her forehead. Standing before him, on this dock in that jacket like a hundred times before, she really could’ve been alive. “This whole time, you’ve been trying to help me move on. You said you didn’t want me here, not as I am.”
“That isn’t what I meant! I do want you here, just…”
“Alive.”
“I want you to be happy. I thought that moving on was what you wanted, that it would make you happy, but… I don’t know. I just don’t want you to go.”
A wave, sudden and higher than the others, crashed over the dock, showering them both in icy water. Hisayo jerked and dropped the urn. It rolled over the side of the dock into the churning sea below.
“No!” Devarsh exclaimed. Black, swirling water found its way into the vessel’s mouth and it sank, drowned beneath the waves. Hisayo stared after it, her face blank except for the wideness of her eyes. Devarsh watched her for signs of fading—was her skin turning translucent? Did he imagine the flickering of her form? Thunder rumbled over the crashing of the sea before the storm dipped into a breath of stillness, quieting a moment as Hisayo turned dark eyes to meet Devarsh’s.
“Still here,” she said.
And she was, more than ever before. Her cheeks glowed pink to match her dress. A small smile sat on her lips. The mark under her chin was stark against her pale skin.
Her wrist clasped tightly in his grip, Devarsh used his free hand to wipe angrily at the tears mixing with rainwater on his cheeks. “I just don’t understand why you left in the first place,” he choked. “You didn’t even leave me a note. Why didn’t you say something? Why didn’t you call? Why’d you have to go and die, Hisayo?”
Gently, she pried his fingers from her arm and clasped his hand in her own. “I wish there was something I could say, Devarsh. But I don’t even understand why this matters so much to you. That girl you wrote about in your diary didn’t sound like that great of a friend. I mean, I didn’t even like Scream.”
Devarsh’s knuckles whitened around Hisayo’s fingers. “The truth is, I didn’t either. I didn’t even want to go to that stupid movie, but you wouldn’t stop spamming my phone until I agreed to take you, and it… it was so much fun, because you made faces during all the scary parts, and I laughed so hard I thought the people in front of us were going to get us kicked out of the theater. And now I’m…” Laughing wetly, Devarsh gestured at his car parked in the gravel. “I’m stuck on the side of the road. Because all my tires blew out.”
Hisayo released his hand and looped her arms around him instead, tucking her chin over his shoulder. “Maybe you just need new tires,” she said, her voice close to his ear.
Devarsh hugged her. She grew cold, and then she was gone, and Devarsh was left clutching a worn leather jacket.
About the author:
Lindsey LeBlanc is a student in Chattanooga, Tennessee. She enjoys stories about relationships and spirituality, especially where the two meet in the middle, as they do in her first published work, "Last Word." When she is not writing about what it means to love someone, she enjoys sunbathing near bodies of water.
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Everyone handles grief differently. Some seek companionship, others need alone time. Some grieve loudly, some silently. Some move on quickly, and for some the wound never fully closes over. Which way is right? Which way is wrong? All of the above, and none of the above.
A beautiful story. Thanks.
Cool choice of names.