Bring Out Your Dead Valentine

Our tryst was more confusing than it was loving or erotic. Valentine's Day was not ending the way I thought it would. Amy and I had had the catered in intimate dinner the night before to avoid having to wait forever because of the Valentine's Day rush and then eat a cold dinner. Sheltering from covid made things different. Some things were lost like dinners at restaurants, but something was gained to like intimate evenings with only the two of us.

This evening I had made salmon with dill sauce and almond rice pilaf for dinner at Amy's apartment, and had ordered in a bottle of Asti chilling in the fridge. Following a brownie topped with vanilla ice cream and a maraschino cherry, Amy's favorite, we had cuddled together and watched a Rom-Com on the television. It wasn't the most thrilling night, but it was nice and sweet for a woman who was nice and sweet. The evening turned bizarre when I swept her off her feet and carried her into the bed room.

"It feels so good when you're in me. I love the way you fill me, puppy."

It wasn't exactly dirty talk, but it got me going. Her body was wrong. Rita had a lush body with ample bosom and nice grab-able hips. Only Rita called me, Puppy.

Amy's body was long and lean with toned muscles and a modest bust. An excellent body worthy of my erotic attention, even though I worried if her frame could support my size and weight.

She responded like Rita but it looked like Amy. She bit her lip like Rita when her mounting arousal approached orgasm, and she kicked me in the ass like Rita when she wanted me to go faster, but her smell was wrong: Wrong perfume, wrong shampoo, and wrong aroma of love.

When the loving was done, she kissed me tenderly on the lips. It was Rita's kiss, but it lacked her fuller, pillowy lips.

"Hold me one last time, puppy," she whispered in my ear.

I spooned in behind her, slid my arm around her waist and cradled Amy's smaller, firmer breast that was equally as fascinating as Rita's.

"I will always love you," I whispered into her ear.

She replied by pushing her butt back into my groin giving it a little wiggle, a very Rita thing to do.

She drifted into a satisfied sleep while I contemplated my Rita free world.

I'm not one to plumb my emotions. Rita said when it came to feelings I played at the shallow end of the pool, but the mixed ball of happiness and sadness welling in my chest threatened to tear me in half. Every tick of the clock pulled me further away from one lover and pushed into the arms of another at the same time. I lay in Amy's arms with Rita's approval.

**********

Right after I was born, I developed a severe kidney infection that put me in the hospital hovering between life and death for a week. I don't remember any of it, of course, but that week in the twilight changed my life. I recovered and by all outward signs resumed a normal life.

When I was four, my playmate named Isabeau lived in a house under our sidewalk in the front yard. She dressed a little funny in a long white flowing gown and most of the time I couldn't understand a thing she said, but she was a playmate any time I wanted one and I was happy. We spent hours in the family room playing side by side, I with my trucks and she with her doll that looked like it was made of corn husks.

One night at dinner with Isabeau sitting beside me, I pointed at the milk and said.

"Ma mere, donne-moi plus de lait, si'l vous plait."

At the age of four, I was too young to show off, I spoke French because Isabeau was with me.

My father turned to me instead of watching the news on TV.

"What the hell was that?" he asked my mother.

I was about to tell him of my friend Isabeau when mom saved me.

"He watches French language programming on channel nine out of Windsor," my mother offered pouring more milk into my glass.

She liked that I was learning French since she had studied it in college.

"Don't you think he ought to learn English first?"

Dad returned to watching the news.

Dad's strange reaction was the first of many lessons in hiding my friends. After that I only spoke French to Isabeau when no one was around.

One day, out of the blue when I was five, my mother dressed me up and took me to school. I wanted Isabeau to come, but she wouldn't. I came home to Isabeau waiting for me. She kissed me.

"Merci, mon ami, mais il est temps pour moi de partir." she said followed by a sweet smile and then she walked through a doorway filled with golden light.

I never saw her after that. I missed her, but I understood on a level I could not yet access in my young mind that things were the way they should be. She was the first of many goodbyes.

***********

When my hand cupping her breast relaxed, Amy grabbed it and pulled it back into position leaving her hand atop mine. I renewed my gentle fondling. She responded with a contented sigh. She wasn't shy about what she wanted, and I wasn't shy about doing what she asked.

************

In grade school, the kids my age seemed rough and mean. I was content to spend my time with the quiet invisible ones who gathered around me. By then, I had learned that I must never tell others about them. If I did, the school social worker would end up asking me uncomfortable questions like when I told Miss Sharpe about the invisible girl weeping in the corner of the room.

I preferred my special friends like Frederick who was a roguish kid about my age who lived under the monkey bars in the school's playground. He wore a rough fabric shirt that seemed too big for him, and pants that stopped just below his knee. There were others. Some seemed attracted to me while others avoided me.

Every school day recess started the same with Frederick.

"Do you see Becky Sibley?"

I would shake my head.

"I don't understand we were buried in the same graveyard on the same day."

"What happened?" I asked.

"I like her a lot, and I have to see her one more time before I move along. I lived with my grandparents in Detroit over the summer and returned home in the fall. Folks said I brought the small pox back with me. A week after I came down with it and died, seven more kids in my school got sick, and two died. Becky was one of them, and I gotta tell her I'm sorry."

"What's she look like?"

"She's about as tall as me. She has blond hair that she wears in a thick braid that reaches almost to her waist. She has a favorite blue dress that she loves to wear. It matches her eyes."

"I've seen her. She spends her time in Mrs. Owen's class.

"Could you talk..."

George Ziegler, a chubby, stupid, no neck thug of a kid who thought punching fellow classmates was better than making friends ran up. As he clenched his fists, I braced myself to receive a painful punch. We were on the playground for lunch recess. In my school you were either a bully, or a victim. I fell squarely in the victim group.

"Hey, weirdo. Why are you talking to yourself? Pretending you got friends?"

Frederick walked inside George's body. George's eyes rolled up in his head and he shook.

"I...," he swallowed hard, "I don't feel so good."

He turned and dashed toward the playground monitor with his hand over his mouth and vomited a partially chewed bologna sandwich at her feet.

"Does he even chew what he eats?" I said looking at the mess.

"What did you do?" I asked Frederick as he alighted beside me.

"I inhabited his body against his will for a second. It made him ill as his body fought to reject me."

That's how I discovered that the dead do have a limited effect on the living. Those unexplained chills we get from time to time are souls passing through our bodies.

I was now obligated to Frederick, so I didn't run home right away after school. I took my time letting the school clear out, then I marched down the tile and block hallway to Mrs. Owen's room holding a piece of paper in my hand. If you looked like you were on a errand for a teacher, no one questioned you. I found Becky sitting at the teacher's desk.

"Hi," I said not sure how to address a ghost who had not initiated contact first.

She was so pretty that she made me all fluttery inside. It was the first time I had ever experienced that. It wouldn't be my last.

She looked at me and her eyes got big.

"It's you. I knew you could see me."

"Why do you spend all of your time in school?"

She smiled. She was very pretty in a 'Little House on the Prairie' way.

"I wanted to be a teacher before I got sick and died."

She ran her hands along the top of the desk caressing the desk calendar.

"I've tried moving along like I'm supposed to, but something keeps holding me back."

"Frederick needs to talk to you."

She brightened. Her form began to glow.

"He's here?"

"I can call him if you like."

"Please do."

She brushed her blond bangs to the side and sat up a little straighter smoothing out her blue pinafore.

Frederick materialized and dropped to his knees resting his head in her lap.

"Becky, I'm so sorry. I never meant to kill you."

She stroked his hair.

"You didn't kill me, silly, the smallpox did."

"But I brought it into town when I came back from Detroit."

"Did you do it on purpose?" Becky asked in a gentle voice.

"No, I would never hurt you."

They began to fade into a bright light, and then they were gone as the custodian opened the door.

"What are you doing in here, son?"

He leaned on his mop looking more like Gandolf than a custodian. His name was George, it said so on his shirt. If we weren't too messy in the cafeteria, he would take out his teeth and show them to us.

"Waiting for Mrs. Owen, my little brother needs his makeup work," I lied.

"All the teacher's are in a meeting right now."

I nodded.

"Then I'll get his assignments in the morning."

**********

I stroked Amy's naked side from her ribs to her thigh. Amy's catlike response was to push against my hand with her body. It wasn't Rita, but it was such a nice sleek body. She cooed as I gently stroked her breast again. Her nipples stiffened under my hand. I tweaked one and she responded with a purr.

**********

It took me years, but I figured out a few things. I could see the dead, but no one else could. I had no idea why I could. For a long time in my teenage years I expected an angel to appear to me at some point and tell me how special I was and how I had been chosen to help the dead. To my disappointment, that angel never appeared. I was on my own.

Most people who died moved on to somewhere else right away. I have no idea where that is, or what it's all about, or why it exists. The angel was supposed to tell me that. I leave descriptions of our existence beyond the grave to religious people. I do know this however. Sometimes a person dies with a yearning so intense that it keeps them tied to this world. Isabeau wanted a friend to play with, Frederick needed to apologize to Becky and the strength of his desire blocked Becky from moving on too.

Graves are everywhere. Every town and city is built on graveyards. Towns all started out small with graveyards surrounding the tiny settlement. As the towns and cities grew, they expanded and built over the old forgotten graveyards sometimes by choice and sometimes by accident. As a result the restless dead wander among us tied to hidden graves beneath our concrete and lawn urban landscapes. If you live in a city, you spend most of your day eating, sleeping and working above old abandoned graveyards. It's the way of this world, and it isn't a bad thing. Ninety-nine percent of the time, a grave is nothing more that a bit of calcium rich soil once the soul has departed.

I help those spirits I can. My worst experience was with a couple sex obsessed ghosts in high school who chose to interrupt me mostly during chemistry class. Let's call them Beavis and Butthead. It was hard enough making sense about Mrs. Sanderson's lecture of s,p,d and f sub-orbitals in atoms without horny ghosts exposing themselves to the better looking girls in my class.

"Hey, nerd," they would call as they wiggled limp ghost dicks in girl's faces, "I want you to screw this one while I occupy your body."

As seniors these sexed up ghosts had gotten drunk and rolled their car in front of the high school killing them both. Now they were tied to the area. They hounded me my entire sophomore year once they learned that I could see and talk to them. They wanted to get laid before they moved on. I could never convince them that I wasn't going to let them inhabit my body while I screwed a girl. It seemed unfair to me and to the girl, and being a shy nerd meant my dating pool was nonexistent.

Finally they got chased away by a spirit from the War of 1812 who had died when a musket ball caught him in the throat on the front lawn of my high school at the Battle of Brownstown Creek.

"I'm Thomas Biddle," he said when he returned, "you're the only living person I've met that can see me."

The bell for fourth hour rang and the halls emptied of kids, and I was a lone nerd talking to himself in the hallway, but still I was nervous. I motioned for him to follow me out the door.

"I caught a bullet in my throat right here when the British and the Indians attacked," he said looking around as if he was seeing the high school and the parking lot for the first time."

"What's keeping you here? I'm sure everyone else has moved on," I said as I opened my car door and slid in.

"I'm waiting for my parents to visit my grave."

He looked an awful lot like me. Neither one of us was tall. He was slight of build with a round face and brown hair. We looked like brothers and I liked him from the outset.

"What year is it?" I asked him. He had followed me into my beat up Chevy Nova in the parking lot. It was the only place that I could think of where we could talk uninterrupted.

He stroked his sparse beard.

"I reckon it's been about four or five years since I died. 1817?" he looked around the interior of my car, "is this a carriage? How do you attach the horses?"

I showed him the calendar in my Trapper-Keeper.

He squinted at it.

"It can't be 2010. I ain't been dead for almost two centuries."

"Time passes differently when you're dead, I guess. Your parents passed a very long time ago. I bet they're waiting for you on the other side."

He shook his head.

"But why didn't they come to my grave? I waited for them."

"You came out of the ground over by the creek. Is that where you're buried?"

He nodded.

"Your grave has no headstone. They may have come to the battlefield, but they had no idea where you were buried."

He would have sighed if he could. Instead he stared out the windshield and frowned as he teetered on the edge of tears.

"That explains everything. It's time to go," he stood with a set jaw looking into the doorway that had just appeared in the middle of the Olds Cutlass hood parked in front of us.

Tom hesitated.

"Look, I was buried with a gold chain around my neck. It ain't much but I think you should have it for helping me when no one else would."

"Tom, I'm not going to rob your grave."

"I wish you would. You're not violating me, I'll be gone in a few moments."

"I can't, I'd feel like a ghoul," I said shaking my head.

Tom nodded then turned and walked into that doorway in the middle of the Cutlass hood and faded from sight into bright light.

I was given a lecture and a detention between his sips of Maalox by the vice principal for being out in my car when I should have been in class. A black aura surrounded him. I had never seen one before. I put two and two together a week later when he collapsed and died from cardiac arrest at the age of forty nine. I could tell when people were about to die. Yet another gift that I did not want.

I still won't dig up a body to grab a gold chain, but I do let spirits help me now. The rationale is simple. If I work at a job, I can help three or four spirits a day. If I let them help me, I can help up to twenty a day. Since my gift is in high demand, and the spirits no longer need the wealth they've accumulated, I see no reason why I shouldn't. I'm about to the point financially that I can quit my job and live off investments.

High school passed in the chaotic haze that it is for most teens. I made living friends in college who were as much into fantasy and role playing as I was, learned to avoid those places where spirits congregate when I wanted time alone, had a few girl friends and studied business. After college I took a job as an accountant at a hospital because there isn't a single spirit in the world who wants to spend eternity hanging around a hospital. I was still the loner by choice though. I spent my weekends on Facebook and the internet locating families for the departed when I could and convincing others that it was the twenty-first century, and the person they pined for had passed long ago.

I'm not that social anyway, but still it was a lonely life, and I could never think of a way to work my moribund hobby into the conversation with a woman I liked.

**********

I kissed Amy on the shoulder brushing a bit of her blond hair out of the way. I was torn. On the one hand, Rita was leaving me forever, but on the other hand, I had developed a real affection verging on love for Amy. She was so different from Rita, yet in many ways they were the same. Since I had gotten to know her, I had discovered her to be as passionate as Rita and as sexy in her own way. Rita had radiated her sexiness wearing plunging tops and clingy fabrics, while Amy remained demure beneath broadcloth and over-sized sweaters. Her passion expressed itself behind closed doors. Both were loving, demonstrative women who liked me for no other reason than that I was me. I loved them right back because love like that is hard to find for the shy and I'm doubly blessed. The lovely thing about a good woman is she will rescue you from yourself. They smooth away your rough edges and pull you into a world of color and warmth that you never knew existed. They only ask that you love them back. That part amazes me.

**********

Driving home from work one day on snow slicked roads, I rolled into a traffic snarl. For the next half hour I crawled forward cursing my overfull bladder, stupid drivers and Detroit weather. When I got to the collision, I saw a crushed Cadillac Escalade sitting in the middle of the intersection amid red and clear shattered glass scattered across the slushy lanes. The police had stretched a blue tarp across the driver's side of the car. Further down the road, a steel hauler with blinkers on sat at the curb. Across the intersection from me on the same side of the road hovered a confused looking spirit above a snow bank.

I pulled over ignoring the honks from frustrated drivers behind me.

"Get in," I ordered. The ghost complied not bothering to open the door. A little further down the road, I turned into an unplowed subdivision and came to a stop in front of a very typical brick ranch home complete with Christmas lights still up.

"Do you know what happened back there?"

The dazed spirit shook his head. He was wearing a well tailored business suit, and looked to be a man of some wealth. He may have dressed to impress, but the collision had scrambled him.

"You were in a collision with a steel hauler. From the look of your SUV, the steel hauler drove up over your hood and crushed you in the process. You're dead."

There is no use being anything but honest with them. They are confused and need information more than anything else.

He nodded.

"That explains why I couldn't get anyone's attention. They ignored me," he turned to me, "what do I do now?"

"Look around, do you see a bright light?"

He scanned his surroundings and then pointed to a glow three snow covered lawns up.