She drifts closer and when her ghostly hair floats around me, it’s like mermaids, sirens from the story trying to pull you down with them and drown you in the deep. Tendrils floating in sweet oblivion.

         Okay, and she pauses directly in front of me. Even with her biblically accurate angel vibes and shifting face, what I do grasp of her, I find beautiful. Staring into an unfinished puzzle or painting, always changing. Always just out of reach.

         I pull the blankets up tighter, preparing for one hell of a crazy bedtime story.

         “Go on, ghost girl,” I encourage her, “tell your tales.”

         To my surprise, she does so.

         Once, she says, gesturing around her, before this was a building of boxes, it was a humble family home. Once, a mansion. Once even a church. A temple. A meeting house. A place of governance. A place of rest. A humble shrine for forgotten gods.

And before all that, this place was a meadow. With flowers that stretched far as the eye can see. 

I was walking for so long that I forgot my name. My purpose. I had blisters on my hands and feet from crawling even. But I knew I had to get away.   

Witch, they called me. Siren. Harpy. All manners of insults. Funny, isn’t it? I can remember the pain, but not the good memories.

“That’s how I am too.” I confide, echoing her gloom. “It’s easier to remember the bad times than the good.”

Yes. And she continues, her voice fervent as if in prayer. And in this meadow, I danced and danced until I was out of breath, until I lay down in the cold rain and the fever overtook me.

I died dancing. 

“Were you?”

Was I what?

“A witch like they said?”

She laughs. I like her laugh the more I hear it. Like bells, those flowers shaped like bells bending against the wind of an endless field. Her meadow, I can almost see it. Smell it, the pollen like golden dust against me. 

I just liked to dance. She says. And they chased me until I died.