the moment I found my first host, I had been devoted to the rules that kept my punishment at bay.
I remembered all my hauntings clearly, but only a few images stayed with me from the time before I was Light. I remembered a man’s head on the pillow beside me. He had straw-colored hair, and when he opened his eyes, he was looking not at me but toward the window, where wind was rattling the pane. A handsome face that brought no comfort. I remembered catching a glimpse of my own eyes in the window reflection as I watched this man ride away on a black horse through the farm gate, the horizon heavy with clouds. And I remembered seeing a pair of frightened eyes looking up at me, full of tears. I could remember my name, my age, that I was a woman, but death swallowed the rest.
The pain, once I was dead, was very memorable. I was deep inside the cold, smothering belly of a grave when my first haunting began. I heard her voice in the darkness reading Keats, “Ode to a Nightingale.” Icy water was burning down my throat, splintering my ribs, and my ears were filled with a sound like a demon howling, but I could hear her voice and reached for her. One desperate hand burst from the flood and caught the hem of her gown. I dragged myself, hand over hand, out of the earth and quaked at her feet, clutching her skirts, weeping muddy tears. All I knew was that I had been tortured in the blackness, and then I had escaped. Perhaps I hadn’t reached the brightness of heaven, but at least I was here, in her lamplight, safe.
It took me a long time to realize that she was not reading to me; nor were her shoes spotted with mud. I held her, yet my arms did not wrinkle the folds of her dress. I cried at her feet like a wretch about to be stoned, kissing the hem of Christ’s garment, but she didn’t see me, couldn’t hear my sobs. I looked at her—a fragile face, pale but rosy at the cheeks and nose as if it were always winter around her. She had gray duck-down hair piled on her head like a bird’s nest and sharp green eyes, clever as a cat’s. She was solid and warm with a fluttering pulse. She wore a black dress with mismatched buttons, the elbows worn thin. Tiny spots of ink dotted her butter-colored shawl. The cover of the little book in her hands was embossed with the figure of a running stag. It was all real and blazing with detail. But I was shadow, light as mist, mute as the wallpaper.
“Please help me,” I said to her. But deaf to me, she turned the page.
“Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird...” As she read aloud the familiar words, I knew what I was. I stayed by her side for hours, afraid that if I looked away from her or tried to remember too hard how I had come to be in hell, I would be thrown back there.
After a score of pages, my host closed her book. I was frightened by the idea that she might put out the light when she went to her bed, and this panic made me fall on her again. I threw my head into her lap like a heartbroken child. The book fell from her hands and dropped through me onto the floor. I was startled at the painless flick of sensation. My host bent to retrieve the book of poems, and as her body passed through me, I felt myself dropping down and then soaring up again as if I were on a child’s swing. A most peculiar expression came over her face. She placed the volume carefully under the lamp on the desk beside her and took up pen and paper. She dipped at the ink and began to write:
A suitor bent upon one knee
Death asked me for my hand
I could tell by the black stains on her fingertips that, most likely, these were not the first lines she had ever written. I couldn’t tell whether I had inspired her, but I prayed that I had. If I could do some scrap of good, perhaps I would be granted entrance into heaven. All I knew was that this saint was my salvation from pain and that I would be hers until the day