twenty flower

*brrraaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAP-BRRRRAAAAAAAAAAAAP*

Danny Taylor zips past cars stopped at the red light, pumping the throttle of his motorbike, his baggy black shirt flapping in the wind. Here comes the intersection- and Danny barrels through it, careening like a kamikaze as the oncoming traffic screeches and spins to avoid him. Laughing like a madman, he tears off down the boulevard.

*woop-WOOP*

“Ah, shit, the pigs,” he mutters.

Punching the accelerator, Danny swerves right and onto the sidewalk, pedestrians shrieking and diving. “Outta my way!” he roars.

*weewoowee-WUPWUPWUPWUPWUP* *ksh* “PULL OVER!”

Shit, they’re catching up, he thinks to himself. Spotting an opportunity for escape, he pops a wheelie and spins, revving down a dark alleyway and away from the police cruiser.

*ksh* “PUT YOUR HANDS UP.”

Blue and red lights pulse against Danny and the walls around him. He looks back and sees police parked on the other end of the alley as well. Danny steps out, hands raised.

…..

A night in jail, some pitiable bargaining, and several hundred dollars in fines later, Danny is sentenced to ten hours of reckless driving rehabilitation classes and his bike is impounded. A slap on the wrist considering that he could have gone to prison, but Danny sees it as injustice. Of course the way he tells the story, he almost got away, but the cops followed him for miles in a Hollywood-esque scenario of unmatched bad-assery.

So now he’s here, in a plain classroom of a Philadelphia high school, pretending to listen to the instructor drone on..

“..and that’s why you always keep a road flare in your car. Okay let’s take a recess, we’ll meet back here in ten.”

Standing up and yawning, Danny walks over to the back window to peer out into the dusky courtyard. Across the cracked pavement, he sees another classroom with the lights on. The desks are empty, but puffy winter coats are slung across many of the chair backs, and water bottles sit atop their gleaming plastic surfaces. How weird. Why are so many people wearing parkas in August? It only takes a moment for his musings to turn nefarious. Everyone’s on break, now’s my chance to check the pockets.

So down the stairs and out he goes, twilight stretching the shadows of the trees and turning everything a dusty purple. Reaching the maroon double doors, he pushes- locked. Annoyed, but no stranger to such situations, Danny walks to the window of the lit classroom, pries it open and vaults himself through.

Danny finds nothing in the first coat, a black track jacket, so he slips it on himself. On to a lime green puffer with a fur trimmed hood. This one just has a scrap of paper with a phone number and a heart. Barf, he thinks. Onto the next, a pink cropped parka. Inside there is a wallet, and what feels like a phone. Jackpot!

But the phone is actually an old iPod. Who the fuck still uses these? The wallet is thin, also pink, but there’s almost fifty bucks inside. Flipping it open, he notices a picture of a blonde teenager. Hot. He checks for an age and realizes it’s just a high school ID, which to his surprise reads, “2001-2002 SCHOOL YEAR”. Confused, Danny pockets the money, and the iPod. Sensing that some minutes have passed, he glances at the clock. Then he notices.

Underneath the clock, cursive green letters on the white board read, “Monday, December 17th, 2001.” Next to that, above the American flag, hangs a framed picture of George W. Bush. What the fuck…? Suddenly a strong scent of sulphur penetrates the room, and Danny pulls his shirt up over his nose, gagging. He runs for the door, and comes out into what was once a hallway. The lockers on the wall are burnt black, many with the doors half melted off and covered in rust. The floor is soft and his feet leave footprints in the dusty ash. Further down the hall, the ceiling has caved in, and as he looks into the black hole, tiny eyes reflect back at him. He can see the double doors he tried to go through earlier only by the fading light eking through their dirty panes.

Full on spooked, he turns to try to wiggle back through the window, and his heart freezes in his chest. The classroom he just walked out of is burnt to a crisp; the desks half melted, warped like something out of a Salvador Dali painting. Where the flag was, just a charred stick stabs into the darkness. The window he came in by a jagged hole where the glass must have been blasted out by heat. All the while the supheric stench remains, seemingly growing stronger as time goes on. Danny dashes to the doors, shoves them open with a burst of adrenaline and comes out into the night, gasping in great lungfuls of cool air.

…..

Later, after struggling to act sane during the rest of the class, Danny walks down the street alone, headed to his dirty one-bedroom walk up, shaking his keys in his pocket and trying to shake the night’s memories from his mind. Reaching a pool of warm light under a street lamp, he leans against the brick and pulls out a cigarette, flicking his lighter with trembling hands. He exhales a cloud of blue smoke. Across the road, a large crowd of people is gathered at the gate of the old cemetery, milling about and chatting amongst themselves. It’s not until the smoke fully dissipates that he realizes that they are on the inside of the gate.

It’s probably just a ghost tour, he tells himself. Yet as he watches, a mustachioed man wearing a flat hat and a coat with two rows of buttons pushes his way through the mob. “Alright, alright, settle down,” he grumbles. Pulling out a large silver key, he reaches up and unlocks the gate. “About time!” yells one man. Wide-eyed, Danny stares as the crowd pours out in all directions. While some look more tattered than others, all are dressed well; the women in gowns and the men in long vests and tall white socks. All of them, Danny notices, are the same pallid shade of gray.

Having forgotten his cigarette, it burns down to his fingers. Danny drops it, wincing.

“Ay, look dere, dat man can see us!” cries a bonnet-clad woman.

“Where? Where?”

“Right dere,” she chuckles, “under de street lamp.”

Danny’s heart must have leapt into his throat, because he can hear it pounding. Apparently so can they. Chaos ripples across the ashen faces.

”Who are you?”

”How does he see us”?

”Come here boy!”

”Someone grab him!”

The cacophony of voices pelts him. Panicking, he starts to run. He has to get away.

A grey man jumps in front of him. Danny shoves him, and his watches his hands sink into the man’s chest as if it was icy mud. His whole body passes through the cold heaviness, and he emerges, wiping the shadowy substance from his eyes. Turning to look, Danny watches as the man’s body reforms like a cloud of smoke.

“You there, stop!”

But Danny turns back around and runs, not looking back this time.

……

Back in his apartment, he collapses on the bed and falls into a deep sleep. In his dream, he stands in an infinite field of wheat at sunset. He hears hooves beating the ground behind him. A grey horse leaps over his head. Looking down, his own body has turned grey. As the sun dips below the horizon, he holds his hands before his eyes and they begin to blow away like smoke..

Bolting upright in bed, Danny feels his heart pounding again and sighs. Just a nightmare.

Then he notices the black track jacket on the floor, the iPod sticking out of its pocket. He jumps out of bed, wads the jacket into a ball, and walks to his window. Yanking it open, he tosses the bundle out, watching the sleeves flutter on their way down. I don’t know what happened last night, but I’m laying off the.. everything for a while.

“Hello, Danny.”

Whirling around, Danny gasps.

A rail thin woman steps out from behind the bathroom door. She’s wearing a long sleeved shirt with one shoulder exposed, and flared jeans that come up just under her bony hips. Her hair tumbles down in waves that end in a hazy aura. From head to toe she is pale grey.

“M-mom?”

She raises her eyebrows. “Yes baby, it’s me. You were always such a troublemaker, Danny, but I never would have expected this.”

……

Danny grips the cup of coffee tightly between his hands. “How?”, he whispers.

“I should be asking you that, Danny,” his mother replies. “There are only a handful of ways.. I’m guessing you took something that didn’t belong to you.. from a haunted place.”

He nods. Sitting across from him at his grimy table, she sighs and stares at him. “Do you remember what grandma said about death?”

He looks up, “You said grandma was crazy.”

She bites her lip, “Well, turns out she was right about some things.”

He pauses, letting the memories come back to him. “She said that after death, the souls of the departed could come back once a year- but I thought that was on the day after Halloween.”

His mother nods, “Sort of. There is about a day and a half out of the year, from twilight one night, to predawn the next night, when we can come back to visit our loved ones. It used to be in November, but as centuries go by, the day stays the same, and moves through the calendar. Now it’s in August.”

“So you’ve come back before?”

“I visit you every year, baby.”

Danny’s voice becomes thick with emotion. “I don’t want you to go.. Please don’t leave me again.”

She gives him a measured look. “There is a way.”

…..

Standing over the flowerbed, Danny wonders if he’s lost his mind.

His mother says, “I can’t touch them Danny, you have to take it.”

He leans down and plucks one of the fluffy orange flowers.

…..

“Marigolds are the currency of the dead,” she had explained. “They can be used as passage to the other side. If you decide to go there, you will die.”

“Will I be with you- on the other side?”, he had asked.

“I-I’m not sure Danny.. There is another place.. The only reason I haven’t gone there is because I didn’t want to go without you. I’ve been waiting for you. Once you go over, I think we might both go to the next place. I don’t know what will happen then.”

“I want to be with you. I would rather go with you into the unknown than stay here without you.”

…..

He plucks the petals off, dropping them in clumps into the leather pouch. He has to go back to get the track jacket and the iPod. His mother says that to leave them behind would be bad manners, that the ghosts of their owners would resent him.

…..

Now, wearing the pouch full of marigold petals around his neck, holding the stolen things, Danny walks with his mother’s ghost into the graveyard he has brought roses to so many times in the past. Walking past her own headstone, Danny follows her to a granite crypt topped with a life-size stone horse. A line of ghosts shuffles along inside, each person following the last into a black doorway at the back of the tomb. He peers into it, but he can‘t see anything. Danny’s mother takes one last look at him before passing through. Holding on to the bag of petals, Danny steps forward.