Don't Call Me Dead

4. The Bus

"I still can't believe it," says Jack.

We sit at the bus stop by an empty rural road. To the other side of it, fields stretch for as far as I can see. The forest stands behind us like a dark, silent wall. It's strange to be outside of it. The evening here is brighter than the midday under the trees.

"I still can't believe it," Jack repeats. "I'll be the first one who's actually captured a ghost."

"You didn't capture me," I say. "And I'm not a ghost."

"I'm sorry to break the news to you, but you clearly are," he says cheerfully, before growing abruptly somber under my gaze. "I mean, it's surely not easy for you to accept, but --"

"I'm not."

"But you live in the woods," he says. "And you can't shake hands because you're...well...intangible?"

"So what?"

"Nothing." He looks around and rubs his shoulders. "Are you cold?"

"No."

"Are you nervous?"

"No."

"Are you dead?"

I frown at him.

"Sorry," he says. "I thought if I surprised you, you would remember."

"If I died, I wouldn't have forgotten that."

He shrugs. "You did forget your freaking name." He looks at the road. "Oh, there's the bus!"

The bus is white and blue, with advertisements plastered on its side. We get up as it pulls over to the stop.

"After you," says Jack.

I go up the steps. The driver, a middle aged surly man with a black mustache, looks at me expectantly. It's only then that I realize that I have no money.

"I'll pay, I'll pay," says Jack, appearing behind me. "You go pick a seat."

The driver frowns, his eyes following me as I start walking along the row of seats, but then his attention shifts to Jack. The bus is mostly empty, except for a couple of women sitting in the back, one of them asleep, the other looking out of the window. I run my fingers over the blue upholstery of the seats, but I can't feel the texture.

The bus begins to move.

"Won't you sit?" asks Jack.

I turn to find him holding onto a hanging stripe next to me, rocking from side to side with the movements of the bus. He smiles broadly. "Can you sit? Or would you just fall through the chair?"

"Stop it."

"Sorry," he says. "Don't worry, the cops will figure out what's happened to you. You'll be... I don't know... avenged?"

"The cops will lock me up for life," I say thoughtlessly, and then we both freeze, equally surprised at my words.

"Why would they do that?"

"I don't know." I search the attic of my memory, but whatever has just emerged from the shadows is already gone. "The words just...popped out."

"Okay," he says slowly. "We're still going to the police, right?"

"Right."

He glances out the window. "We're turning to the town, so say bye-bye to your forest."

I turn and watch through the back window the wall of trees growing smaller as we move away. The evening is fading, and the lights along the bus ceiling are more noticeable now. The one in the back is actually a bit too bright. It hurts to look at it. I blink and shake my head.

When I open my eyes, there's no light, no Jack and no bus. I'm standing in a small clearing next to the fallen tree. The light is fading and the clearing is not nearly as cheerful as it looked when Jack had been here. Have I imagined him? But there's a heart carved on the tree's bark, with "Jack and Kattie" in the middle of it.

He's been here.

He's left.

But I can't.

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