The Demise of Willow Green by Darla Cathilde Cutherford
1.
Years ago, I died in a river, crying blood on Halloween. I remember my spirit crawling out of the water. I vowed to haunt the somber mansion I grew up in, as well as the city. Once I was dead, I felt wings on my shoulder blades, feathers falling and disappearing on the floor. I was an invisible ghost in my old house, waiting for my parents to receive the news of my death. When I was found, I was laid to rest under a headstone shaped like an angel.
My name was Willow Green. My life was cut short while I was a senior in high school. The year was 2008. I spent a great deal of my last moments on earth crying under the highway and skipping class. I bummed cigarettes from people for fifty cents, obscuring myself with smoke. On benches, I carved words like Conflict, Evil and Kill. I drew eyes on everything.
One day, beyond the smoke wisps, I noticed Keith Delacroix under the highway across the street from the school. His eyes and hair were as dark as midnight. His cheekbones were sharp and his smile was tantalizing. Keith sauntered towards me and my burning cigarette. We were in the same English class. Keith praised the paper I wrote on the novel, The Bell Jar. Then he invited me to a Halloween party. If only I had seen behind his plastic facade. I’m now a ghost under moonlight that reminds me of his smile. First he was composed, then he was feral. He disguised himself as an angel of light, but layers of that light bled away to reveal black shadows. I remember his rage, his face like a skull. If I had never gone to Chelsea Tyler’s Halloween party, I would still be alive.
2.
I feel distant from everything, even when I’m close to it. In the places that I haunt, no one can see me. The aftermath of death is painless. I have excised the blade from my broken heart. Nothing can hurt me anymore. In life, I was devastated and maladjusted. Attending school felt like a war. I had a fascination with blood as it flows. On the night of the Halloween party that Keith invited me to, I looked up a makeup tutorial on Youtube that showed me how to paint fake blood tears below my eyes, with gold glitter glistening on the teardrops. I remember peering into my vanity mirror one last time, grinning beneath lipstick and fake tears. My parents had no opposition to my attending the party, so I slid through the foyer in a black chiffon dress with wings attached to my back. I walked out the front door of the mansion. I drove to Chelsea’s house. Keith was waiting for me beside a trellis.
“You look amazing,” he told me.
I thanked him.
“I have something to ask you, but we need to go somewhere secret to discuss it,” Keith said.
“Okay.”
He led me through the backyard full of drunks and stoners and into the trees. We walked down a winding trail.
“Do you want to try this?” Keith held something in his palm. It was an LSD blotter paper, colored lime green. I had tried marijuana a few summers ago, but never had I tried something stronger. I had been fascinated with LSD ever since I read Go Ask Alice, which described the anonymous diarist’s first time tripping on acid. I recognized what it looked like from pictures of blotter paper I had seen on the internet.
“I’d love to try that,” I said.
“Put it on your tongue and let it dissolve,” Keith said. He took one himself.
I felt a faint, bitter chemical taste as the drug dissolved. It took about thirty minutes to start taking effect. Keith and me spent that thirty minutes lingering in Chelsea’s backyard, gossiping about other students and discussing the curriculum of our classes. Suddenly, the features of the others started to blur and my surroundings began to tilt and whirl around. It became a melting, watercolor night. Everything was covered in stars and orbs. Keith led me inside the house and we began to laugh at the sounds distorting around us. I was transfixed by a disco ball someone had put on the ceiling, dancing to an 80s pop song beneath it. I started laughing hysterically. Keith started to laugh, too. We had no idea what was so funny, what we were laughing about. We danced around the room like idiots, almost knocking over a bowl of punch. The party soon grew boring, and we decided to leave. We weren’t far from the river, where Keith wanted to go. Rainbow smears of light covered the houses on the street. The streetlamps shed liquid gold light onto our heads like halos. I felt like I was in outer space, ascending above earth. Everything was full of dark and light. Keith kissed me on a stairway. His hands caressed my fake wings. He gently traced the fake glitter tears with his fingertip.
“What are you so sad about?” Keith asked me.
“I’m afraid life will get harder, that I will never be fulfilled,” I told him. “I don’t want to grow up.”
“Then don’t grow up,” he said.
And I didn’t.
3.
As Keith and me made our way through dark neighborhoods and throngs of trick or treaters, I did not notice that he was seething over something. Once we got to the riverbank, his eyes lost their warmth and started to burn with anger. I saw flames and glowing embers in his irises. The sky was suddenly purple and the river was a rippling curtain of glass. I hallucinated flowers all over the place, appearing on trees and then disappearing into thin air. A scythe vanished into a bush. Keith began to babble about something I sent to Chelsea Tyler on Myspace.com, a social networking site that is now obsolete. He was enraged that I had degraded her for her looks, and warned her to stay away from him. That was the year before, and the exchange of messages on Myspace had not been on my mind for awhile. I did not even see her at the party and was surprised Keith brought me to it. I realize now that I was lured to that party only to meet my doom.
“Chelsea wanted me to do this,” Keith said, his hands encircling my throat. The angel wings on my back became mangled on the ground. I clawed at him, choking, feeling myself vanish. Keith led me into the water. I stumbled alongside him. He pushed me over and held my head below the water. When I was dead, I was somehow still alive, standing over myself and Keith, watching the tragic retribution unfold. He fled and left me on the river rocks. I could not feel the temperature of the water as I knelt over my moonlit corpse. My face was a mess of fake blood and gold glitter. My mouth was a red wound. Strangely, I felt a sense of peace in never being able to grow up. I decided that Keith Delacroix was not worth haunting. My spirit left the river forever and now I observe people all over town, sometimes haunting houses just to watch TV. I met other dead spirits better than Keith, and I am glad to live in tranquility with them. Eventually, Keith was caught for what he did to me. Someone at Chelsea’s party saw me leave with him. I saw him on TV, sitting solemn in a courtroom. I wanted to slash him to ribbons. I wanted to fill his mouth with broken glass.
In the room I was haunting, where the TV glowed dimly, I watched the man on the couch as he slept. I learned that his name is Dale Tierney. He reminds me of Keith Delacroix. Years have gone by since my death, and recently I’ve developed an affinity for Dale. I know he can’t sense me or see me, but I still like to haunt his place occasionally. I watch him gaze into mirrors, standing beside him and unable to see my own reflection. As I whisper praise into his ear, I realize he cannot hear it. Sometimes I wander for hours in fields, or to stand above my angel-shaped headstone tracing the engraved letters of my name. The Tudor mansion I once lived in with my parents was sold to the Mulvenna family. Sometimes I observed the two angry daughters who moved into the house. Their names were Sinead and Mathilde. They ended in ruin. They died by their own hands and ended up companions of mine. We are apparitions that are free to go anywhere. After the chaos of our lives, we found eternal peace. The camaraderie that has developed between me and the sisters means more to me than any of the friendships I had when I was alive. The other day, Mathilde came up with the idea that we should haunt Keith in his prison cell. Years in the penitentiary had caused him to bloat and grow pale. Mathilde waved her hand over his sleeping eyes. Suddenly, they began to bleed. He blinked, awake, wiping the blood with his fingertips and growing alarmed when he saw the redness. He darted over to the mirror in his cell and saw his bloody eyes and began to scream.
“You son of a bitch,” I growled in his ear.
“Willow?” He asked. He seemed to see me. I relished the fear in his eyes, and then I vanished from his cell with Sinead and Mathilde.
We are free to wander for eternity, and Keith is confined to his cage.
I wish I could toss him into the ocean and film him as he sinks below the water, unable to stay afloat.
