Worth 1000 Words | EP 61 | A Ghost in Daylight

Revisiting an artist who inspired a story way back in Episode 5. Similar in composition but different in scope. I hope this contributes nicely to your October reading.

Thanks for reading.

Artwork by Alexander Mandradjiev

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/ELd3J4

DISCLAIMER: This work has not been edited beyond what was done in the video. The goal is to capture a story in a short amount of time and keep it as raw as possible.

The Story

I see her in the daylight. Only in the daylight. Muted and lifeless debris caught in invisible currents I cannot feel. Can she feel? As it stirs around her like particulate in a glass of water, shed from a lemon, perhaps. Her sourness is apparent in the way she looks at me. Does she look at me?

I look. What I see is this. A plain woman in a plain dress standing on a square of folded sheet not much wider than her shoulders, which sit narrowly on her frame despite the voluminous material resting there.

I see her when I rest. When my feet are tired from the walks from seat to window. Not far, but far enough for me. My bones are like splinters, the doctors say. That makes me think of the trees I love so much but have to admire from afar. Through the window that brings me this lovely apparition in the daylight. Only in the daylight.

I wonder why she visits me, but moreso why she doesn’t come in the night when all ghosts are rumored to haunt. I’ve tried to ask her, but she doesn’t respond. She is as rigid as those trees I miss. But the trees sway in the wind, their dead leaves piled outside the room where my bones don’t allow me to reach. Another comes through the open window. Eight hundred and one.

Foolish games like this occupy my time, which has slowed to the pace of a single grain of sand through an hourglass. The motes and down and outdoor intruders move faster. Around her. Not through her. Like the light. It paints her such a hue, both pretty and pale, showing me nothing of the dark wall that rises behind her. But it only ever reaches her hips, never rising above, no matter the position of the sun. I believe she has a power over it. I believe she has a power over me.

How I wish she would respond in some way. The simplest indication that she knew I was here, for her, for both of us, to hear her stories of pain and pleasure alike. I would worship her, if she wished. Perhaps I do worship her. I grow embarrassed when I think such thoughts, but such thoughts aren’t in my control, as she is not in my control.

How I wish I had control. Of her, of my splintered bones, so we may stand in the daylight together, both of us naked to the open sky, where I can see her face free of shadow so I may make her smile. I limp to the window to see the sky, but only make it halfway, each step the sound of matchsticks snapping. I wait there, until the pain subsides, my back to her, which makes me ache.

I tried to look under her dress once, to see what we all yearn for, what I haven’t had in some time. It was a mistake. The platform upon which she stands, a table perhaps, a workbench, or even a bed–I’m not sure of its origin–is too high for me. And I should have realized this. Stairs are painful enough. But, no, I had to inspect her with my desires. My sick desires.

God or gravity or some other force that wanted to see me fall made me fall. My hungry head upturned to see her secrets, vertigo took hold. I lay there for a day or two. Piss and shit myself for a day or two. With quite possibly the worst view of her you could imagine. The angle I lay in showed me nothing but her tailoring, which in this position wasn’t the flattering kind. No curled finger, no sculpted jaw, no lock of hair. I was cursed to look at the patterns of her funeral dress, and those patterns frightened me. Flowers twisting into bear traps, tipped with blood and bone. Vertical lines stretching into gallows fit with nooses the size of my neck. Gauze as thick as the cold fog that makes me hurt so much.

These thoughts have taken me back from the window, to my seat where I can admire her again in relative comfort. How I wish she would smile. How I wish her eyes would twinkle with recognition. How I wish I could climb up that accursed, absurd, pointless platform and face her. Hold her. Tell her I am the one she has come for, because I enjoy the daylight, too.

Then it hits me. The folded sheet. Has she ever stood there without it? That sheet has always been there, left behind by the previous owners for no known reason, though I hadn’t questioned it, so excited to procure a home in the countryside I had admired since a child. But when my bones fell to disease, it became my prison, one I could only admire through a window when my body allowed me the luxury.

I think on this matter for some time, study where the dust begins and ends beneath the sheet, mentally mark it’s exact placement, every fold, because it must be perfect, because she is perfect, because she deserves perfection.

When the sun goes to sleep, I go to work. I gather it up, carry it like a fragile relic to the spot near me, so she can be near me when the sun rises again.

I don’t sleep. I can’t sleep.

The sun finally wakes. It spills across the floor like fresh milk. I want to lap it up. Then it disappates, diffuses, as clouds cross the sky. I curse those clouds, and they flee. They fled to a wind. The shutters clatter against the window, the open window. Wind hurls her sheet out of the room, where the dead leaves gather. Where I cannot reach. Where no daylight reaches. Where daylight never reaches.

I stand. I fall. I break. My broken view is of the corner of a white sheet in shadow.