PodCastle

* Author : Eugenia Triantafyllou
* Narrator : Alethea Kontis
* Host : Summer Fletcher
* Audio Producer : Peter Adrian Behravesh
*
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Originally published in Uncanny Magazine.


Rated PG-13.
My Country is a Ghost
By Eugenia Triantafyllou
When Niovi tried to smuggle her mother’s ghost into the new country, she found herself being passed from one security officer to another, detailing her mother’s place and date of death over and over again.
“Are you carrying a ghost with you, ma’am?” asked the woman in the security vest. Her nametag read Stella. Her lips were pressed in a tight line as she pointed at the ghost during the screening, tucked inside a necklace. She took away Niovi’s necklace and left only her phone.
“If she didn’t die here, I am afraid she cannot follow you,” the woman said. Her voice was even, a sign she had done this many times before. Niovi resented the woman at that moment. She still had a ghost waiting for her to come home, comforting her when she felt sad, giving advice when needed. But she was still taking Niovi’s ghost away.
Stella paused. She gave Niovi a moment to think, to decide. She could turn around and go back to her home taking the necklace with her. Back to her unemployment benefits and a future she could no longer bring herself to imagine, or she could move down the long stretch of aisles, past the dimming lights and into the night, alone, her mother’s ghost left behind—where do ghosts return to in times like this? Niovi would be a new person in a new country, wiped clean of her past.
Foreign ghosts were considered unnecessary. The only things they had to offer were stories and memories.
Niovi had prepared herself for this, and yet she had hoped she wouldn’t have to leave her mother behind.
She gave the necklace to the impassive woman and let herself drift down the aisle as if a forceful gust of air ushered her away.
Her mother’s ghost waved goodbye behind the detector and Niovi’s thoughts was of the Saturday of Souls. It was a prayer, an invocation as she put more and more distance between her and the security woman, her and the necklace. Without her mother’s ghost she would start to forget soon. But this she had to remember. She needed to hang on to something now that her mother had been pried from her hands.
The Saturday of Souls.
When the ghost finally disappeared, Niovi’s legs felt like lead. Her arms felt like lead. Everything felt like lead and she could barely move.
“Welcome!” Niovi heard the driver say as she boarded the airport shuttle.

The first thing Niovi faced when she stepped out of the shuttle was the cold. It was only October. Snow would start at the end of November. But even now the cold was so utter, so complete, it seemed like a wall, an extra line of defense between herself and these people who had too many ghosts and her who had none. A final warning that foreign ghosts were a nuisance, a waste of space.
“Don’t worry,” she whispered to the frost. “You are too late.”
She started her new life in a small apartment in a badly-lit part of a street that led to a cul-de-sac.
In the mornings, as she waited for the days to pass so she could start her new job, she would walk around the city,