Desolate Angel - By Chaz McGee Page 0,1

inexpressible sweetness of their bodies. I can see. I can hear. I can bear witness to what I have lost. That is all.

I do not know why I ended up here, no longer of this earth, yet somehow bound to it. I am a solitary wanderer, forced to face a bitter truth: great love abides in the house that once was my home, but I am no longer a part of it.

In truth, I never was.

I have been dead for six months now and my passing has caused barely a ripple in their lives. Connie continues to work each morning at the department store; the boys continue to rush home from school to her embrace. I have seen them come together each evening now, time and again, without glimpsing an acknowledgment that I was ever there.

Perhaps I never really was.

It is this evidence of my failure that causes me to ponder my other regrets. You see, I failed others, too—and not just the victims, whose morgue photographs left a never-ending trail of human catastrophe winding through my unsolved files. I failed those they left behind as well. I think of them often, the surviving loved ones who came to me, seeking justice, and left with little more than despair. For, all too often, I used their tragedies to satisfy my craven need to fail, turning their calamities into excuses to drink away the hours, hoping to find that lost place where, at last, I could let myself care too little. I stared the other way when confronted by their misery, unable to meet their eyes. Eventually, I even avoided my own eyes in the mirror and grew too ashamed to ever look back on the overwhelming condemnation of my failures.

Now, looking back is all I have.

I am a ghost haunted by my regrets, doomed to walk through a world that is neither here nor there, tasting my fate in my solitude, seeking a redemption I fear will never come.

My name was Kevin Fahey. I do not know what to call myself now.

I walk among the living, unseen and unheard, unsure if my continuing existence is evidence of Hell—or if I have somehow scraped my way into Purgatory. If so, if this is Purgatory, it is by the mercy of a forgiving universe, and through no effort of my own, that I am here.

I have tried to transcend my boundaries, but my translucent prison holds firm. I have stood at my wife’s side as she lies in bed at night, murmuring to her of our time together before my surrender to eighty-proof despair, hoping to make myself heard. Hoping to make myself, at the very least, a memory.

It has all been in vain. I can feel no indication that Connie cares to remember what her life was like when I was in it. In fact, I can see no sign that anyone in my former world knows I am still here. I can perform wild fandangos across busy streets and cars don’t even slow to avoid me. I can walk the sidewalks for hours, shout at the top of my lungs, jump up and down, waving my hands in faces: no one ever sees me. All I have earned for my desperate labors is the occasional quizzical look on a face, as fleeting as a twitch, or a sudden turn of the head, as if someone has glimpsed me out of the corner of an eye, only to lose me under full scrutiny.

Except once, just once, when a young boy saw me. That single incident gives me hope that I will not be alone forever. That hope keeps me wandering.

It happened two months after my death, when my ere mitic existence was bitterly new. I was standing at the edge of a playground, watching my boys swing up against the brilliant blue of a cloudless June sky. They’d hang at the crest of their arc for a single, glorious second before dropping back to earth in a stomach-churning swoosh. The purity of their joy entranced me. I was transfixed—and so accustomed to being the watcher that it took me a moment to realize that I was being watched. It was not until an odd heat overcame me that I realized my solitude had been penetrated. I looked down to find a small boy staring up at me, his eyes drawn to the gold badge pinned to my lapel.

“Is that real?” he asked. He was a pale child, sickly-looking, with deep shadows