Slow Dance in Purgatory

The day after Maggie’s parents died, she’d seen her mother standing beside her bed, looking down at her. For a moment, she had even felt her mother’s hand in her hair, and she forgot that she was alone in the world, that her parents were gone. It had been only for a second, but Maggie had not been asleep. She had immediately run out into the hallway and down into the room where her parent’s friends were huddled with coffee, deciding what to do with her. Nobody believed her when she told them she had seen her mom.

About two weeks after she’d been placed in her second foster home, Maggie had seen a little boy playing with miniature cars on the rug in her “new” room. She had mentioned it to her foster mother, asking her who the little boy was. The woman had locked herself in her room for the rest of the day, and though she’d been kind to Maggie initially, after that she barely looked at her. Apparently there was no little boy. At least there hadn’t been for two years. Her new foster parents had lost a child, a three-year-old boy, when he had drowned in a neighbor’s hot tub. Maggie hadn’t remained in their home for very long.

Once at a public library, Maggie had asked a busy librarian if there was tutoring available at any time during the week. The librarian had been juggling books and had held a pencil between her teeth. She hadn’t responded to Maggie’s question or even looked at Maggie when Maggie spoke, and when one of the books tumbled from the librarian’s hand, Maggie stooped to retrieve it, only to have the book shimmer like a mirage and blink from her sight. She’d rubbed her eyes vigorously and reached for her glasses where they were perched on her head. When she had stood again the librarian was gone. On the way out of the library that day, she had noticed a framed picture of the busy librarian who had rudely ignored her. It was sitting on a table next to a jar filled with dollar bills and coins. A large poster next to the jar said “Please give to the Janet March memorial fund.”

There had been other times when Maggie had seen people who others could not, but with the exception of her mom that long ago morning, the people she saw had been unaware of her, almost as if they weren’t really there at all, like Maggie was simply watching a re-run of them doing something they had done many times in life. Maggie didn’t know why she could see these little moments caught in time, but she could, and she did. It wasn’t ever anything that scared her or felt threatening to her. Whatever she was seeing was long past and completely unrelated to her – again, like watching a snippet of a stranger’s home movie.

When she had first moved in with Irene, she had been careful to check to see if her room had been mostly unused. She didn’t want a room inhabited by a ghost, even if that ghost was just a cosmic loop of energy stamped on the space. Aunt Irene had given her a few options, and Maggie had chosen the smallest room tucked in the highest eve of the house. Aunt Irene said the room had been used only for storage. Imagine her dismay, then, to be startled awake late one night to find Irene’s late husband in her room.

Maggie hadn’t seen her uncle except for a handful of times, but she had known immediately that it was him. Roger Carlton had gotten quite portly in his old age; he drank too much, overate, and never got any exercise. Add in a surly disposition, an explosive temper, and a wasted life, and it hadn’t been a huge surprise that he’d succumbed to a massive heart attack at the age of 71.

The sighting only lasted a minute or two. He was just standing at the end of her bed, and she swallowed her scream, shoving her fist in her mouth and trying to make herself as small as possible. Roger didn’t react to her fear or raise his head at all. He held a large book in his palms and was reading intently, holding it close to his face as he peered out from under his ghostly specs. Then he was gone.

The next morning, she considered finding a different room to move into, but knew that the odds of seeing “Uncle” Roger again were probably the same, wherever she went. After all, he had lived in the house for almost fifty years. He had left his fingerprints in every room. Fortunately, the episode had not repeated itself. Maggie wondered if that was what had happened the night before in the hallway at the school. Maybe she had seen one of her ghostie moments, as she called them. Giving them a cute name made her feel more normal and made the episodes less jarring.

“That must be it,” Maggie said out-loud as she rolled out of bed and dug around for her slippers. “That school is as old as the hills. It’s a miracle I haven’t seen a whole ghostie mini-series in that place.”

Maggie laughed at her own lame joke, but knew there were several big holes in her theory. Her past experiences seeing ghosts had never involved blaring music or chores being miraculously completed. Most of the other ‘ghosts’ had never been aware of her at all. This one had been startled…and somewhat aggressive. Maggie didn’t want to think about it anymore, so she pushed the unsettling event to the far corners of her tired teenage brain and headed off for morning dance practice.





3


“GONE”

Ferlin Huskey - 1957





August, 1958