The Deathly Kiss

Four

Jane thought it was time to face the music. Since before she'd left campus she had been dreading to see the greenhouse that was tucked behind the main one. She managed to clumsily climb down from the upper section of the barn. She righted her clothes and plucked hay from her hair and from Ivan's flannel.

Her sandwich was inedible. She found it and their two sack lunches thrown around on the freshly washed cement floor. Her mug of tea was sitting on the crate still and she plucked it up and took a sip lost in thought. It was still warm. Things happened so fast when it came to Ivan, she asserted. She wondered what he was. The inky tears and black eyes...sharp teeth. He knew she had fallen asleep after she'd fled. A part of her suspected he could see her even now. Maybe he didn't vanish at all. Maybe he simply didn't want to be seen.

She drank her tea leaning against the crate. Looking around she noticed her bag was missing from where she'd sat it by the main door.

That fucker stole her iPad.

...

She walked to the greenhouse. The glass panes were mostly intact with a few exceptions. She touched the door handle and took a deep breath.

inside was a time capsule. There were many shelves of gardening tools, small porcelain containers filled with trinkets and large flower pots stacked in a corner. On the right was a workbench and a large basin with a water pump. Her grandmother's gardening gloves were laying as she left them on the counter beside a long-rotten aloe plant. In the very back was a terracotta tile platform with some outdoor furniture that had seen better days. A dusty radio sat on the little coffee table next to a stack of books.

Neither she or her grandfather had touched the inside of this place in years. It was too hard on him seeing the place she always was and would have been if she had lived longer. For Jane it was difficult to see for another reason.

She walked to the gardening gloves and held them, examining the purple flower pattern along the fingers to the wrist. She leaned over and laid them down upon the ground, walked forward, and sat down on a relatively clean plastic chair and waited.

She'd planned to draw while she sat here, but since Ivan seemed to want to go through her bag she was stuck sitting in silence.

10 minutes. 15. 20. And she heard it. A soft rustling sound and a humming that made her ears pop like she was driving through the mountains.

A whisp of light, that's how they always started. The dead. One moment a they were a fuzz in your peripheral and the next they manifested like a projection. In certain light they looked solid, but beneath the misted glass of the greenhouse her grandmother appeared translucent and tinged with a swatch of sea foam blue. She didn't seem to notice her. She bent down, picked up the gloves and returned them to their designated spot. She wiped her temple and started rummaging through drawers of objects that weren't there. She sang softly like she always did. It was a verse of "You Are My Sunshine" that was a bit dated from the happy version children sang. The version sung by Jimmie Davis.

"I'll always love you and make you happy

If you will only say the same

But if you leave me to love another

You'll regret it all someday

You are my sunshine, my only sunshine

You make me happy when skies are grey

You'll never know, dear, how much I love you

Please don't take my sunshine away

You told me once, dear, you really loved me