Ghost
I grinned from ear to ear as I heaved my newest purchase into my cramped apartment, an old chest of drawers. Much to my dismay, many of the drawers were missing and I would need to work around that to make use of it. Making my way through my barren lounge room I found myself in my kitchen, grabbed a water bottle and skulled it as if my life depended on every drop.
With a loud breath I trudged back to the chest of drawers that now needed to be inspected. I knew I was a bit of a scatter-brain, however today was like a bad joke. I bought the set without looking at it and now I had to do the grunt work without any help from the burly men at the store I had found it.
“Come on, no need to beat yourself up about it now” I said, tugging my unkempt hair into a high ponytail and began pulling out the remaining drawers and checking them over to ensure no stains, mold, or bugs had eaten at the hardwood. It took me almost an hour to pull them all out and inspect them until I was satisfied. One of the top, smaller drawers was left for me to inspect and when I pulled it out my fingers brushed against something akin to paper attached to the back of the drawer. I set the drawer down on the floor and stared at the scrap that was taped to the back.After a few minutes of careful consideration, I peeled it off and turned it over in my hand a few times. It was a scrap of papyrus and scrawled on it were a bunch of numbers, a string of six numbers. 181963. To me those numbers meant nothing and I was growing hungry and tired from a day of work, and so I shoved it in my pocket, happy with my decision to talk to the store I bought it from, until then I was going to eat my dinner before jumping straight into my project.
Hours had gone by without noticing how dark it had gotten. Hours of measuring, sketching, and thinking had taken up my last few hours of sunlight and with that I finally managed to decide on what I was going to do with my set of drawers and with that concluded I took a break, choosing a shower to relax and unwind from the day, I even took a chance on not getting called into work and cracked open a beer to drink while in the shower. All thoughts of that scrap of parchment where gone until I took my clothes off and let them drop to the floor, only then did I remember the sheet of papyrus I had found,
“Shit!” I hissed and grabbed it out of my pocket, ensuring it didn’t get wet or smudged. With a relieved breath I rolled it up and put it just under my shirt, shielding it from any water I might spray without realising.
After finishing my shower, getting dried and dressed, I sat on my bed with my laptop in front of me. Downing the last of my drink I simply typed in the numbers into a search engine, only that revealed nothing of use to me, random files and a colour of dark blue.
“Well that got me nowhere” I huffed and slightly chewed my upper lip then thought that it might be a date of some kind and tried to think of anything that happened on that day, but nothing came to mind, I was too young to remember what happened in the world on that specific day. Not to say that my memory was good at all to begin with.
"If it is a date then what's so significant about it?" I muttered and turned them the first of august 1963. A bunch of newspaper articles popped up, however only one caught my eye.
'Tragic Accident Along the 314 Highway, Drunken driver crashes into a family of four, no one survived.'
My eyes widened as I recognised the headline. In stunned silence I began to scroll down, raking my eyes over the images, finally I came to the photo of the family before the crash and in the photo was my younger self, staring back at me with a wide smile and gleaming eyes. I remember the day that photo was taken, I was six years old and I had just found out that I was going to have a new dad. The photo was only a few months before the crash and only a week after my mothers wedding. ‘Entire Family Killed’ rang through my mind,
“It can’t be possible, I’m alive.” I paused, “I remember being in the crash and walking away, people talked to me, people…” I stopped and read the article from start to finish, trying to find any sort of reference to survivors or seeing a body being pulled from the wreckage but nothing of the sort was found. And then I remembered.
No one had talked to me that day. I cried and cried next to my family's bodies, screaming at everyone to help them, but no one seemed to care enough to hear the pleas of a crying girl. Now it all clicked together, it was like a veil had been lifted as every repressed or altered memory came to the surface, all of the false memories changed to show me what I refused to see from the start. No one acknowledged my existence at any place I had gone, no one heard my words, no one could see me standing in front of them. In every memory I held it was as if I was an onlooker to everyone else as they went about their day, an audience member who was to watch but never interact with the cast. Two words left my lips before my vision faded to black.
“I’m dead.”
