ghost

The car beeped. The hazard lights flashed on and off. The keys swung on their ring, hanging from the ignition. The front windshield was splintered but intact sans a china-doll size hole directly in front of the passenger’s seat. Its seat-belt latched but holding no body.

Ten feet from the car was a child’s pink converse. The left foot one. Its laces still tied. Twenty feet from this car was another car with less damage. A blue illumination sprayed from the under carriage and some trance, rave music projected from its too many speakers. A man in his early twenties had the driver’s side door open and was hanging out of the doorway. Propping himself up with his tattooed forearms he spewed bile from his mouth.

Another man drug himself, in his three-piece and loafers, to a small object tangled within the roadside brush. White stockings. One foot shoeless. The man crawled, his forearms myriad colors, not from tattoos but bruised from the steering wheel. He crawled barely able to see through the blood filling his eyes.

Long black, curly hair was soon felt beneath his asphalt stained fingertips. He picked up the tiny frame of a tiny girl. Small butterfly barrettes tied in her hair. Her white blouse now chlorophyl green and urine yellow. Her jet-black hair even darker from the blood. It was all matted down but shined in the moonlight.

He sat her up and held her as tight as he could. But with a dislocated shoulder it wasn’t tight enough. He cried into the black of the night and the brilliant shine of the headlights. He went to speak her name but only small gurgles and gasps of blood would come out for minutes that seemed like hours. Then finally, deep inside of his pain and loss, he found his voice.
Somewhere a dog barked and was answered by a wolf’s howl.
“Girtie?... Girtie?...” His voice barely audible. He looked at her blackened face and blued eyes. The eyes reflecting the flashing of the hazard lights. The man pulled a discarded straw wrapper from her hair and wiped blood and gravel bits from her face and forehead. His cut knuckles and bleeding palms leaving more than what was wiped away.
“I love you Girtie... my little Gertrude... my... sweet princess...”
He tried to grab her legs and pull them closer but the pain in his arms had grown. He saw her kneecaps in the white stockings. It was as if they had exploded, bits of bone and cartilage leaking out. He lost himself in anguish for many minutes. Flashing back through his life but seeing nothing but her body, almost lifeless and red.

Sirens were heard in the distance and it brought this man, Eric, back into the surreality of the moment. He looked around, trying to grasp it all. Trying to remember what he was and what had happened. While at the same time trying to forget it all and trick his mind into believing it was all a dream.
Just then something touched his chin. It was the tiniest, most brittle, hand he had ever seen. With short, boney little fingers.
“... daddy...”
“Girtie...?” He leaned down and kissed his blood on her forehead. “Sweet honey, wake up. You’re okay. It’s all okay. Everything will be fine... okay... we’re fine. I love you... don’t go to... sleep.”
He felt her stomach and chest extend and contract with every short breath.
“Stay with me. Stay awake. Don’t go to sleep. Done leave me, honey.”
A warm liquid began to soak his legs and stomach. Bringing with it the ammonia smell of urine and the sulfuric smell of fresh blood.
“...daddy...”
“Stay awake baby. Stay with daddy.” Her china-doll face began to pivot back and forth, scanning the scene.
“That’s our car...” she says as she points her nimble, weightless hand.
The man grabs it and holds it. “Yes it is, but we’re okay.”

Miles down the road flashing lights were visible. So far away, just specks.
“Girtie wake up. Don’t go to sleep! We are going to the toy store today! You can get anything you want- everything you want! We’re going today but you have to stay awake for a little while longer. Stay here. You can have everything. What do you want? huh sweetie? What do you want?”
She pulls her hand from his grasp and points to the tattooed figure across the road, lying on his back in the gravel. His knees pointed up at the stars.
“I want...”
“What honey?”
“ I want... that man... to name his daughter... Isabelle...”
I don’t understand... HONEY WAKE UP!” She began to drift, her eyelids becoming heavy.
“Girtie, stay here.”
“I want that man to name his daughter Isabelle... and give her everything.”
The man howled as he felt one last breath exhaled against his body. Her tiny hand fell lifeless to the ground. The man collapsed and passed out on his side.

Four years later.
There was a birthday party held at a park two miles down the road. A mini-van drove by this spot earlier and stopped to place a dozen tulips by a wooden cross on the roadside. Then the mini-van drove to the park to set everything up for the party.
There were games. A pony. A clown that was more scary than funny.
There was a piñata shaped like a huge green frog with a shiny golden crown. When busted open he bled Jolly Ranchers and Now & Laters.
There were a thousand tiny laughs.
And a puppet show.
And there was a chocolate cake with vanilla frosting. It read:
“Happy Birthday, Isabelle.”

Tattooed arms held back a young girl’s hair, that matched the frog’s crown, as she leaned in to blow out the candles. A few locks dropped into the cake and came back covered in frosting. But she got all three flames out on the first attempt.

Present opening took a full hour. There were more presents than people and the girl zipped right through them all.
The smallest box was lost amongst them all. She ripped its Barbie wrapping back and opened the box to find a brand new pair of pink plastic butterfly barrettes. She showed them around real quick for the guests to see and for the camcorder to record. It was operated by her “Granpap.” Then she went right on to the next, bigger, gift.

What she didn’t see was the glances back and forth between her father and a man she didn’t know. A man that came to all of her birthday parties. He stood in the back, with his three-piece and loafers, and smiled. His moist eyes would connect with those of a man in his late twenties, tattooed but sober.

That night as his daughter slept, tucked in with all of her new toys and dresses, her father watched her sleep. And as her chest would rise and fall with each long breath he could see the glow of another girl exude from her body.
With every breath he saw the ghost of the girl on the roadside.
With every smile on his daughter’s face he saw the smile of the girl he killed. Although he never got to see her smile during the course of her short life.
And he knew it would never go away. He knew what he did. He lived with it every day.

He loves his daughter more than anything in the world. And he also loves his ghost.