The Dead Only Stay
Dead If You Let Them
Francine
Witte
“So, what if I’m
a ghost,” Alan
says to me as he sits down to join me for dinner. “I’m still your husband.” I
instinctively put out a plate for him. Even though I always thought ghosts
don’t eat.
He is as heartbreak handsome
as
I remember. Pool of blue eyes, cliff-sculpted jaw. “You could have told me
about your girlfriend,” I say. “I mean, I’m not sorry she stabbed you.”
He ignores the plate I put
in
front of him and instead starts eating from mine. I never ordered Grubhub
when he was still alive. Wives cook, Alan always insisted. Once he was gone, I
never cooked again. One of the many things I never had to do again. Like listen
to his stupid rules and girlfriend lies.
Now, he is sticking his ghostfingers into my fries.
“I figured you knew
about
Ramona,” he says just like that. “Come on, you had to know I would look
elsewhere when you started to, y’ know, puff out.”
Yes, I puffed out. I had
always
believed that love would keep me eating right. That love itself would be enough
to feed me, but I was wrong. It started way before Ramona, it was all that damn
cooking. The only time Alan really paid attention.
“There’s a reason
I’m here,”
Alan says. “I need a thousand bucks, and there’s no other way for me to get
it.” I think about how if Alan wasn’t already dead, I would be tempted to kill
him.
He gives me that look he
always
used to give me, that one where his eyes go soft and real and the reason I
mostly stayed with him. “I thought ghosts didn’t use money,”
“We don’t”
he says, swiping
another fry. “But Pete doesn’t care. Says it’s the principle of the thing.”
I ask him if he means Pete
from
the body shop, the one who got killed in a car crash last August.
Alan says, “Yeah,
I borrowed
some money. Ramona didn’t come
cheap.”
I start to hate Ramona all
over
again, because I’m sure she didn’t wife-cook for him. He probably took her out
for lobster and Dom and who knows what.
Then I remember what a favor she did me with the stabbing.
“What happens,”
I ask “if you
don’t give Pete the money? I mean, it’s not like he can kill you again.”
Alan shakes his head. “No,
but
he can make my death pretty miserable,” he says. “You gonna give me the money
or what?”
I tell him yeah, I’ll
give it to
him. “Come back tomorrow, I’ll have it for you.” Since Alan’s
death, I’ve been able to save up a
bit. I almost have enough to take that cruise I always wanted. And then, I say
“after that, you’re gonna stay dead, right?”
I can always take another
cruise. If Alan stays dead, if Alan stays dead.
He
pops the last of my fries
into his mouth. Doesn’t even ask if I wanted it.
Francine Witte is a flash fiction writer and poet,
and the
author of the flash collection RADIO WATER. Her newest poetry
book, Some Distant Pin of Light, has just been published
by Cervena Barva Press. Her work has been widely published, and she
is a recent recipient of a Pushcart Prize. She lives in New York
City. Please visit her website francinewitte.com. She can be found on
social media @francinewitte.
