She was sitting on my bed. She smiled, her teeth faint against a velveteen tongue.
“You’re home,” she said.
I sank weakly into a chair, my briefcase sliding out of my hand like a leather fish.
“You’re here,” I replied. It was four o’clock, almost dark already. The steely light pushed shadows like bionic legs up my walls, stiff marching. Traffic noise blurred beyond the windows into the rain.
“There’s a letter waiting.” She offered it to me, an envelope growing blue with wetness. I got up slowly. She always made me feel so heavy, perhaps because her movements seemed so gracefully separate from gravity. She gave me the letter and I turned, walked towards the kitchen, unwinding my scarf.
I was waiting for her to disappear. For her clothy smile and gauze eyes to drop into a void, with the ankle-hungry palms of childhood nightmares. I didn’t want her to leave, but her presence betrayed a side of myself I did not want to see.
The kitchen glowed with white sky and ran with maggots of the rain-shadows dribbling down the glass. I watched the city out my window, the tall, metal necks of skyscrapers bared in rows. The fuzzy spots of coloured lights down on the street. It was very high, up there.
Fourteen stories.
“Why don’t you smile?” asked the ghost. She walked over the tiles with bare, bluish feet, one directly in front of the other. Her movements were childlike, staring with fixed concentration at the path before her.
“I don’t feel the urge.”
Her eyes lifted up, pupils swelling as they settled on my face. She was reproachful, I could tell – and yet her expression seemed simultaneously to pity, to understand.
She walked right up to me, into the membrane of air that surrounded me and warned when someone was coming too close. And I felt the stirring of all nerves and sensations, the thudding rabbit-panic of my heart lifting into apprehension. I had not been so close to her, to anyone, in a long time.
Then, with slow hands, she dug two fingers in each corner of my mouth and stretched upwards, as if my face was chicken flesh or putty. She carved a smile out of my face, and those fingers were very warm.

Time passed, but I never adhered to an order of things. I sat on the ground beside the window that grew colder every minute, and seeped coldness into the concrete floor. I could not remember why I had wanted this harsh-lined, industrial tomb for an apartment but I had discovered that night the way it wrapped around me with pale stormy light, became my own hard shell cocoon, a womb suspended in the sky and smothered protectively with high smog.
She sat huddled at the foot of the bed, shivering.
“Close the blinds,” she said. “Keep the warmth in.”
I didn’t shift my gaze. It seemed acceptable to ignore her, sometimes.
I stayed on the floor, entranced by my tremulous fingers, and fluttering them slowly in front of my face. They could barely move from numbness. She sighed, and I noticed her hair was faded into almost-transparency. It possessed just filaments of shine, caught by dull light, and barely a trace of colour. What colour? I couldn’t remember.
“Damn, I’ve forgotten—”
“It’s okay,” she said, brightly. “It doesn’t matter.” The expression suddenly seemed to take on an echo—it was as if I had heard it before, in some other context. Some warm place, with laughing undertones in more sun-coloured voices.
“It does. It does.”
I stood up. Brushed past her and into the bathroom. When my hands slipped into the water, steam slithered from my skin and brushed its belly against the mirror. The fog snuck up around my image, haloed my head and sat below my throat. The air was so wet.
I turned on the bathroom light and it struck me with its yellowness. How honestly it exposed my sick eyes, and the ghostly pallor of my face. I’d had enough of myself, the way my head felt.
“What’s wrong with me?” I sighed, leaning over the sink, up close to the mirror. There were little red threads of veins; a mesh of them entangling eye-corners.
I took a shower and crawled into bed alongside her. She smelled backwards and hollow, like nostalgia and grief. It was the feeling of something which always escaped, and I could never fix my eyes on it. I sank into nightmares.

In my dreams, she was always suspended with me in that black liquid. We felt for each other in the pounding darkness -- how to determine the slippery limbs of monsters from hers?
There were sounds like heartbeats, but more distant and wide-spaced, yawning gaps of silence which swelled achingly. She filled my sub-conscious.
Absence is always more acute than pain.

In the chilly, grainy hours of the morning I rolled over and watched her mouth tremble into smiles while she conversed, silent-lipped, to a place beyond my ceiling. Her eyes were milky with distance, their colour disappearing. I pursed my fingers around her arm, pressed firmly into her white pear flesh as if to bruise her.
“You’re changing,” I said, cloaked under sleep and darkness. “You’re different, now. The smell of you has changed, and the way you look.”
I heard her smile. Is that even possible? The little sparkling sound of saliva with her moving lips.
“No,” she said serenely, “I’ve been like this for a long time, baby. You just don’t remember.”
I dug my fingers in harder, I could’ve moulded her clay bones. My arm shook with the effort.
“I remember!” I hissed, and she didn’t wince. She didn’t feel pain.

We sat on the balcony, the jutting lip of my apartment building, rough wool blankets over our knees. The sky was thick and icy, punctuated with strange holes in the clouds. If it was winter, it was the depth of it. The startlingly cold depth that hardens your shuddery jaw and seizes the pulleys of your back, holds you tense.
“There’ll always be holes in the sky,” she said. I had the vague idea that it was a reassurance, but I couldn’t tell. Her skin had become just a membrane, the silky globe-covering of an onion. I could see all the framework of bones and her soft, blood-infused muscles. Yet somehow she was still pretty. All transparency, with none of the grotesqueness.
“That means nothing to me,” I said dully. There was just that smile again, baring the wing-like scaffold of smiling jaws.

At night, she sat up cross-legged in my bed, her spine showing through like an elevator cable. She watched me brush my teeth, spitting foam into the sink’s black eye and splashing my face with hot water. I came to the edge of the bed and unclipped my watch, folded it in repose on the bedside table. I slid off my ring, and she smiled at that, held her hand out to hold it.
“Too big for me,” she breathed, gleefully sliding it onto her raw wedding finger. The ring clinked next to its partner, and for a fragment of time, they fit together.

It was light that pressed its solemn face into my dreams and woke me. I squinted into consciousness, felt the sun ache in my brain. The backs of my knees were sticking to the sheets with sweat and my hair was damp. Strange. To feel hot. To feel.
Clarity soaked in. I sat up in bed as I could remember sitting up as a child, bewildered and dozy, kneading my eyes. The air was filled with particles of dust.
She was gone.
I leaned over, running my hand over the sheets. Felt the wrinkles where she had once imprinted her marine-veined limbs, swimming with me in sleep.
“Leah,” I said. My voice sounded almost surprised. Surprised to hear myself say the word, for the first time in years.
“Leah.”
And this time it was a solid word, a reality. I felt it, tangibly lodging between my tongue and the roof of my mouth.
I got up, padding along the floor with new weight and purpose. Panels of yellow sun lay spread across the room. The light was different.
Our sullen, cool kitchen was golden and empty. I went to the tap and filled a glass, drank it and tasted the sweetness. Water had a taste. It was new to me.
And then, leaning against the bench, I saw something on the table, next to my mute telephone. It was the letter in its crisped envelope, ink smeared across it in pale streaks. I brushed my hands over it; its realness. Its significance.
She didn’t say much, he remembered. The paper was folded neatly, and when I unfolded the letter, a silver band slipped into my palm.
Time to go.
It was all she had written. I slipped it into my coat pocket.

I was leaving when I caught my reflection in the hallway mirror. It had been a habit to avoid it, but it was only my face -- strangely unfamiliar now, and loosened, as if all the taut cables of my skull had been let go. I gazed at myself, remembering those delicate fingers, and the holes in the sky. I think I smiled.