HCE received a lot of high-quality submissions for The Green Issue – sadly, too many to fit inside the magazine! So we offered some shortlisted writers and artists the chance to be published here on the website. Keep an eye on our social media for more great writing like this, in the run-up to the release of The Green Issue…
A Ghost’s Advice
Philip Palios
The church was three stones’ throws from my house, that’s what he said. I looked around my house but there was no church in sight. I walked further, but grew frustrated and wondered how far exactly a stone’s throw was in this ghost’s opinion. I wandered into the Post Office, hoping that they might know the city better than I. When I told the woman at the counter I was trying to find a church three stones’ throws away, she scratched her head and paused before answering.
“Well, I don’t know. There’s no church near here, that’s for sure. Let me check something.” She pulled out a massive tome from under the counter and opened it up to a page with rows and rows of numbers divided by about a dozen columns. “A stone’s throw, it says here, that’s about a block. Three blocks from here, then? I don’t know.” She put the book away as I recovered from my astonishment that such a measure was official. As I walked out of the post office, it occurred to me that she was probably bullshitting me, but I was too panicked to do anything about it.
Three blocks? I walked three blocks in every direction from my house, but there was not a single church. I saw the sun setting over the river and slammed my fist on top of a nearby rubbish bin. My fist hurt louder than the sound it made. Go to the church three stones’ throws from my home, if I wanted to live past sunset. That’s what he said. At least I think it was a he, the ghost had a deep voice.
When I had woken up that morning, I was stunned to find my bedroom completely upside down. It took a while for me to realise that I was floating from the ceiling. My gut jumped into my throat and I waved my arms as if I were drowning. The ghost had revealed himself through his laughter. He was just below me and when he began laughing, he gradually became visible. A fat old white man with a beard down to his toes. “Santa?” I asked jokingly.
A large bronze staff appeared in his hand and he used it to knock me down from the ceiling. He pulled me close to his chest and whispered into my ear, “Today is your last day, are you ready?”
“No!” I shot back. “I’m too young, I have so much left to do. Why is today my last?”
“Everyone has their time. Now is yours. Listen, I wanted to give you a heads-up. I’m not the one ending you. I’ve lived here since you arrived and always kept to myself. I figured what harm would come by letting you know what I know, now that you only have a few hours left to live.”
“This is ridiculous. I’m leaving.” I said, turning toward the door. When I grabbed the handle my flesh melted and my consciousness was transported into a blazing white void. I felt more pain than I have ever imagined, as if I was being burnt alive. I tried to scream, but I had no voice. Tried to cry, but I had no tears. Moments later, I was pulled back into my bedroom.
“Listen. Listen. I know a way you can keep living. It’s an ancient ritual. Something that fell into folklore and then vanished due to lack of interest. But you seem desperate to stick around. All you need to do is go to the church three stones’ throws from here before sunset. Stay there, you will be transformed, and you will keep living.”
I was surprised how easy it could be to avoid death and how such a thing surely wouldn’t fade from public discourse if it were brought up in the modern age. Not only could I live on, I could probably make a fortune telling people all they had to do to defeat mortality was go to church. It never occurred to me at the time that there were mobs of people already doing just that, and failing miserably.
I thanked the ghost and went to work, knowing I would have plenty of time to go to church before sunset after work. It never occurred to me that I lived nowhere near a church. As the sun continued its descent, I began to feel my skin shrivelling up. I pulled up my sleeve and saw that my skin had become grey and wrinkled. I was already beginning to die. I rushed back to my bedroom and began shouting for the ghost. I told him this was insanity and that he must stop it. I went into every room of the house whilst yelling my head off, but to no avail.
Returning outside, I saw the last beams of sunlight cast through the clouds and a frailty running through my bones. I thought of calling my parents, my girlfriend, but I refused to believe that this was actually the end.
Mad with rage, I picked up a stone from the gravel lot in front of my house to see how far I could throw it. It landed just past my neighbour’s house. I tried again, seeing if I could at least make it a block. The stone went further than the first, but still not far. I felt the energy in my body fade and failed to stay standing; the sun now set behind the distant hills to the West; I fell to my knees. Desperate, I grabbed another stone and threw it. This time it hardly left the gravel lot, but I felt a strange mist begin to cloud up all around me. Was I dying? I laid down, resigned, and began to cry.
The mist continued to grow and I felt cold air rush against my skin. I could not see, but I felt naked. Life began to flow back into my bloodstream. I was strong and firm. Slowly, the mist faded and I saw that I was in the centre of a gothic cathedral. Large stained-glass windows rose high into the ceiling three or four stories above me. I was stunned and I could not move.
Three stones’ throws. I tried to laugh, but I couldn’t make a sound. My leaves shook. My leaves. Looking down, I saw that I was no longer human, but had taken the form of an oak tree. I tried to move, but the idea felt foreign to my body and I stayed in place. A lone whistle echoed through the vacant cathedral and slowly grew louder. I couldn’t see its source.
“Here you are, you found it!” The familiar voice of the ghost from that morning made my limbs shiver.
“A tree?!”
“Aye. An oak. You’re not dying anytime soon now. You have hundreds, maybe thousands of years ahead of you. Plenty of time to do all of those things you still wanted to do.”
“Right. Like I can raise a family as a tree.”
“Oh, sure you can. In fact it could be quite a large one.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“Listen, I’ve done good by you. I warned you about your death and even gave you a way out. What more do you want from me?”
I had no response. The ghost’s whistling resumed and slowly faded into the distance.
It took years for me to accept my fate. I wondered what had become of my body and if there had been a funeral. Eventually, the church was remodelled into a bar. They named it “The Oak,” after me. I had lost my voice shortly after the ghost departed, but I enjoyed listening to the stories and conversation of folks at the bar. I wondered if death was that pain I had felt when I touched my door handle, and if so then surely this was a better option. But life became rather dull. I kept watching humanity get worse and worse. It became harder for me to breathe, despite the sophisticated air filtration system they installed in the bar, and I began to long for death. I had nothing to live for.
And then it was just yesterday that I woke up back in my own bed. Checking my phone, I saw that not a day had gone by since my death. There I was, just as I had been the morning I had woken up suspended from the ceiling. Having travelled through time, or space, or both, and transformed into a being without voice or mobility, I felt a newfound appreciation for my human abilities and an urge to remind others of life’s brevity. When I began telling my partner what happened, she suggested I see a doctor. The doctor suggested I stay in a psychiatric hospital. Now here I am. In a creative writing class for the insane. No one believes me. No one believes in ghosts.