stretching like purple half-moons beneath weary eyes. His hair stuck up in odd clumps about a partially bald head. His legs were dusted with sand.
“Sure.” I knelt so he could get a better look. “I’m a detective.”
“Can I touch it?” he asked, his fingers inching toward my badge.
“Go ahead.”
Had he also passed to the other side? He was, undeniably, close. I could see it in his pallid eyes.
No. The boy was alive. His mother rounded the corner of a nearby storage shed and grabbed one of his hands. “Talking to trees?” she asked, shaking her head in exasperation as she dragged him away.
The boy stared after me, his face clouding over with a resigned recognition, as if he had realized what I must be—and understood that he, too, existed along the edge of two worlds. I waved my farewell, overcome with pity for what his future held, hoping that his mother’s fierce love could somehow save him from the loneliness of an existence like mine.
I never ran into the boy again, though I looked for him often among the faces of the children I passed. I felt such overwhelming love for him and I clung to this shred of humanity. Once I stood an entire week’s worth of afternoons by the playground sandbox, hoping to see my little friend again. But it was not to be. I do not know what happened to him. But he taught me the two things I have learned so far in my desolate wanderings: I am not the same man I was when I was alive, I have changed for the better, and that there may be some among the living who can, indeed, see me. They are my proof that I still exist and still have a chance at salvation. I just have to find them.
Those are the ones I seek.
This knowledge has kept me searching through the hallways of my former life, hoping to find a way back to the world of the living, a door to redemption or even just a passageway to what lies beyond.
Indeed, finding a way out of my solitary prison was my sole purpose for months upon months—until she came to me.
Chapter 2
The evening was cold, at least to the living. I was standing in my yard at dusk, watching my boys leap into piles of autumn leaves. Their squeals filled the air with a contagious glee that went unnoticed by neighbors who were carting groceries, parking cars, and flicking lights on in their houses as a talisman against the coming darkness. No matter. I was there and I understood: the abandonment of their laughter was exquisite, as integral to the universe as church bells pealing across a meadow. No one heard it but me.
I was too distracted by my private joy to notice the girl at first. She appeared as little more than a glimpse of white in the dusk that was gathering behind the house next door. She emerged from the shadows as a young woman clad in a yellow sundress too flimsy for the cold October air. She came straight at me and I had not yet absorbed the shock of being seen when she raised a palm, as if ordering me to stay put, then moved forward with a languid grace as flowing as a brook over boulders.
Who was she and how did she know me? How was she able to see me? I felt the world shift beneath my feet, as if vast tectonic plates had clicked into place. A wild hope rose in me—had I, at last, found someone else among the living who could see me? Or, and my hope faded at the thought, had I found someone just like me?
She drew closer. I saw that she was barefoot, though the grass was touched with frost. Sure, the cold didn’t bother me. But I was dead. Her feet had to be numb. Unless she was like me.
She kept moving forward, each step as ethereally precise as a ballerina’s. She looked so frail I feared she might evaporate into a thousand wisps of smoke and be gone to me forever. She made no sound, and as her face came into view, I saw that she had been badly maimed, her beauty horribly marred by violence. Bruises bloomed in ugly purple splotches across her face and shoulders, both of her eyes were blackened, and a trickle of blood ran from a corner of her mouth. Her yellow sundress was torn and drooped