Olivia Brooks - Editor
Dark clouds roll over the field of wheat, thunder rumbling to the tune of the croaking warble of dallow flies.
I stand at the well and let my fingers wander over the jagged stones and the cracked, yellowed mortar in between. At my feet, ants patrol an overturned wooden bucket.
This well had been cared for, I remember.
Back then, children leaped fences and clambered boulders the size of wagons, as adults looked on with tender nostalgia. Chickens clucked loudly and plowhorses churned dirt beneath their hooves.
An image burbles to the surface of my murky pool of memories, one of cottages wreathed in flowers for some holiday or other and I hold the remembrance close to my heart.
This had all been loved.
The low clomp of footsteps compels me to turn, my cotton dress rippling across my bare legs, and I see him.
Rufus Finngald-Everett.
“Hey,” he says.
He stands with his head cocked impudently to the side and his hands tucked in thrice-patched pockets. I notice that he has finally succeeded in purchasing the shoes he waxed poetic about the last we met. Nigh-keys, he called them.
How are you? I ask.
My voice cannot compete with the symphony of wheat rustling in the wind, dallow flies, and drum beats of thunder crescendoing and decrescendoing in the humid air, yet Rufus hears me anyway. The open mind of a child, I suppose.
“Fine.” he shrugs, pulls a face. “I dunno. Could be better.”
It is the same for me.
“Yeah?”
I survey him in greater detail, You have grown taller.
He looks proud, “Dad says I’ll prolly get at least six feet and I’m only eight, so. Grandpa was tall too. Dad says he was practic’ly seven feet.”
I’m sure you will be quite tall.
“I better. Sis would tease me elsewise. And if I got tall, I could play basketball and —and the other kids wouldn’t stomp me as much. Maybe I’d even stomp them if, y’know, if I felt like it. If the mood struck me or what.”
Mischief darkens his eyes as he considers this last thought, his fingers drifting subconsciously to a bruise brushing his forearm in dark purple and red.
A mechanical scream cleaves the countryside and I startle.
“It’s just an ambulance siren,” Rufus scoffs. “You oughta know better. Actin’ like a baby, scared of every little thing.”
If a boy of my time had spoken to a girl a few years his elder in such a manner, he would have been whipped. I debate telling him this, along with a few other choice phrases, yet find that the temperament for petty retaliation eludes me. Perhaps it is indifference tethering me here, after all. After all these long, countless years.
Wrath and vexation and love are such human emotions. It is the intangible things you miss the most.
“El?”
Rufus’s voice returns me to the present. I like his nickname for me. Full names bear history, and Elisabeth is a somber, weighted word.
Yes?
“I don’t wanna be rude but how… how did you die?”
I fell down this well and drowned.
“Oh. That’s why you’re still here, right? That’s why the well won’t budge and everyone says it’s haunted. I guess they’re right, though. About the haunting.”
Yes.
“And- and you’re all alone. You’re stuck here.”
Yes.
“Hm…” Rufus thoughtfully taps his chin, his eyes both innocent and knowing. “Not for long, though. Soon you’ll be up there.”
A spirit?
“No, lightning.”
He points to a flare of white in the dark clouds. Nature’s magic, wild and free.
I’d love to be lightning.
“You wouldn’t be lonely either. You’d have Mom and Grandpa and also, you’d make real nice looking lightning.”
Did you say I would look pretty?
“Psh, no. You wish.” he ducks his head in the way he does when he lies.
I watch the wheat dance, hiding a smile in the hollow between teeth and cheek, and when it rains, we lift up our arms and dance together.
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