Natalie Hughes

Purple Ghosts

The gravestones were smoky, touching the jagged cement like falling sand. It wasn’t morning yet, but the dew was already settling on bare branches. There was nothing much to see: only darkness looming in the corners and cracks of haze oozing into sight. Soon light would break, the mist would fade and it would be just a graveyard. Plain, barren. No green, leafy trees, they were bare; no sprouted tufts of grass, only brown blades dotting the ground. An odd place for a graveyard: next to a child's park. It held only a few, poor souls whom nobody came to visit. The place was haunted with purple ghosts that hovered on legless bodies and made you feel things you wouldn't normally feel: other worldy things, magic things. The coloured ghosts exhaled ice, their lungs frozen solid. Frozen in their moment of death. Did they even breathe? Could they? I did not think so. They were caught in the middle of taking a breath. The last breath. I felt uncomfortable things every time I visited this place. Yes, I visited often. There was a single emotion and a memory that lingered inside, trapped, like my lungs in my ribcage, rattling my bones, trying to escape so it could play among the fields with the purple ghosts, and it was free in this place. And more than the freedom, I liked forgetting and becoming lost in something other than myself, and I existed in a world that I did not belong to. It was different to the pain I was used to in my world. Not good, nor bad, just different. I think it was because of this that I gravitated towards them, the ghosts. Or rather, one particular ghost.