Hal

It had been three months since he died.

The road to recovery is long and hard, and in this case, also unsuccessful. No matter how much morphine the hospice nurses gave him, he was still in pain. The cancer latched onto every organ it could and would not release its literal death grip on him until every bit of life was gone.

My Hal, who once gave me strength, needed mine. His rich chocolate brown eyes morphed to a flat hard brown. His strong, tan arms got more brittle with each week. His smile, once his most noticeable feature, shrank from a grin to a smirk to a flat line. The man I knew and loved faded before my eyes, and in this one solitary moment in the middle of the night, I yearned for his touch more than I ever had since his passing.

You can imagine my surprise when I felt it.

A cool, thin hand, reaching around the covers to find mine as lonely sobs escaped my lips. I gasped when I felt it, then recoiled and turned on the light. Nothing there.

Good lord, I scolded. Get a grip.

Grief can make you do weird things. Imagine things, even.

It can make you want things, too.

So the next night, body wracked with mournful cries, I found myself wishing again to feel his hand. Bony and pale, from months of withering away. It would have been nicer to feel his strong, reassuring hand. But his hand in any form was comforting to me nonetheless. I reached my hand out and heard a stirring from the edge of the bed. There was his hand again, reaching across the endless sea of sheets and blankets. I gripped it and squeezed. It squeezed me back.

After a quick inhale, I glance at the tall, standing mirror in the corner that faces my bed and closet. Reaching upwards from the depths of darkness under my bed, I saw a long, spindly arm twisting its way up the mattress to meet my own.

I screamed when I saw it, but quickly stifled myself. Here was Hal, coming back from wherever the hell The Beyond was, maybe even hell itself (because god knows we did some crazy things in our youth) to comfort me, to help me through my grief — and I was going to reject him because he appeared as he did in his last days to me? Would I dare insult him by being repulsed by his final form?

No. So I squeezed his cold, bony fingers and fell asleep once more.

Since the screaming incident, things have started to go sour. Jewelry that Hal gave me has slowly gone missing. I begged and pleaded to thin air for forgiveness, that I had only been startled by his appearance, but I welcomed it nonetheless. It didn’t matter. He still tried to erase the only parts of him that I had left.

The night after this begging incident was the last straw.

I lay in what was once our bed, alone, and inconsolable. But a thought struck my mind and once I had realized it, my grief turned to anger. Our vows had said in sickness and in health, not in death. And I had held up my end of the bargain, by god. I had sat by his bedside and wiped every tear, given every sponge bath, spooned every last bit of food into his drying mouth. I would not stand for this punishment any longer.

“Hal,” I breathed, and the hand snaked upwards once more. Seeing it in the reflection of my mirror gave me goosebumps, but I fought them and pounced off the bed.

He started to recoil, but I was too fast. I leaped to the edge of the bed and looked under, daring to confront my husband one last time. I let out a blood curdling scream.

This specter was not my husband. In fact, he wasn’t a specter at all.

He was a man, a fully human, living breathing man. And he looked at me as if I were the ghost myself.

***

It has now been six months since Hal died.

And it has been eight since the man came to live in our house, unbeknownst to us.

He lived in the crawlspaces, under the bed, in the attic — anywhere he could in order to keep to the shadows and live off of our backs.

It was no wonder that Hal’s morphine gave him no relief. This thief had replaced it with saline and taken the drug for himself.

My jewelry had not gone missing due to Hal’s ghostly wrath. It had been pawned at a shop down the street.

When I was brought to court to testify against this monster, I had only one question for him. His deeds were selfish through and through, and I could see motive in all except for one.

“Why,” I demanded as handcuffs encircled his pale, bony wrists, “why hold my hand through the night from underneath my bed?”

He stared for a moment, then grinned wickedly at my ignorance as he answered.

“Your wedding ring was still on your finger.”