Short Story | Fiction | Ghosts
Bygones
Thanks to Mike, Beth would need to find a different favourite café.
Relaxing at a corner table in her favourite café, Beth kicked off her uncomfortable shoes and savoured the relief of the cold tile floor on her soles. Bliss! Finally comfortable, she sipped her hot chocolate as she scrolled through social media, despairing at the usual dearth of anything that even hinted at a deeper connection between her and the people at the other end of the posts. She missed being part of an “us”.
After a minute or two, she became conscious of someone standing next to her table and lifted her eyes from the screen to confirm what she felt.
“Hi.”
She blinked back at the man standing only a couple of feet away from her, then dropped her gaze back to her phone. “Clear off.”
“Yep…totally deserved that.”
“And yet you’re still here.”
“And yet I am.”
Beth flipped her phone face down on the table and abandoned it, even though she suspected this conversation was going to change her perspective on the whole missing being part of an “us” thing. “What do you want?”
“Can’t I just say hello?” Beth titled her head and waited.
Mike, her ex, relented. “Okay…I…need your help with something.”
She snorted out a laugh and repeated, “Clear off.”
He slipped into the seat opposite hers. She twisted her body away to make sure he understood he wasn’t welcome. “Beth…please — ”
“In our last conversation, two months before we were due to get married, you told me I was a crazy bitch and you wouldn’t marry me if I was the last woman on Earth.”
Mike pressed his lips together a moment. “Yes, well — I was wrong about that.”
An old, familiar flutter churned in Beth’s stomach. “Wrong about not wanting to marry me?”
He looked mildly confused. “No…I mean…maybe that too, but — ”
“Never mind,” she grunted, sipping her hot chocolate and tuning him out. She wasn’t about to let him break her heart all over again with false hope.
“Thing is, when you told me you talk to dead people it kind of freaked me out. I’d never had any experience with anything like that. I thought it was all nonsense.”
His attempt at an explanation only enraged her more. No one had ever accepted her gift. She’d hoped he would be the one she could trust with it. “I wanted to be honest with you. I needed your love and support and you rejected me. And then you ghosted me for almost two years.”
Again, he looked grim-faced. “You’re right…about everything. And I am a lowlife for what I did. The thing is…I need your help now…and you’re the only person I can ask.”
Disgusted, Beth picked up her phone and started scrolling again, ignoring him. It was hard to do, but he deserved this. And she would keep telling herself that whenever her conscience nagged at her for not giving him another chance.
When she glanced up a few seconds later, he’d gone. But all around people stared back at her, some with mouths hanging open, others whispering to one another then breaking eye contact. The whole clientele of the café was completely and silently focused on her.
Great, she thought. So now I’m the bad guy?
She finished up her drink and left, forcing her feet back into her hellishly pretty shoes for the trek back to her car. Pissed off to have been embarrassed in front of so many people, she succumbed to the temptation of a chocolate bar, her usual source of comfort. She hopped into the corner shop near the carpark and browsed the choices, inexorably drawn to the bigger more indulgent bars as her ire blossomed.
Then something else caught her eye. The chocolate bars were next to the newspaper stand, and while she never usually bothered to give the tabloids a second glance, something told her to look.
There, on the front paper of the local newspaper, was a picture of Mike. The words in the title accompanying it refused to assemble themselves into anything she could comprehend for a minute, as if her brain went into total shut down. But she knew what it said all the same. There was no other reason Mike would be front page news. And now it all made sense. Why he’d come sought her out after all these years. Why he admitted he’d been in the wrong. Why everyone in the café had looked at her like she had lettuce growing out of her ears.
They’d thought she was insane. She’d been arguing with thin air.
The chocolate suddenly lost its appeal.
She wobbled back out onto the street and made her way to her car, barely feeling the ground under her feet, let alone the pain from her shoes. When she finally made it back to her car, she sat a moment and let what had just happened sink in.
Dead.
Mike was dead.
Murdered. Stabbed. Found in his apartment. It didn’t feel real.
A cold chill filled the car. “Probably should have waited until you got home, huh?” Mike said from the passenger seat.
She looked his way, seeing the ethereal glow surrounding him she’d missed in her anger at his earlier intrusion. “Yeah…probably.”
“Sorry I embarrassed you in there.”
Beth accepted his apology. “Sorry you got murdered.”
He shrugged and gave her a lopsided smile. “I probably deserved that, too.”
Story inspired by Mad as a March Writing Prompt by JF Danskin, particularly Idea 3 (Write a drabble or flash fiction about someone whose behaviour is uncommonly or rarely seen…but perhaps they have a good reason for it).
Thank you for reading.
