Tidal
The apartment had been empty for 43 days. I knew because I’d counted them, not on purpose, I just had nothing else to do. When you’re dead, time moves differently. Sometimes a day feels like 10 minutes. Sometimes 10 minutes feels like drowning.
I sat on the kitchen counter, legs dangling over the edge, watching the afternoon light cut through the grimy window. Dust floated in the beam like tiny ghosts. Smaller ghosts than me. Lucky them.
The apartment was small. One bedroom, a bathroom with tiles that had probably been white in 1974, and this kitchen that was really just a corner with a stove.
The last person who lived here was a woman named Delilah Vance. She had three cats and played opera music at two in the morning. I used to sit in her living room and watch her conduct invisible orchestras with a wooden spoon, her cats weaving between her ankles.
She never knew I was there.
Then one day she packed everything into boxes, cried into her hands for 20 minutes by the door, and left. The cats meowed from their carriers. I wanted to tell her it would be okay, wherever she was going. But my voice just disappeared into nothing, the way it always did.
That was 37 days ago. I should leave. Go somewhere else in Behinton Town. But there were only so many places to go, and I’d been to all of them about a thousand times.
The coffee shop on Fletcher Street where Ramona made the same terrible scones every morning. The bookstore with the faded awning where Mr. Kowalski alphabetized the same shelves over and over. The park where teenagers smoked behind the pavilion and pretended they were the first people to ever feel misunderstood.
I’d walked every sidewalk. Sat on every bench and tried every door. Most days I ended up back here, in whatever apartment was empty, because at least empty spaces didn’t remind me that I didn’t exist.
The building was old, the kind where the floors creaked and the radiators clanged like someone was hitting them with a hammer. Four floors, eight apartments total. Mrs. Gatto lived below this one with her dog, Biscuit, who barked at me sometimes. Dogs could sense things. Biscuit was the only creature in four years who seemed to know I was real.
I slid off the counter and walked to the window.
Behinton Town spread out below me in all its forgettable glory. It wasn’t a bad neighborhood. It wasn’t a good one either. It was the kind of place people ended up when they couldn’t afford somewhere better but didn’t want somewhere worse. The laundromat on the ground floor had a flickering neon sign that said “SUDS” in pink letters. Across the street was Mike’s Pizza, and next to that, a convenience store run by two brothers who argued in Turkish every single day at 4:30.
Past that, I could just barely see the corner of Union Street.
I looked away.
I didn’t like thinking about Union Street. But it was hard not to when it was right there, always right there, like a scar on the neighborhood that only I could see.
4 years.
Had it really been 4 years?
Sometimes I still thought I’d wake up. That this was some kind of mistake. A coma, maybe. Or a bad trip, though I’d never done drugs, so that didn’t make sense. Maybe I was in a hospital somewhere and this was all a dream while my brain tried to fix itself.
But then I’d try to pick something up, a book, a coffee cup, anything and my hand would go right through it. Or I’d see my reflection, or the lack of one, in a mirror. Or I’d try to leave Behinton Town, try to cross the invisible line at the edge of the neighborhood, and my body would stop like I’d hit a wall made of nothing.
Those were the moments I couldn’t pretend anymore.
I was dead.
I died on Union Street on a Tuesday night, walking home from a concert. Some band I can’t even remember the name of now. I was 19. I had a jean jacket with patches sewn on it and boots that hurt my feet. My phone was almost dead and I was texting my roommate, Piper, telling her I’d be home in ten minutes and asking if she wanted me to pick up snacks.
She texted back: Chips. The good kind. Not those healthy ones you always get.
I laughed and looked up just in time to see the headlights.
I don’t remember the impact. I remember the sound, this awful crunch that didn’t seem real. I remember being on the ground and thinking, My jacket’s ruined. I remember someone screaming. I remember hands on me, a voice saying, “Stay with me, stay with me,” and I wanted to say, I’m trying, but nothing came out.
Then I was standing on the sidewalk, watching paramedics work on someone on the ground.
It took me a long time to realize that someone was me.
They covered me with a yellow tarp eventually. Yellow. Not white or black or anything that made sense for death. Just this bright, awful yellow that looked like a raincoat.
I stood there and watched them take my body away.
I thought someone would come for me. A light, maybe. Or an angel. I wasn’t religious, but it seemed like there should be something, right? Some kind of process. A tunnel, a door, a fucking instruction manual.
But there was nothing.
Just me, standing on Union Street, watching the ambulance drive away.
I tried to follow it. I made it three blocks before I hit the barrier. It didn’t look like anything, just air but I couldn’t move past it. I pushed and pushed until I was screaming, but it was like the whole world ended at the edge of Behinton Town.
So I walked back.
And I’d been here ever since.
At first, I tried everything. I yelled at people, waved my hands in their faces, knocked things over. Nothing worked. I was invisible. Silent. I didn’t have a reflection or a shadow. I couldn’t move objects or write messages in steam on mirrors. I wasn’t that kind of ghost.
I was just... stuck.
For a while, I followed Piper around. She came to Behinton Town once, a few months after I died. She left flowers on Union Street and cried so hard she had to sit down on the curb. I sat next to her and tried to hold her hand, but my fingers went through hers like smoke.
She wiped her face, stood up, and walked away.
I never saw her again.
After that, I stopped trying so hard. I let myself fade into the background. I became part of Behinton Town the way streetlights and cracks in the sidewalk were part of it, but not noticed.
I watched people. I learned their routines. I gave them names in my head when I didn’t know their real ones. There was Grocery List Guy, who shopped at the convenience store every Thursday and always forgot milk. There was Headphones Girl, who jogged past at 6 a.m. with music so loud I could hear the bass. There was the couple who fought on the corner by the pizza place every Sunday night and then made up by Monday morning.
I wasn’t part of their lives. But I could pretend I was.
The thing about being dead is that you can’t feel most things anymore. I couldn’t feel hot or cold. I couldn’t feel hungry or tired. I couldn’t feel pain.
But I could feel lonely.
God, I could feel lonely.
A truck rumbled down the street below, and I pressed my face to the window. It was one of those moving trucks, the kind people rented when they didn’t have enough stuff for a real moving company but too much to fit in a car. It pulled up in front of the building, right below me.
I watched as the driver’s side door opened.
A guy stepped out.
He looked about my age, maybe a little older. Messy brown hair that stuck up in the back like he’d just woken up. He wore a faded green t-shirt and jeans with a hole in one knee. He stood there for a second, hands on his hips, staring up at the building like he was trying to decide if this was a mistake.
Then he said, out loud, to no one: “Okay. This is fine. This is totally fine. It’s just an apartment. People live in apartments all the time. You’ve lived in apartments before. This one just happens to smell like... what is that, mothballs? Or maybe sadness. Can sadness have a smell?”
I blinked.
He was talking to himself.
He walked around to the back of the truck, still muttering. “Should’ve hired movers. But no, you said you’d save money. You said it would be easy. ‘How heavy can a couch be?’ Spoiler: very heavy. Extremely heavy.”
He opened the truck and pulled out a box labeled KITCHEN in black marker. He carried it toward the building, talking the whole time. “First box. This is progress. This is adulting. Tony Bright, responsible human being. Tony Bright, a guy who definitely knows what he’s doing with his life.”
Tony.
His name was Tony.
I watched him disappear into the building, and heard his footsteps on the stairs. Heavy, uneven. He was carrying something awkward.
A minute later, he was in the apartment.
My apartment. The empty one I’d been sitting in for 37 days.
He dropped the box on the floor with a thud and wiped his forehead. “Okay. One down. Forty to go. Why do I own so many things? I don’t even like things.”
He looked around the apartment, hands on his hips again. His eyes passed right over me.
Of course they did.
“It’s smaller than the pictures,” he said. “Why is it always smaller than the pictures? Do landlords have, like, a special wide-angle camera that makes every place look huge? Is that a class you take in landlord school?”
He walked into the kitchen three steps, because that’s all it took and opened the cabinet under the sink. He peered inside, grimaced, and closed it again.
“Nope. Don’t want to know. Ignorance is bliss.”
I should’ve left. I should’ve gone downstairs or across the street or literally anywhere else. I’d seen people move in before. It was always the same. They’d unpack, settle in, live their lives and I’d be invisible.
But something about him made me stay.
Maybe it was the way he talked to himself, like he was trying to fill the silence. Or maybe it was the way he looked around the apartment, not excited nor disappointed, just... tired. Like he was going through emotions because that’s what people did, not because he wanted to.
He looked lost.
I knew what that felt like.
Tony made four more trips to the truck, carrying boxes and muttering commentary the whole time. “Books. Why do I have so many books? I don’t even read anymore. Oh, that’s depressing. Add that to the list of things I used to do. Right under ‘having a plan’ and ‘knowing what I want.’”
By the time he finished, it was almost dark. He stood in the middle of the living room, surrounded by boxes, and sighed.
“Home sweet home,” he said. It didn’t sound sweet. It sounded like giving up.
He pulled out his phone, scrolled for a second, then put it away. He opened a box labeled KITCHEN, pulled out a mug that said WORLD’S OKAYEST EMPLOYEE, and stared at it.
“Yeah,” he said. “That about sums it up.”
He put the mug on the counter right where I was sitting.
I moved without thinking, sliding off the counter to stand a few feet away.
Tony didn’t notice. Of course he didn’t.
He ran his hand through his hair and looked around. “This place needs... I don’t know. Something. Plants? Do I seem like a plant guy? No. Books? Too many already. A sense of purpose? Can’t buy that at IKEA.”
He walked to the window, the same one I’d been staring out of all day, and looked down at Behinton Town.
“What am I doing here?” he said quietly.
I almost answered. I don’t know why. It’s not like he could hear me. But the words were right there, on the edge of my lips: I don’t know. I’ve been asking myself the same thing for four years.
Tony stood there for a long time, just looking. Then he turned around, grabbed a blanket from one of the boxes, and lay down on the floor.
“Bed’s still in the truck,” he said to the ceiling. “Tomorrow’s problem. Everything’s tomorrow’s problem.”
He closed his eyes.
I stayed where I was, watching him. His breathing slowed. The apartment settled into silence except for the creaking pipes and the distant sound of someone’s TV through the walls.
I should leave.
I didn’t.
I sat down on the floor, a few feet away from him, and pulled my knees to my chest.
“Hi, Tony,” I whispered.
He didn’t hear me.
But for the first time in four years, I didn’t feel completely alone.
