PodCastle

* Authors : Samantha Murray, Avra Margariti and Devin Miller
* Narrators : Eliza Chan, Matt Dovey and Srikripa Krishna Prasad
* Host : Matt Dovey
* Audio Producer : Devin Martin
*
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This Blue World Previously published by Fantasy Magazine (Issue 83)
The Light At the Edge of the World Previously published by Flash Fiction Online
Directions to the House of Unnumbered Stars Previously published by Flash Fiction Online, October 2022


Rated PG
This Blue World
By Samantha Murray
 
You leave while it is still dark. Your lover sleeps on his stomach, the sheet draped only to his waist.
You don’t want to go. You want to slide back into bed and listen to him breathing. And for him to make you coffee later, dark and sweet.
But you’ve never let anyone haunt you. And you’re not about to start now.
Your car takes a few tries to get going, as if it is reluctant to move out of his driveway, as if it wants to stay, not to glide down his street in this blue world that exists just before dawn.
There is light in the sky when you pull off the highway and wind through the suburban streets to your house. A woman is walking down the road, and she is surrounded by her ghosts. You try to count them unobtrusively . . . eleven? Crowding and cluttering behind her. She doesn’t look that much older than you, and how easy is her heart, did it just throw itself at anyone who came along? You wonder if any real people are waiting for her at home or if their ghosts were the only part she kept.

You’ve always been able to see them. Most people can only see their own ghosts; only a rare few can see those that belong to other people.
You’d confronted your mother once, when you were not much more than five. “But you should only love my dad,” you’d declared stridently, flushed and righteous. You knew which ghost was your dad, although he’d died when you were a baby. You’d curl up next to his ghost sometimes and tell him about your day. He never spoke back to you and his eyes were always on your mother.
“I do, my dear,” your mother answered. And yet there was another ghost in your house, too. A younger man, with hair that fell forward over his forehead. “Once, it was something that was true,” your mother said when you’d huffed and puffed about it. The ghosts lingered, even once you’d stopped loving them. “I wanted to deny it later. Pretend he never meant anything to me, just a crush, an infatuation, a fling. But here he is, so . . .” she shrugged.
“Do you haunt him too?” you’d asked. You hadn’t thought of this before; it was a new idea with tricky edges.
Your mother looked very far away and oddly younger. “I should think it likely,” she said, with a very non-mother-like smile that you hadn’t seen before.

You are in the middle of making yourself a cup of tea — peppermint, your tea of choice for afternoons, when you look up and see him. Sitting in your window seat, one hand folded under his chin.
Too late. You are too late. Your hands grip the benchtop and you bite down hard on your lip. Too late.
Surely your heart is sinking but if that is the case why is it hammering so hard in your chest?