A Wish Never Fulfilled

New beginnings rarely actually initiate change of any kind. Everything has a tendency to revert back to the beginning. Circles have no deviations, and life is nothing if not a circle.

Catherine Parkell believed her own story to be the exception as naive newly minted adults often do. Moving from her small, rural town in landlocked Kansas to the bustling big city of Chicago, her dreams were far larger than her job’s salary allowed for. Similar to many girls her own age, she longed for the silver screen even though mediocrity seemed too big an obstacle to surpass. She didn’t lack skill, but was by no means a generational talent. Nor was she unpretty, but her looks would sooner be described as cute or even mousey in most circumstances when the industry far preferred bombshells or knockouts. Even so, there is nothing more powerful or perhaps more misguided than a young adult’s dreams.

Her new apartment was shabby at best and a hazard at worst, but a girl who lived in her imagination and her dreams had little need for properly applied wallpaper. When she closed her eyes, it was fame and fortune she saw, not the mold that would soon have to be thoroughly scraped from the bathroom and the kitchen.

Jobs at the nearest diner and bar down the street meant that her mornings were free to scour the area for auditions. Every wrong lead or failure to locate the person holding the audition was simply part of her ‘settling in’ phase.

This wasn’t to say that there was never any hope, quite the contrary. In fact, there was an incredible amount of potential in Catherine Parkell, and that is far more tragic than anything hopeless.

Catherine soon found that she had quite a way with people. The patrons at the diner and bar were quite taken with her and left her large tips. She told them her dreams, and they insisted that her big break must be right around the corner.

And she did find work as an actress, hand modeling in some commercials, speaking roles in others. It felt like the start of something big until that something never got bigger. Those commercials never led to a big break, and no television producer knocked down her door, offering the role of a lifetime.

When one of the patrons at the diner asked if she had any interest in making more money, her answer was an instant yes. The shine of a new life and a dazzling dream had begun to rust. Her closet-sized apartment felt stuffy, and the monotony of being a waitress had started to make the days bleed together.

The job wasn’t anything particularly special, but it did involve more money. There was an opening at the law firm of patron’s husband. They were looking for a new legal transcriptionist. It sounded so exciting, but Catherine soon found it to be exceedingly difficult. She was by no means a slow typist, but she found the workload to be a lot more tedious than she had expected.

One of the things that had drawn her to the job was the idea that she would be surrounded by stories, by interesting people in high stakes predicaments. As it turned out, she had mistaken the job for that of a court stenographer, who might hear details of wild crimes and be asked to recite slips of the tongue in a tense courtroom.

Instead she largely transcribed videos into documents. Though the material was thrilling at times, her office was a small room with white walls, and she could hardly feel the tension or the importance if it even remained at all.

When a dream dies, it has a rather upsetting tendency to absorb ambitions. Like a black hole where the light of hope winks away into nothingness, the drive for more gets pulled away alongside it. So with the dwindling number of auditions Catherine searched for, the hope for stardom and legacy began to fade as well. Soon, her dreams had to do with a larger apartment and a retirement fund. One might say that adulthood is a lot like that black hole where dreams disappear.

She had friends of course, and she was not afraid of embarking on the occasional date. But unaware of her gradual descent into the complacency mundanity requires, she was unable to open up truly. How can one explain the dreams that drive someone into the big city then wither away next to a Murphy bed?

It was sad, but not devastating when it happened. But of course, the lack of tragedy does not equate to the lack of potential, and unfulfilled potential in itself can form its own tragedy.

It was a quiet Tuesday when it happened. A mundane day for the end of an overarchingly mundane person. She was 37. Not young enough to make it into the papers, but young enough that people still spoke her name with some sadness in the months to come. A sigh and a moment of silence was to be her legacy.

Catherine had barely noticed it happen. The new apartment she had moved into had mentioned some work would be taking place in the unit next to her. She had the misfortune of being home from work, sick with the flu. When a putrid odor filled the air of her apartment, her nose was too clogged to smell it.

There were several people at fault. The building manager, for one, should have alerted the other tenants of work on the gas pipes, but he opted to get the work down while the average person was at work, hoping to avoid having to deal with disgruntled tenants. The other person at fault was not the man who accidentally dislodged the pipe connecting the gas stove on the other side of Catherine’s kitchen wall, but the other worker who insisted on opening up all the windows to let the carbon monoxide exit the room and call it a day rather than calling in a gas leak and checking the integrity of the rest of the pipe.

Catherine’s windows were closed due to the chill of the late autumn breeze. When the dizziness caused her eyes to close, feeling suddenly weak, she thought her flu was driving her to take another nap on the couch. She was dead within ten minutes.

Her eyes opened, an odd lightness to her bones, colors a bit more muted than usual. But it didn’t feel odd to her, just as the young woman sitting on the coffee table didn’t feel particularly odd. Catherine was of course surprised to see the woman, but there was no fear to make her heart pound. Catherine felt oddly like a character in a movie scene that wasn’t about her.

“Hello.” The woman smiled. She looked kind, though her features were difficult to pinpoint. She looked familiar, but Catherine couldn’t recall meeting her before. Her face felt like the very definition of deja vu.

Catherine blinked at her slowly. “Hello.”

The woman looked around the room for a moment, absorbing the details of Catherine’s life. It’s odd how a person can be defined by their things, the order in which they place them, and what objects they choose not to own. Catherine, of course, owned nothing particularly worth mentioning. The woman cocked her head, appraising Catherine not unkindly. “Do you have any questions?”

A cough arose in Catherine’s voice, and she was briefly surprised to find her throat no longer felt so dry. Everything that had made her feel ill and nauseous moments ago was a mere memory. “Who are you? Are you a doctor? Did someone call you for me?”

The gentle smile on the woman’s face turned slightly somber. She had a lightness to her appearance, not because of anything to do with her presentation, but as though darkness waned when she approached. “I’m afraid not.”

Catherine sat up on the couch, looking around in disorientation. A fog was lifting in her mind. “Then what are you doing here?”

She remained on the coffee table, her warm eyes following Catherine as she stood and looked around the room. “I’m here for you.”

An overwhelming sense of nothingness began to settle in Catherine’s bones, weighing at them. There was no pain anymore, but there was nothing at all. No sense of temperature, no sensation. She was aware of the floor beneath her feet, but she didn’t feel grounded to it.

Catherine was not one to panic easily; in fact, she was largely amiable during even those most distressing twists of life, but the uncanniness of sensation was beginning to overwhelm her. She looked back at the woman at the coffee table. “I’m sorry. I don’t know why you’re here, but you need to leave. I’m not feeling quite myself.”

The woman rose. “I understand you’re confused.”

But Catherine had turned away. Numbness, nothingness was spreading through her veins, robbing her of any feeling other than the panic that was slowly building. She crossed to the door, feeling as though her apartment was suddenly too small. Her hand closed around the door handle, aching for fresh air, for the sensation of it filling her lungs. But the door handle didn’t turn.

“Catherine.” The woman’s voice came from only a few paces away. “You can’t open that door.”

“Why? Why not?” She tried harder, but the most the handle would do was rattle. Whirling, she faced the woman again. “Who are you? Why are you in my apartment?”

The woman sighed, her face a perfect expression of sympathy. “You know who I am.”

“No, no I don’t.” An indescribable sense of foreboding settled over her skin. Her hands found their way into her hair, pulling at its roots. Still no sensation.

A hand lay on Catherine’s, pulling it from its spot in her hair. Warmth flooded where the woman’s touch lay. “If you didn’t, you would have been terrified the moment you saw me.”

The warmth of her caress was an anchor in the sea of weightlessness. Catherine shook her head, tears building in her eyes. She wished they burned. The truth lay just behind her tongue, but it felt too far away, too implausible. “I was asleep on the couch.”

The woman’s eyes showed a practiced, though genuine sympathy. “You’re passing on, Catherine.”

The words shattered the room. Everything that had once been weightless felt crushingly heavy. Memories flooded Catherine, dreams she had never fulfilled, chances she had never taken. It felt unmistakably true that she was gone, but it couldn’t be true. How can life end so unremarkably?

“No, no. I was on the couch. I’m asleep.” Catherine wrenched her hand away from the woman. Forcing herself to stand up straight, a false smile appeared on her face. “You’re some sort of horrible nightmare.”

The woman let Catherine stumble away from her. “I go by many names, but that is not one of them.”

But denial is not so easily overcome, and Catherine was a woman whose life was built around stubborn optimism and acceptance. If she had been willing to accept hardship or hard truths, she might have been able to fight harder for her dreams of a legacy. Her optimism led her to take the easiest path in life, the one that would lead to the most instant relief, accepting obstacles as insurmountable too easily.

It was another obstacle that life would have ended prematurely. Denial and absurd hypotheses extended the false joy. “One of the women at work has had one of these before. She called it a lucid dream.”

“Catherine, I do not wish to rush you, but I’m afraid this process is not one without a deadline.”

She barked a laugh. “A deadline? You’re implying that I’m already d…”

The woman appeared before her again, moving within the blink of an eye. Her voice was more firm now, like an adult running low on patience as they chastised a child. “Catherine. You have to come with me. All you have to do is let yourself go.”

The woman extended her hand, but Catherine jerked out of reach. “Let myself go? I’m not d… This isn’t real.”

“It is.”

“No.” Catherine shook her head sharply. “No, it isn’t.”

“You’ve passed away, Catherine.” The woman took another step closer. “There was a gas leak. It killed you.”

The words bounced around Catherine’s skull, striking her repeatedly. “That’s not possible.”

“It is. Just look back towards the couch.”

There was nothing Catherine wanted more than to ignore her suggestion, but something overtook her like a compulsion, and she looked towards the couch again. There were feet visible from the side, and horror spread through her bones as she came to stand before the figure laying on the couch. It was her, her own body, leached of color. She was still, as though she could be sleeping, but there was a lack of movement that felt uncanny, like a wax figurine that mimicked reality too well.

Catherine’s voice bubbled out of her in a sob as her hand clasped over her mouth. “That can’t be possible.”

The woman was by her side once again. “Why not?” Her voice was as gentle as a violin.

Catherine couldn’t tear her eyes away from her body. “Because I haven’t done anything. There’s not even anyone here to notice that I’m d…that I’m dead. My life hasn’t meant anything to anyone.”

“Everyone’s life means something to someone.”

Her eyes were glued to the body, to the smudged makeup she hadn’t quite been able to remove last night. Although her skin was pale, her lips were a bright color, and for whatever reason, that unsettled Catherine most of all.

She had never been a woman who complained or dug her feet in, never fought for anything she wanted. Even now, an urge to listen to the woman, to cause her little inconvenience weighed on her. On some level, Catherine was aware that none of this was the woman’s fault. She wasn’t the reason that Catherine’s soulless body lay on the couch, but she clearly had powers. She could do something.

“Who are you?” She whispered, wrenching her gaze from the couch.

The woman appeared to have a perpetually soft smile on her lips. She was quite pretty, or at least Catherine got the feeling that she was. Her features felt just out of a sight like trying to recall a face from a dream.

“Some have called me Charon, and others have called me a Reaper. Some have even called me an angel.”

“That’s not an answer.” The words caught in her throat, but Catherine tried to calm herself.

“It’s not. All answers will come after we go.”

When the woman took a step towards her, Catherine stumbled backwards. “What if I didn’t go? People have out of body experiences that change their life. What if this could be that?”

The woman’s gaze followed her. “That can only happen for bodies that are on the brink, ones that are safe now. The carbon monoxide is still filling this apartment. Your body is gone.”

“But you can put me back.” Catherine clasped her hands together tightly, feeling just a breath away from begging on her knees. “Then I can make something of my life.”

“Catherine, the window will pass soon, and I will have to leave.”

Her words fell on deaf ears. “I have to go back. I have to do something. I’ll make an impression. People will notice when I’m gone. You just have to put me back.”

The woman looked hastily around the room, a sense of urgency marring her pristine features. “We are running out of time, Catherine. There’s no one here, no one that you could watch over for a while who could prolong the process.”

“Exactly,” Catherine could hear her voice becoming shrill, the desperation bleeding into her vocal chords. “No one’s here. None of this meant anything. It can’t end like this.”

There was a shift, and everything came violently into focus. The woman’s face was no longer unclear, and Catherine stumbled backwards. She wasn’t beautiful, or maybe she was once, but now she was decaying. A piece of her cheek was missing like a cracked porcelain doll. Her face was cracking then disintegrating, falling into ashes on the floor.

A scream ripped through Catherine as she stumbled backwards.

The woman lunged for Catherine with a hand that was rapidly splintering into dust, but she jerked herself away, throwing herself behind the couch. As quickly as she could, she crawled away, as the angel, the reaper, the ferryman fell to the floor in ashes.

Silence was loud in the apartment. She wasn’t sure how long she sat on the floor, staring at the place where the figure of a woman had just been, but the sun began to lower across the sky. Slowly, her fingers trembling, she began to peer around the other end of the couch where her body lay.

Part of her had expected to feel terrified at the sight of her body, but she simply felt alone. Her body seemed to be a part of a dream, some past life she had lived hundreds of years ago. It felt far too detached from her to imagine that just this morning, they had been one and the same.

With the woman gone, the emptiness began to feel bigger, and her apartment that had once been so full of warmth felt hollow. She sat there staring at her body for a while, as though it was her only connection to life.

A fire truck’s siren in the distance brought her out of thoughts, and she slowly rose to her feet. Although she had no hunger, she felt the urge to continue her normal routines. Perhaps normalcy would return her to life. Her too pale fingers gripped the knob at the base of her stove, but it wouldn’t turn. Nor would the fridge open or the faucet turn on. Nothing moved for Catherine anymore.

Despair was a hot tightness to her throat, but she turned back towards the living room before it could grip her completely. Catherine was a woman of poise and always had been. She would not fall to this problem, not when solutions were needed. But having thoughts of purpose and strength didn’t will those things into existence, and Catherine dragged her feet as she mourned the life that she had blinked by.

The smoke detector blinked atop her ceiling, next to the carbon monoxide sensor that should have saved her life, but its regular blinking red light was silent. She blinked up at it, wondering if it could truly be off, if that was the cause of all of this, but she couldn’t reach it, nor could she move a chair to try to reach it anyway.

The only thing she could do was sit in front of her body and finally let the tears spill down her cheeks. It was an odd sensation, tears that felt simultaneously weighless and crushing. Everything, the interaction with the woman and the sight of her own body, still felt like a dream that she couldn’t wake from.

Her mind raced through every thought she’d had, every experience she lived. How could things that felt so purposeful and full of life feel so meaningless now? Why had she bothered to go to the farmer’s market last Thursday, but never continued to strive for her own goals? Catherine was to leave behind a legacy of mediocrity, a life of nothing significant ended by a faulty carbon monoxide detector.

She surmised that the building manager had tinkered with it during a routine building inspection last week. It was the only reason she could think of that it would have stopped working while the smoke detector beside it blinked happily away. She had replaced their batteries at the same time, and while it wasn’t necessarily the only solution, it seemed like the one that fit the most. The building manager had always been a man of greed, capitalizing on any opportunity to cut costs even if safety was sacrificed in the process. It would likely cause too much of a fuss for him to have insisted everyone be made aware of the repairs, easier to hope to do them secretly.

It didn’t matter now anyhow. It didn’t make her any less dead.

Part of her hoped that she would fall asleep, and that upon waking, it would all have been a dream, but she never slept, nor did she tire. Time felt rapid, yet achingly slow, as if she was adrift feeling the strength of the ocean all around, but never the effect of a wave.

At some point, though she couldn’t tell if it was the same night or the next, time feeling like a blur, the other tenants returned home. Normally, she would have only been able to tell if her next door neighbor accidentally shut her door a little too hard, but this time it was obvious. Because upon returning, Ms. Darton screamed.

The smell, she smelled gas, she screamed, panicking spreading through the hallway like a flame. Other tenants were only just returning as well. It must have been just after the workday ended, Catherine surmised.

Things happened quickly, yet as if through a fog. The authorities were called, and the building was clear. That was how they found her. It was lucky that one of the men from the gas company insisted that she might have a pet that they needed to check on. If not for that man, her body might have been rotting for days.

Catherine watched them come in, their faces drawing together in pity at the sight of her. They didn’t seem surprised, simply saddened.

“Right next door. She had no chance.” One of the workers lamented as he crossed to her to look at the body.

Though Catherine sat but two feet from where he crouched, it was as though he looked through her. She gazed at him mournfully, wondering if this was her last chance to see another person. Was this what she had denied her easy crossing for? To watch the world carry on without her?

“Foolish to have her window closed.” Another man said as he pried open her window. The men were adorned with gas masks, and all things considered, they felt more strange than she did. “She could’ve given herself a chance if it was open.”

Catherine’s attention snapped to the man by the window. An outraged sob burst from her throat. “I’m not the one who turned off the detector!” Her voice rose in a mix between a plea and a shrill scream. “I didn’t do this to myself!”

The man carried on. “Did anyone know her?”

The one that crouched by her body answered. “Her neighbor mentioned something about her being polite.”

By the window, the man let out a sigh. “Such a waste.”

The words’ meaning splintered before Catherine’s eyes, and although the man likely meant that it was a waste that a woman had been killed over nothing, she couldn’t help but see the meaninglessness of her life through their eyes. She had been dead for hours, and no one had noticed, and the ones that did come for her were there on behalf of the building. It was a waste. Her life was a waste.

“If only the window had been opened.”

Dormant rage boiled in her stomach. She screamed, and they didn’t flinch. “It wouldn’t have mattered,” her voice was shrill, but only to her own ears. “The detector was tampered with!” She screamed more and more until her throat should have been raw, until her voice should have been lost to her. She screamed as they called the police to come get her body. She screamed as they left the apartment without another glance towards her. She screamed in the silence. And nothing stirred.

No one buried Catherine Parkell, nor did anyone discover what the building manager had done. It would be years before someone would even think to contact her aging parents asking if they knew what had happened. She was cremated by the morgue with her ashes held onto in case anyone came looking for them, but no one did.

And Catherine’s spirit remained in that apartment. Sometimes she found she could walk between rooms, through the walls, and other times she was confined to the room that she died in. At first, she relived her own memories, sifting through them for meaning and value, but as time dragged on, emotions replaced thought. Despair bred anger. Numbness bred disorientation.

She had lived an empty life, and now she was to have an empty death. She was alone with nothing, but even nothingness can fester. Dormant feelings grew elevated, heightened.

That is how Catherine Parkell came to haunt 3421 Martine Boulevard, but it is never places or even people that are haunted. It is life itself just as much as death that is haunting.

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

There were other families who moved into that apartment after Catherine’s death, afterall, a nice affordable apartment was hardly easy to come by. The building manager did not disclose the death that had occurred in the apartment, nor did he admit to his culpability in the event. The first family that moved after Catherine Parkell never witnessed anything strange. The Godiers lived joyous lives, a couple with two lovely young boys. The couple lived to their elder years and only moved out of the apartment when their boys had families of their own. The Goldiers moved down to the South where they could be warm, and their sons’ families could visit whenever they wanted.

They sold the house to a single mother, who was blessed with a beautiful baby daughter and a spiteful pre-pubescent son. It was years before they experienced anything strange, though Catherine was still there. She roamed the halls at night, but the loud cries of a baby still learning how to sleep kept her away.

Seasons came and went, and Catherine grew more lonely. The happenings of the family were right before her, but they were so far away. It was as though she was stuck watching the portrait of someone else’s happiness while her own had long since withered away.

The first sighting was a rather unspectacular one. As the baby girl, Angelina, grew into a sweet toddler, she drew Catherine’s attention. Catherine had never married, never had children of her own although she had always wanted to. First, she was too focused on her career, and then she was older and had grown wary of men.

The first time she watched Angelina sleep, it had been out of curiosity regarding the children she had never had. But as time grew on, and Catherine’s hold on her own mental state began to grow weaker, the child became a sort of fixation. The lines between her own life and the ones she was watching began to fade, just as the lines between life and death themselves did.

Angelina was six years old when she declared that her room was positively freezing at night. She of course declared this less eloquently and with a much more jumbled pronunciation of consonants, but the sentiment was the same. Her mother bundled her with blankets that night, yet Angelina still shivered. Her teeth shattered so hard that she woke herself up, and that was when she saw her.

Standing over her bed, face blue, eyes sad and distant, stood Catherine. She was weeping, tears streaking down her face, but she snapped to attention when Angelina opened her eyes. Angelina was peering at her with the curiosity that only a child who thought for at least a second that she might still be dreaming could have. That curiosity lasted for only three seconds.

Catherine’s mouth began to open and her sobs, those same screams that hadn’t been heard by human ears for twenty-five years were audible.

Angelina trembled in her bed as the woman before her wailed, terror turning her silent. The sound of her cries were so loud that Angelina felt it ringing in her ears. But it wasn’t until the ghostly woman’s cries ceased that Angelina felt her own scream rise out of her throat.

Within seconds, Angelina’s mother was in her room, bursting through the door, but all she saw was her daughter cowering against her pillow. In spite of all of her single parent exhaustion, she stayed with Angelina for hours, trying to convince her that her room was safe and that the ghost had been part of a dream. Parents almost never believe in things they cannot see until they are far too close for comfort.

Her boy saw Catherine next, but he was too absorbed in himself to realize what he saw. His mother, Margaret, in all of her weariness, tended to leave him to his toys and sour attitude as she cared for Angelina. He had grown used to talking to his toys, ordering them to stand a certain way, unwilling to tolerate any toy soldiers who fell over. He was in the midst of a war scene when a voice spoke that wasn’t his. The toy soldiers were in two lines, preparing to rush each other, and his general was making a speech to his soldiers to boost morale.

“Are we ready, men?” He spoke in a lowered pitch.

But a decidedly female voice responded, “Yes, we are.”

He continued to play for three seconds, rushing his soldiers towards the other line before he replayed the moment in his mind, realizing the strangeness of the situation. In retelling this moment, he would never admit how his heartbeat sped up as his eyes scanned the toys strewn about the floor. He had thought that maybe one of Angelina’s talking baby toys had been thrown in with his, but they were all sitting neatly in their own box.

Then he saw something before him, an outline of a woman flickered like a light just before him. But by the time he blinked, it was gone, and the room was still with silence.

Margaret saw the ghost once. She had long chalked up her daughter’s fears of the dark to simple childhood fears and too many violent television programs, and her son had never mentioned anything strange to her. Margaret was washing her face, letting herself fall into her nighttime routine in the hopes that it would provide comfort for days that bleed into each other.

When she lifted her head to look in the mirror, the figure of a woman was standing behind her. She jumped, her heart jolting out of its chest as she whipped her head to the side, but the bathroom was empty all around her. Margaret rubbed at her tired eyes, placing her hand over her heart to calm herself. Perhaps she was more tired than she realized. It had been a trying several days. Angelina had been insistent that someone came into her room every night, and when Margaret had shown her the locks on the doors and windows, that had only made her more frightened.

“Does that mean we’re locked in here with her?” Angelina had asked her mother, tears welling in her eyes.

Margaret had assured her that they were perfectly safe and that they weren’t locked in with anyone, but she was at her wits end. How does one teach children about dreams and imagination without making it sound dismissive?

Finishing drying her face with a washcloth, Margaret peeked again at the mirror, but the reflection was her own. It was only when she turned to the door that the figure appeared again. She appeared so normal that Margaret almost thought someone else had wandered into their apartment, but as the figure spoke, her skin began to turn blue.

“We’re the same.” She rasped, a voice hoarse from unheard screams. “You fill your days with monotony.”

Margaret’s heart was in her throat. Her feet were rooted to the ground as the woman’s skin began to turn from blue to gray.

“But you have them.” A decaying hand reached for her face. A gentle graze.

A scream tore from Margaret’s throat as she ripped herself away, wrenching her eyes shut. But when she opened them again, the woman was gone.

Stumbling to the wall, she tried to gather herself, assuring herself that there was nothing there.

“Mommy?” Jackson’s small voice called from his room.

Margaret sighed deeply, tearing her fingers through her hair and cursing herself for waking them up. As she padded over to his doorway, she tried to mask her expression, turning back into the weary yet capable mother.

“Mommy had a nightmare, honey. Go back to sleep.” She said through the crack in the doorway. Jackson was sitting up in bed, but he eventually nodded and lay back down.

The apartment felt cold, and she reminded herself that she had to talk to the building manager about it. Their neighbors insisted that their units were warm even in the cooler days, but even though Margaret could never locate the draft, she was positive there was a lack of insolation somewhere that chilled the living room.

She peeked at Angelina next, praying that her scream hadn’t woken her, but Angelina was already awake, sitting up in her bed and shivering as the same figure of a woman crossed from the foot of her bed to her bedside.

“Get away from her!” Margaret burst through the door just as the woman reached for Angelina, her long fingers wrapping around the trembling girl’s arm. Her intention had been to tackle the woman before she could touch her daughter, but the figure turned to mist as soon as she had spoken. Margaret crashed into the bedside table instead, slamming her hip into its side and cursing.

“Mommy?” Angelina’s lip quivered as she reached for her mother. “Is she gone?”

Margaret couldn’t speak to respond, her mind whirling with the pain in her hip and the impossibility of what she just saw. Instead she took her daughter in her arms and held her. She didn’t know how long they sat there, listening to each others’ breathing calm down.

“My arm hurts.” Angelina pointed to her forearm. For a second, Margaret thought she was holding her too tight, but the marks on her arm were long and red, from nails that had dug into her skin.

“How did you do that?” Margaret asked gently, but her heart was sinking.

Angelina blinked up at her. The tears had dried, but she was still shaky with fear. “I didn’t. The woman did. She tries to hold me, but I tell her not to. Usually, she disappears, but this time she came closer.”

Margaret swallowed, her voice useless in her throat.

“Why is her skin blue?” Angelina asked.

Her thoughts had all turned to silence as she sat stunned holding her daughter. “I don’t know.”

“Why is she here?”

“I don’t know.” Margaret repeated.

**

When morning came, Margaret might have been able to convince herself that this was all a dream if not for two things. The scratches on Angelina’s arm were even angrier in the morning, nearly drawing blood. But what Margaret found far stranger was the casual manner in which he asked the two of them “if that blue lady was what all the fuss was about?”

Margaret struggled not to drop her coffee cup on the floor, putting it on the counter with a shaky hand. “You saw a blue lady last night?”

He shook his head tightly, digging into the cereal Margaret had made for him. “Not last night. But the nights before. She comes into my room and cries. She’s crazy.”

His cereal bowl was ripped out of his hands and thrown into the wall behind them, and the table shook beneath them. The three of them were still in the empty room, each of them holding their breaths.

“Sometimes she throws things.” He whispered when the shaking stopped.

Margaret moved them the next day, refusing to negotiate with anyone who tried to get them to stick around at least until it was sold. She wouldn’t step foot in the apartment again, especially not with her kids.

The building manager, who was distantly aware of Catherine’s death, tried to get Margaret to keep quiet about the whole ordeal, but she was vocal that no child should be allowed into that apartment.

Eventually, she told enough people that the real story of Catherine surfaced, a poor woman who died in a gas leak, and the public took notice. Infamy spread like bad gossip, and tours were organized. The pain of a woman trapped in her own place of demise became a spectacle. Some wealthy individuals even paid large sums to spend a night in the apartment and listen for her wails.

The building administration lined their pockets as they became a stop on a haunted house bus tour, insisting that they receive some of the profit in exchange for letting the tour attendees come up and view the famed living room in which she died.

There was never any talk of exorcism or helping her pass because without proof of the haunting, there would be no money to be made, nothing macabre to be gawked at. Catherine as a person was forgotten, and all that was left was her profitability.

Forgotten in life, exploited in death.