To Touch the Wind
by Alicia Adams
I always thought that on the day I met my soulmate it would smell like roses or something—maybe honey. I had been drinking whiskey neat for the better part of the night, though, and I reeked of alcohol and sweat. My apartment smelled like black mold.
I’m pretty sure there’s black mold. No one will listen, though. Who cares if Oliver Pulaski dies a slow death from black mold? Alcoholism, they’ll call it, and they’ll throw me in an unmarked grave somewhere and look for nonexistent relatives to step up and pay my debts. But enough of that—don’t get me started on that.
I went to the bathroom—rust, mold, grime, tiles fallen and shattered and no one to fix them, you get it—and splashed water on my face. Then I cupped some water in my hands and drank.
That’s when I heard her. Her voice was like church bells, like birds singing in the wind, like sunshine on a meadow. The kind of meadow where if Oliver Pulaski tried to walk on the grass, in two minutes some asshole would say “Hey, you can’t walk on that grass!” That kind of grass and that kind of sunshine.
“Your place is a dump,” she said.
I spun around, my wet hands clenched into fists, feeling dizzy from the spin and alcohol both and unsteady on my feet. “Who’s there?” I bellowed.
“You can hear me?”
“Yes, I hear you. Now step out where I can see you!”
“You can’t see me,” the voice said. “You shouldn’t even be able to hear me!” Her voice was moving left to right and back again, as if she were pacing. It made me feel even dizzier. I shook the water from my hands and held my head in them.
“What are you, a ghost?” I said. I had never talked to a ghost before.
“I don’t know. Maybe?”
“Okay, what’s your name?”
“I don’t know. What’s your name?”
“Oliver Pulaski. You don’t know your name?”
More pacing. “Does anyone ever call you Olly?”
This wasn’t real. It couldn’t be—at least that’s what I thought then—but I liked it. I liked her. “No. Can you hold still for just a second?”
She was quiet. Then she said, “How about Liver?” The pacing had stopped.
“Why would anyone call me Liver?”
“Well, I’m going to call you Liver. One who lives. Seems apt, considering.”
“Funny,” I said. “I take it you were a comedian when you were alive?” But I didn’t hear her answer. I fell onto my bed and passed out.
The next morning I awoke in a messy tangle of sweat and sheets. I could hear the neighbors screaming at each other over who paid what bill. Even the sunlight that came through the windows was somehow brown. How did they do that? How did they find every single way to make sure I had less than everyone else?
The hangover sloshed back and forth in my head in little waves of turbulence. It’s the kind of thing that makes you want to quit drinking forever, but you don’t. I tried it once. It wasn’t terrible; I just got bored, and boredom might be worse than death. I asked Sara about it once, and she said that both were shitty and not mutually exclusive. That really everything was shit and what could you do about it? But I’m jumping ahead.
My head throbbed. I cursed myself for drinking. My knees hurt. I’m not even old, and my knees and back and joints have all gone to shit.
“Good morning,” the voice said, a voice from nowhere.
“Shit!” I yelled and sat straight up. Then I remembered her. The kind of girl who probably tasted like apples. The kind of girl who could clean your hair just by running her fingers through it.
“Good morning,” I said, pushing the sweaty hair out of my face. “Sorry about that.”
I got up and walked to the kitchen. If she counts, and she does, she was the first guest I ever had in my home.
I have a table and two chairs. You’ve probably gotten this sense of me, like I live out of cardboard boxes. I have furniture. It’s not the best furniture, but I have some. I even have two chairs even though I never have company. I was drinking coffee and sitting in one chair, and the voice was coming from the direction of the other chair.
“What should I call you?” I said.
“I don’t know. Do you have any ideas?”
I wanted to give her a beautiful name, a name for the kind of girl she seemed to be. An intricate, yet simple, wholesome name. “Sara Beth?”
“Sara Death,” she said. “I like it.”
“Okay, so how did you get here?”
“I don’t know.”
“So you just died and showed up in my apartment?”
“Well, no. I’ve been wandering for a few days. I came in here last night. What do you got going today?” she asked.
“Not much,” I said. “I was thinking of hitting up some yard sales, but I can stay here and keep you company if you want.”
“Okay.”
“What do you have going on? What’s your plan? Is there some sort of end goal, some end place you’re supposed to get to?”
“I didn’t get the memo,” she said. Sadness like you’ve never heard. And who could blame her? Here she was with no life and nothing going after death, sitting in this shit hole with me.
For story’s sake I’d like to say what happened next happened right after, but I don’t have great ideas often, and it took time. Time passed. I got to know Sara as well as you can get to know a person who has no anecdotes, no relationships to share. She got to know me. All my childhood and adolescence, the pitiful details of my adulthood—all of it.
I’m not sure if she ever tried talking to anyone else. Maybe she tried and it didn’t work, or maybe she wasn’t interested in talking to anyone but me. I prefer the latter, but either way she stayed around. Sometimes I had the sense she’d gone somewhere else for a bit, but most of the time she was nearby. We were lonely people, but we were almost never alone.
One day when she was pacing around so much I couldn’t keep track of her, I asked her: “Do you think the bed sheet thing that ghosts do in movies would work for you?” It was a ridiculous idea. Of course it wouldn’t. It was just a gimmick in cartoons to show you where the ghost was, to give you the illusion of etherealness.
But we decided to try it anyway. She insisted I get a clean sheet first. That was a very Sara thing to say. In the time that had elapsed she’d overseen the cleaning of my entire apartment. She’d made me shower and cut off the knotted lengths of my hair. I refused to pay for it, but with her verbally guiding my hand, I did an okay job myself. I cleaned all my clothes and put them up in the closet. I cooked and ate vegetables. I drank water. I drank less, alcohol that is, but I didn’t quit. She was good, but she wasn’t that good. I don’t think it mattered much to her so long as I could keep up with her in conversation, and I could. I’d been drinking a long time. If there was one thing I knew how to do well it was drink.
I didn’t have a clean sheet, but there was a dollar store, and I rounded up enough change to go buy a nice, clean, brand new bed sheet. Not a fitted sheet, she told me, a top sheet. As if it made a difference. Of course, I bought it in white. How could I not? It was also the cheapest, but that wasn’t the reason.
“Where are you?” I asked as I came through the front door, ripping open the cellophane wrapper and unspooling the sheet from its rectangle of cardboard.
“Over here,” she said. And then when it was clear I needed a little more direction, “At the bottom corner of the bed, the corner closest to you.”
I was cautious as I walked over. I’m sure I had walked through her accidentally before, but it seemed like a jerk move.
I said, “Stand directly in front of me about three feet away.”
“Okay.”
There was no way this was going to work, I thought. I tried to draw out the moment. As long as it hadn’t failed yet, there was still hope.
“What are you waiting for?” she asked. I could hear the anxiety in her voice.
“Are you ready?”
“Yes.”
I swept the sheet up over the side of where I thought she would be and let it glide down over the top of her. For a second it looked like it was going to work. I could see the outline of her head before the sheet fell further down, and then her hands as she tried to hold it up before the weight of the sheet sank down and puddled on the carpet.
“Huh,” I said.
“Well, that didn’t work,” Sara said.
“It almost did, though. It could still work. Want to try again?”
Sara let out a long exhale—probably unnecessary given her lack of lungs. Long standing habits take a while to change, whether you remember them or not. “Okay,” she said. “Go ahead.”
All day we tried. I caught glimpses of her in the faint silhouette of the sheet. There were her hips. The corner of her knee as she tried to kick the sheet higher. Her neck, slender and swanlike in the white of the sheet.
After long last she said, “It’s not working,” and I heard her voice trail over to the bed in defeat.
“Hm,” I said. “It was nice, though. I feel like I got to see you.”
“A lot of good it did us.”
I never told Sara—and maybe I should have—that I had seen her before. It was a few days before I first heard her voice. The sirens had been blaring in the night, and I took a walk to get away from them. I was drunk, and it was dark out and cold. I was walking down an alleyway leaning on the brick wall for support and sometimes I let my fingertips brush across the surface. It felt nice. Rough isn’t a bad sensation. It gets a bad rap.
I didn’t get too close to the flashing blue and red lights on my way back home. I peeked around a corner at the yellow tape, the bloody red sheet on the ground, a woman’s shape below it.
I didn’t stay long enough to find out what happened. I’ve learned not to lurk around a crime scene. Or maybe accident? Either way, I went home. I’d like to think she sensed something about me and followed me. I’d like to think she chose to come home with me.
I’m sure I slept that night, but it felt like tosses and turns until morning. It had almost worked. My Sara was like slightly denser air. The sheet had been too heavy, but maybe something could work.
In the morning I scoured the apartment looking for materials. Sara was silent, but I sensed she was there, sulking like a cat under the table or in the shadows of some corner. I could almost hear her thoughts: “You can’t see me, and if you can’t hear me I might as well not exist.”
You might have sensed that I don’t own a lot. What I settled on were trash bags. Not the most romantic choice, but light and flexible. I cut the seams off and the folds until I was left with rectangles of thin, filmy black polyethylene.
“Sara Death,” I said, hoping the inside joke would gain her favor. She didn’t respond. I had dozens of sheets of trash bag rectangles at my feet which I lifted onto the table.
“Sara Beth, come here. I know this won’t be your first choice, but I want to try something.”
“I’m here,” she said. “I’ve been here.”
“Tell me exactly.”
“I’m sitting cross-legged in front of the refrigerator.”
I turned toward her. I imagined the space she took up, tried to blur my vision to see an outline of her (sometimes this worked, by the way. Not always, but in the haze of sleepiness I could see her form in the blurry waves of half vision).
“Are you ready?”
There was silence. “I’m nodding,” she said.
Slowly, I lowered the first sheet of polyethylene over where I imagined her head to be.
My God. Here was the miracle. It sat there midair, hovering like an upside-down hammock. She turned her head, and I watched the plastic move with her.
“Liver?” The most excitement I’d ever heard in her voice. Genuine joy.
“It’s working!” I said.
Sara stood so fast that the trash bag sheet slid from her head and crumpled to the floor.
“Again!” she cried. “All of it!”
We spent another full day, this time a day of triumph and joy, placing and sticking polyethylene strips together. She was like a papier-mâché doll. I watched in wonder at the tilting of her head, the little shrug of her shoulders, the tiny peaks of her collarbones as my love took shape. I had to be so gentle. The slightest over-press, and I pushed the trash bags into her (which, mind you, she did not like).
It was the happiest day of my life. She let me breathe my musty breath against her pseudo-skin and didn’t say a word, even sighed happily.
I wrapped her, mummy-like, along the arms, around each tiny finger. I took a break to stretch and eat lunch and all the while she whispered, “Liver, my Oliver, please finish me. I’m almost done. You’re almost there.”
Onward then, to her ribs, the arch of her spine, the taper of her waist and then on again to her hips. By nightfall she was done. I have never been so proud of any achievement before this one, my greatest gift to the world.
I cracked open a beer and put my feet up on the table, crossed at the ankles. “You’re gorgeous,” I said.
“I’m sure,” she laughed. “I look like a trash queen. But I’m here, aren’t I? You can see me.”
She complained, big surprise, that she couldn’t move anything. If she touched something with one of her hands, the hand instantly fell apart. I didn’t mind repairing it for her.
It wasn’t perfect, but it was more than I had ever had, more than I had ever given myself permission to want.
Sara and I had only a few beautiful weeks. I gave her everything I could, but I didn’t have enough. I got movies from the library that we could watch together. I brought in flowers cut from neighbor’s yards (“I can’t believe you’re stealing flowers! People work hard on their gardens!” she said). I brought paintings home from Goodwill. Some of them were pretty good—lilies on water, a circus tent in a crowded town, snow bedecked villages with reindeer hoof prints stamped into the sparkling white. I gave her all my love, all the love that I could give, but it wasn’t enough.
“I want to feel the sun,” she said one day, staring out the window. Her polyethylene skin reflected so much sunlight. Sometimes she got so hot, just touching her burned my fingers.
“I want to feel the sunshine, and I want to touch the wind.”
“Sweetheart, I don’t know what to tell you.”
“Don’t call me sweetheart!” she snapped. “I’m not your little project. I’m a person, and I want to feel the wind.”
Her face had been the hardest part to sculpt. As soon as she moved it—showed any expression at all—it started to lose shape, became a smooth surface with no features.
Her featureless face stared at me then, and I stared back, unsure of what to say.
Sara stood and walked to the door. She stopped in front of it, unable to open it.
“Open the door,” she said.
“But Sara I—”
“Open it!”
I opened it. Sara let her fingertips hang outside of the door frame. A small breeze riffled the plastic, but her fingers bounced back to their previous shape.
“I can feel it now,” she said.
“What? How?”
“I don’t know. I feel the sun, too. I feel the sun and the wind. I feel free. I feel like myself.”
She put her whole hand outside the door. It whipped and snapped like a windsock. Through it all it maintained the look of fingers, the curvature of palm and wrist. She laughed. I was happy for her.
She looked at me for a while, and then, without warning, she stepped through the door.
The wind caught her at once. Off she went, a heap of taped together trash bags riding the wind. She collided with shopping bags and candy wrappers and the crunch of dead leaves. I chased after her, and I caught her, but she was just a bunch of trash bags by that point, an empty husk, so I let her go.
I still wait by the door in case she comes home. When the windows turn brown, I clean them; she would be proud. Mostly I keep the windows and door open. I want to hear her when she comes home, if she does.
It shouldn’t surprise me that she hasn’t. It shouldn’t hurt. Why would she stay in this little apartment? Why would she stay here, with the black mold and the broken tile?
I let the sun in and the wind. It’s not a great life here, but it’s something. It’s something to know that for one shining moment I had something good. For a brief, glorious moment, I knew what it was like to love deeply, to feel so incredibly alive even face to face with death.
I miss the heat of her plastic skin against my hands, and the way the light reflected off her arms as she stood by the window. I miss her laugh. I miss the way she’d scold me to brush my teeth when all I wanted to do was lie in my bed forever. I miss the passion she could summon for every little thing—eating a vegetable, washing my clothes. I hope she’s found what she was looking for. I hope she’s happy.
But every day I wait by the door, just in case. I close my eyes and listen for her voice—clear and pure as church bells.
_______________
Alicia Adams lives in the forest with her spouse, young daughter, and cat. You can find her work in Hearth Stories, Luna Station Quarterly, and DreamForge Magazine. For a full list, or if you’d like to say hello, you can visit her website: AliciaAdamsWriting.com.