Ghost Touch: A ghost created my authentic personage
Ghost touch. Not on your screen, but on your skin. It chills your soul.
I once experienced ghostly ripples on my skin—ghost bumps.
Glacial ooze seeped through my sensitive pores, infused my blood flow with ethereal blizzards blown from Hades’ realm, and iced my heart.
White cells puzzled, red globules fainted. My cilia roots, stunned, pitched millions of tiny red flags.
Angels, shine celestial light, touch my cheek, hold my heart! I refused to sacrifice my bone and blood for art.
Not a ghost story
In my young adult-still-living-with-parents’ galley den, I was writing a chapter in my first novel. Not a ghost story, but I wobbled inside an episode where I summoned, unaware, the dead.
Aunt Ana, a prop protagonist in my sensuous romance, played vivid enough, but lacked depth. Bi-dimensional, too flat. It hungered for an authentic touch.
Despite her deep, glowing eye-pupils and sleek anthracite hair helmet, the portrait ranked plain photograph. Not art.
Shade grading missed. The sepia tinge, then tones in sunshine or gloom, the mix of reverie and chortling despondency to authenticate the portrait.
Fictional Ana walked, but her steps were inaudible. She laughed, but not sparkling enough. Her lips didn’t move when she spoke. Oh my, her mute caresses didn’t touch me, as balmy as they might be.
Those dark pupils didn’t slurp my eyesight, and her glinting irises sent me short distances. I envisioned her stare carrying me toward far-away realms of unknown stories instead.
My word painting needed bone scaffolding, guts, flesh. A live model.
A sidereal touch
I raked my memory gallery. This neighbor, that borsht vendor, a grandma when younger, my mother in her elderly future? None suited my personage’s embodiment.
A breathing icon, though, from long ago, kept signaling spent smiles to me.
No.
Each time intuition flaunted her image, I gave it a berth. Until one torrid afternoon when, pressed by the drive to write, I had to decide. Ana played key catalyst in that scene, so eluding her hindered a smooth shuffling of the fictitious events.
I found the one. Who else but my mom’s aunt Helen? She lurked—already breathed and walked in my novel without my invite.
My spirits cringed, since she had long passed, but the writer within celebrated. So I accepted her sidereal touch.
After the eureka whisper, I got down to performing the miraculous transfer from mundanity to art. To do so, I gatecrashed Aunt Helen’s heart.
Ghosting after a warm-fleshed touch
Curled on my couch, I shut myself off the present, to invoke her once warm-fleshed touch. I dismissed the heat waves flooding in through the open window, blinded myself from the nearby sky, and played deaf to neighboring pigeons’ cry.
Dark tunnel, urged crawl, and then, zippy ride…
A sliding medium telescoped immaterial tubes that narrowed and enlarged in consecutive shafts. Crushed or inflated, I fled, unaware of ascent or descent. But I didn’t care. I raced to reach Helen’s touch.
Senses numbed on purpose, I continued the chase, mad, unabashed. But no hint of Helen. Her light, when I saw it, would rekindle them.
I kneaded my brains, squeezed remembrances, but to no avail.
Naughty flickers of my chamber’s recent reality interfered with my grim quest. Violet strokes on a painting, glistening teeth in a photo, a yellow notebook on my lap. Shoo!
Latest bird cries or doors thumping plucked my eardrums. Hush!
Clanking crockery in the kitchen, frying onion odor, stinking fumes—Mom’s cooking. Antique rose whiffs, jasmine thickets, gardenias—oh, Helen’s ambrosial garden. Her touch.
These elusive perfumes dragged me closer to my grand-aunt’s bygone era on earth. Bewitched, I ghosted through the tenebrous medium.
Soon, the tunnel flipped vast plain. Inundated in an ocean of light, the plain shrank, and I zoomed in on Helen.
Ghost images
Her jet-black hair pulled sleek in a nape knot, Aunt rustled in her bright, spotless kitchenette. Feet shuffling, skirts swishing, she whisked to cook something, grumbling. One restless shoulder decrypted stirring in a pot.
Stew vapors inveigled my nostrils, potato, zucchini, eggplant essences melting. Then, Helen’s torso yawing—she fretted away a darn gravy spot.
Phut. Aunt plumped the lid and then swiveled around.
My curious guts cringed, but left no impression on the housewife’s forehead. With an impassible sigh, she plunked herself on a stool, grabbed a last-resort-sized packet, and lit a dull cigarette.
Carpathian tobacco. Raw, genuine. An authentic touch.
Spectral smoke coiled, soared, then looped hither. Entered my memory. Will the inaudible reek send me long distances, to Helen’s lived and unlived stories?
Ghost stories
A luciferous-eyed girl tugs at her mom’s cotton skirts, on a rickety rusty pontoon rubbing against the granite cobbled bank. Danube gloom, a lugubrious barge boat moaning, and the misty harbor tableau sinks.
Daisy glades sprinkled with poppy heads, where irises hide and meet. Her irises glint alluring blackness while his emit enamored celestial blue. Helen’s first love she rambled about over family meals.
I recalled my child’s thirst to decipher Aunt’s enthralling exuberance. My writer self, though, hungered for more, so my memory strived to wring lifeblood from the gallery’s scenes. To grind pith into elixirs, touch Helen’s core.
In a lapse of inner focus, I realized I was grinding my teeth.
God, no! I feared the portal closed, so caring a hoot about tongue or tooth, I resumed my metaphysical race.
I alighted on no gloomy or bright forlorn reel though, but back in aged Helen’s kitchenette. In a shaft of shy light, she dragged on her cig, her silence accompanied by the lid’s mumbling.
Soon, my persisting peeping caught a tinge of shame. If only I played a mischievous spook. But no. I spied on forbidden ground for word painting’s sake. A blasphemous spook.
Forgiveness, I begged, but didn’t relinquish my sinful intent.
A touch from beyond
Helen’s wrinkled fingers squashed the cigarette. Then she raised her forehead and her stare fixed me on the spot. As though I was not enough fixed in bed.
Blood froze instants in my veins. I gasped, but not air.
In a flash, I received ventilation. The least kind I needed—arctic. Ice particles from a spooky universe’s north pole, materializing on my skin, not blown. Cut off from brain control, my pores shrank in puny defense. Too late, since occult winters dipped their needles in my soft and tough tissues.
I thanked my blocked lungs because I dreaded inhaling a speck of the static blizzard compressing my physique and my reasoning.
In my brain, though, soon sprouted buds of wonder. Did my concentration open an arcane portal to hell? God warned me I trespassed heavenly thresholds?
Punished by the Supreme or stalked by Hades’ shadows—which was worse? Whose touch terrified my marrow and guts?
My brain marrow hushed speculation when the standstill foregrounded an encompassing chill beyond bearing.
Beyond was coming for me. My cells panicked.
A goodbye touch
Beyond a lateral wall, I envisioned my mother wallowing in savory steams from her hot meals. My diaphragm, empowered, produced a monumental, beyond human piston and propelled my paralyzed lungs into motion.
I hollered, I shrieked, I invoked my nearest protector, human, and supreme in this household, this world.
With my sensors focused on the chamber holding our hearth’s mom, I hollered again. Hallway, doors, too much concrete inside walls. Oh, God, help me!
“Mom!”
The chill jumped off me, startled. I scared the spirit out of it. Ha!
Thank God, I experienced normal physics again, however frightening, as the frigid current coiled around me, trembling. One shy tremble touched my cheek.
A goodbye touch.
Then the window wings fluttered. The chill, tasting warmth from my skin, rushed out into the blue.
The ghost touch trailing behind infused authentic perfume into personage Ana.
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