Winter Ghosts

This is a short story I did as an exercise from the writing prompt "Midwestern Ghosts."  I had some issues formatting it from Pages to Blogger, forgive any weirdness there.

Winter Ghosts  

     When I met Nicole she was all black lipstick, spiked choker and pale skin like glass.  So how could I not be into that?  The writing course we were both in conveniently took care of introductions and, with a nice efficiency, gave us glimpses into each other’s tritely tortured souls.

So now we were hanging out on the regular, coffee (of course) almost every afternoon, bad horror movies (of course) almost every night.  I was smitten, I might as well have had big pink hearts where my dumb, shit-colored eyes were, but she had that disaffected distance that just made everything worse.  That half smirk, eyes rolling, revealing impossible white beneath makeup-blackened lids; slender, black tipped fingers pushing dark strands of hair behind ears more metal than skin.

Still, we were basically inseparable then, and I’d follow her everywhere, which is how we ended up in the graveyard together on a cold North Dakota night in November.
“Do you believe in ghosts?” she asked, (of course she did) sitting on a large headstone (of course she was) with her legs dangling.
“Nah, not really,” I said.  “I’m pretty into this thing called science, it’s pretty cool.”  I shifted my feet; thrift store combat boots are uncomfortable. “Do you?”
“Um, yeah, I know they exist.  That feeling of something watching you in bed, a shadow in the corner of your eye?  Ever since I was little.”
“Yeah, totally not your imagination, or, you know, like all the drugs or whatever.”
“I have EVP tapes.  Where you record voices, like from the dead.  You can hear ‘em, super clear.”
“Oh come on, your brain wants to find patterns and recognize familiar things, even when there are none.  There’s a word for it.  Appop…appofas…whatever, there’s a word for it, and that’s all that is.  Trying to make sense of static.”
“You can listen to it sometime, you’ll hear it,” she said, hopping off the headstone.  “Hey, I have an idea, come on, let’s get some stuff from your place.”

And that’s how I found myself driving out to Middle of Nowhere, ND 582FU with the camping gear I’d used exactly once.  “Turn off up here,” Nicole said.  We slowed and turned and crept along the roughly kept gravel drive, ruts and potholes masked by a fresh, white covering of snow.  
The house was dark, hunched and angular against the white snow and clear sky, brightened by the moon.  Snow crunched and squeaked under the tires as we idled forward, there wasn’t much, but I was afraid of getting caught on something under it and not being able to get out.  We stopped about 20 yards from the house.  Treelines and shelter belts hid us from the highway, and kept the sound from the few cars out here this time of night almost blocked.
“This is it!” Nicole said, her voice very loud in the silence.  She opened the door, the draft blowing her perfume in a cold wave at my face.  We grabbed the bag out of the back seat and headed up to the house.
“How’d you find this place?” I asked, very mindful of volume.  This was trespassing, right?  Abandoned house or no.  I’d heard cops swing by places like this to make sure people like us weren’t doing things like this.
“If I see something interesting, like a long dirt road off the highway, I check it out,” she said.  We crept up the wooden steps of the small porch, faded yellow police tape fluttered with raspy whispers in the breeze, stitching the entry closed.
“Come on,” she said, opening the door and deftly slipping between the tape strands.  I was surprised it wasn’t locked, but followed with a glance back to the car.

We stood there for a minute, taking in the stillness.  The musty smell was thick, even in the cold, and dust hung in the beam of Nicole’s flashlight like silt in those underwater videos of shipwrecks.  “Holy shit,” I breathed.  
We were looking through a small entry area directly into the living room.  Two ancient couches slouched against the walls , a seating area broken at 90 degrees.  A heavy, simple wooden coffee table stood in front of them. There was clutter everywhere, boxes, old clothes, drawers pulled from a dresser, plates, books, photographs; the result of intruders’ ransacks or just the refuse of a discarded life, who knew?
We walked into the living room, and I set the duffel bag down, tendrils of cold dust curling up around it.  Nicole was moving around the edge of the room, an apparition of black hair and black clothing, softly swirling from place to place, lightly touching the mirrored wall clock, gently picking up a rotting children’s book.  I bent to look at some of the photos, half expecting gruesome serial killer trophies, but finding only mundane strangers, smiling from some other life.  
“Let’s go upstairs,” Nicole said, pointing to an open door leading to a steep set of stairs.  I nodded and we carefully climbed up, wood sighing with each step.  At the top, a narrow hallway stretched through the length of the house, with doors along both sides.  One towards the middle hung open, and we crept in, the small bedroom filled mostly with a kingsized bed.  An old suit was laid out at the end of it, gray with dust.
Nicole shone her light around the rest of the room, over once nice dressers, lamps that probably would never be anything but dark now.  Being here felt strange, voyeuristic, even though there was nothing to see.  The wind had picked up outside, and was swirling and diving between the trees like ghosts, that groaning sound you only seem to hear on windy winter nights scolded us as we moved from room to room, holding ice-cold hands and giggling with nervousness.
 
     Thumps and creaks filled the house, as we went downstairs, the wind outside becoming suddenly frantic.  “Do you want to go into the basement?” Nicole asked.  I didn’t want to admit that I was getting a little spooked, and going down there seemed like a terrible idea.  I knew there wasn’t but it really sounded like something was moving around down there.
“I guess, but I’m sure it’s the same as everything else in here,” I said, playing it cool.  She smiled.  Probably saw right through it, but just said,
“Yeah,” and went back into the dusty living room.  She crouched down and opened the duffle bag, pulling out the tightly rolled sleeping bag.  I’d gotten it the year I went to college, picturing all sorts of adventures, it was not messing around, heavy duty, survival grade.  The kind people use climbing mountains.  All I’d used it for was a one-night trip to a state park and on my bed for a few days when I spilled pop all over my sheets and didn’t wash them right away.
She lay out that big sleeping bag and took off her pants, then her jacket, and shirt, down to her panties and tank top, her pale body almost glowing in the dark of the room.  “Come on, crawl in,” she said, sliding into the bag.  I undressed, shaking, dropping my clothes on the filthy floor, next to the other mildewy piles, hardly feeling the hard, cold air, and eased into the sleeping bag next to her.  We zipped it shut above our heads, and Nicole cracked a small glowstick on.
“I told you there were ghosts,” she said, her face green and black and hypnotic.  “They’re all around us,” she laughed softly.  I felt drunk.
We wrapped our legs together and, chest to chest, listened to the sound around us and it was easy to imagine us encircled by spirits.  She closed her eyes, and I looked at her face for a long time in the dying green light, until I eventually fell asleep, warm again and breathing in the dust of someone else’s life.

I didn’t lose my virginity or anything that night.  I didn’t even lose my virginity to Nicole.  The next morning, we climbed out of that heavy bag, pulled our very cold clothes back on, and drove back to town holding hands.

I still don’t believe in ghosts, but every so often, I still wake up when it’s dark, when I’m lonely and that wind is loud, and I remember what it felt like to be surrounded by them for a night.