“Do you believe in ghosts?” 

​

Bella wanted to ask do you believe in God? but something about those words shrunk her. Somehow, do you believe in ghosts seemed to be a more viable question to ask a college student standing at the mouth of an alley in the crease between day and night. Dusky brightness leaked down the ivy-choked walls of the alley that opened unexpectedly into an evergreen garden—magic. Bella had come across this spot in the daylight, but she knew immediately that it was a place designed for this: the day and night struggling between the layers of brick and steel, bouncing violently off of the windows together and trembling beneath the street lights in their spasmodic war, but here—the sanctuary where they could exist softly together. Silver-and-red mountain-clad cans crushed into the concrete, sparkling like quartz in a hidden cave, dispelled the illusion that this was her place alone, but the charm of a human place still left inverted goosebumps under her skin. So when Dillon asked her where she went at dusk every evening, Bella brought her here and said—

​

“Do I believe in ghosts? ” 

​

Dillon had a habit of responding to her questions with more questions, rhetorical or not, biting the edges before handing them back. Bella nodded. She could feel the miniscule muscles in her irises contracting, dilating her pupils to catch every wave and solitary particle of light that fell between them. She wondered if her eyes looked black. Dillon’s did, but then they always were—or at least, they had been since she was small; Bella remembered the first time she noticed how dark Dillon’s eyes were, staring widely up at Bella as she sung and hung the laundry. Dillon strode to the back of the alley where day was dying more quickly and scanned the corners before sitting cross-legged on the rusty steps of the fire escape. A single strand of ivy had curled around the railing and drooped down into her hair. Bella watched with inexplicable fascination as she brushed the creeping thing away and dropped her chin into her hands, elbows on her knees, big black eyes rolled upwards like they thought the answer might be written somewhere in the gray sky. 

​

“I don’t believe,” Dillon said slowly, “that people just disappear when their bodies die. There’s too much of us in here, sometimes.”

​

The silence pooled in the pavement cracks and settled in a puddle around Bella’s dusty, ancient flats. She examined it while waiting for Dillon to continue.

​

“I think—I mean. I think I mean that people still exist, but I don’t think they just wander around, like the spiritual homeless, you know? I think they make a home for themselves. In us.” 

​

Dillon brushed her fingers against the space below her wrist as she said it, exactly where Bella’s scar tingled impatiently. The ivy whispered in a frightened hush under the shrill rush of an unexpected wind. The daylight was dying fast everywhere and in places already dead. 

​

“What about you? Do you believe in ghosts?” Dillon looked up. Her question hung limply on the wet new darkness. No reply.

​

Bella had vanished.

            _____________________________________________________________________________

 

There’s too much of us in here, sometimes.

​

Dillon shivered as she marched through the darkness on her way back to the dorm. The thought had been intrusive, violating her determined fury. She was sure that Bella would be sitting comfortably on her bed by now, waiting for Dillon to walk into their room. Bella was strange. She liked to walk through the city at night, and not in the well-lit streets but the hidden places—the haunted alley gardens, the sinister spaces beneath bridges, the rotting places in hollow trees. She was so unlike Dillon, who was all friendly, freckles, and fun for as long as the sun was out—but the night was Bella’s. Dillon still hadn’t grown comfortable with this by the time she summoned the courage to interrogate Bella about her nightly roaming. 

​

It was tragically disappointing when Bella invited her to come without hesitation, because the fantasies Dillon had constructed in her romantic’s heart collapsed instantly. She could no longer indulge in that delectable twist of horror, the luscious sense of shame she felt when she followed Bella through the realms of her imagination, an erratic hellhole of ghosts, poltergeists, vampires, serial killers, and alley shadows. Perhaps, she reflected as she turned a corner, that was why she didn’t like to walk home in the dark. In the dark, the barrier between her gothic imagination and her reality became uncomfortably thin. 

​

She must have made a wrong turn. This was the first time she’d ever lived outside of the small Minnesota town she’d grown up in and she still hadn’t mastered the crosswalks, much less getting where she needed to go. She pulled out her phone and furtively pulled up Google Maps, glancing around to be sure that her ghosts were still lodged firmly in her imagination and that no malignant shadows hovered nearby in search of lost girls. There’s too much of us in here—

​

This time, the thought was almost opaque. Wind whipped and white sheets snapped on a clothesline, billowing, a memory of a memory of her grandmother singing about the Soul of the World when Dillon was a silent child. The old woman had husked the words in her wide mouth, inflaming something in her granddaughter. Dillon shook it out of her mind and tried to focus on the little blue line. Estimated time of arrival: 12:17 a.m. What was she doing out so late again? Oh right. Bella. A burrowing anxiety tunneled into her. Bella was fine. 

​

I think they make a home for themselves. In us. Dillon remembered learning about existentialism in high school psychology; her teacher had been trying desperately to explain angst. The poor man couldn’t seem to get a room full of dozing adolescents to understand how alone they were in their own heads. Dillon had tried to understand, at first. She remembered her grandmother’s voice seeming to come from just outside of the classroom, drifting through the open window—had the window been open?—though her grandmother had been dead almost two years by then. Dillon wondered how her balding psychology teacher would have reacted if she’d told him she hadn’t been alone in her head for years. 

​

               _____________________________________________________________________________

 

Bella found herself in the bar district without being able to remember how she got there. A hazy green shamrock burned the night away over her head; there were never so many lights where Bella grew up. They snuck up on her. She loosened her eyes until the multicolored lights blurred into a Rorschach test and the black spaces between them became brighter than the neon. There were people milling up and down the sidewalks. Bella hated crowds, usually, but the exact spot she was standing held a stillness. When she closed her eyes, she was almost alone. 

​

Do you believe in God?

​

Bella did not believe in God. At least, that’s what she’d been telling herself since the hospital. But she couldn’t convince herself even then, because a part of her knew she was surrounded by God. God was the white of the sheets and the pristine red of unformed scars hidden under years of heavy wandering. God was in the empty space in her head where the voices once were, the voices that now belong to her granddaughter.

​

Bella was much older than Dillon knew. 

​

When she was young, Bella thought she was a poet. She thought that maybe, somewhere in her nighttime ventures, she’d discovered the Soul of the World. It was a dream, but it wasn’t a dream—she was fourteen and fresh from a funeral at four in the morning, looking for a new place to be alone. She passed the alley behind the record store and there—in the corner, where a large recycling bin had been toppled over—she found it. 

​

She climbed amid the crumpled cardboard boxes and soda bottles and found the THING that Borges and Coelho and King David had written about—the Soul of the World, or the Aleph, or maybe God. It horrified her; she loved it, she despised it, and she knew in every tendon and tissue that she was bound to it forever. The THING wouldn’t fit in her pocket, so she cut herself open to fit it inside of her. She never remembered whether she succeeded or not. They doused her in a mist so white and divine that she forgot what the THING looked like and why she needed to bear it with her into eternity. But she kept its song brimming in her soft places, a cadence of voices and centuries passing through her blood. 

​

 A voice shook Bella from her reverie and the lights resolved into the bar district again. 

​

“Dillon!”

​

               _____________________________________________________________________________

 

Dillon blinked the lights away. She must have been so lost in thought that she lost herself in the streets for a second time. This street was unfamiliar in the dark and would have been completely unrecognizable if it weren’t for the Shamrock Bar’s namesake glowing above the crowd; Dillon had seen it once, gray and dead during the day. She would never make it back at this rate. She hardly noticed the mass of bar-hoppers pressing in around her, but she could smell their skin and their sweat. 

​

“Dillon!” the voice called a second time. Bella? Dillon turned and passed her eyes over the red-haired girl waving at her several times before registering her. 

​

“Oh, hey. . . ”

​

Dillon tried to find a name somewhere in the folds of her memory, but she’d met so many new people in the past week that she couldn’t even pinpoint the first letter. She thought maybe she’d met the girl in her Astronomy class, which she’d since dropped, but she wasn’t sure. 

​

“I never took you for the bar-crawl type,” the girl laughed. 

​

Her eyes were alert, but Dillon could smell something fruity and stronger than apple juice on her breath. 

​

“I don’t. . . ” 

​

“Bella!”

​

               _____________________________________________________________________________

 

Bella turned around and found herself face-to-face with Dillon’s hall monitor; she’d only met him once, the first night they’d stayed in the dorm. He’d caught her off guard and her real name had slipped out like a breath. Now he was smiling easily and holding hands with his boyfriend.

​

“So, this is where you’ve been going every night! You’re the last person I expected to be a thirsty Thursday warrior.” 

​

He raised a beer can in her direction, a toast. She was no longer in her place of stillness—she must have moved outside of it accidentally, or maybe it had moved on. She needed to find it, to chase it somewhere less suffocating. She turned from the hall monitor without saying anything and barreled straight into a red-haired girl. She staggered and slung a strange look at Bella. 

​

“Am I drunk or did that guy just call you Bella?” she asked.

​

Bella stepped away from her and felt it again—the stillness. It must have snuck back while she wasn’t looking. She closed her eyes for a long moment. 

​

“. . . Dillon?” the red-haired girl asked with the voice of someone speaking to a rabid animal.

​

Dillon opened her eyes, black and shining in the heat. 

​

“Do you believe in ghosts? ”