Night Auditor

Meredith (16)

Billy wasn't my only visitor from the dead.

Summer of 2012. Exactly a week after my grandfather was hit by a bus while riding his dingy motorcycle grandmother always scolded him about. My uncle had just come home from the crematorium, a round vase with a shiny metallic surface in his hand. My grandfather.

How little and insignificant he looked at that moment, diminished in nothing but his own dust to be left in this metal casing. Most likely to accumulate even more dust much like himself. How puny he was at that moment, his enormous hands forever absent from a world he constantly hurt.

For the first time in a long time, there was genuine happiness. With my grandfather's death came the brittle shackling of chains I was bound with ever since Mom left me in my grandparents' care two years before that. My breathing felt lighter as if my body was realizing it no longer felt the need to tiptoe, to quietly live in the shadows so as not to trigger his heavy hands.

That night, the first night my grandfather's ashes sat on the mantle to collect dust, I hung out on our front porch, sat on the rattan chair my grandfather used to sit on when he smoked his cigarette in the afternoons. No one in the house was allowed to sit on that chair. Of course, in the house were just me and my grandparents, my mom away in the city only to come home on the weekends. That rattan chair was my grandfather's special spot and anyone he caught sitting on it was at the mercy of his fists.

Well I was sitting on it now and there was nothing his ashes could do about it. I could have smeared the thing with dirt or just completely destroyed it so no one would ever be reminded of the times he wasted his afternoons to smoke. I sat on it, reveled in the satisfaction of how angry he must feel if he knew I was sitting on his rattan chair. The little girl who was always up to no good. The one who took his punches and smiled after he was done.

For a very brief moment I considered lighting a cigarette, to imitate him and feel the power he thought he had all those times when he sat on this throne. But that was just him burning his lungs away, his last bit of luck running out when that bus crushed his frail bones into pieces. I thought he'd go out by lung cancer. The bus was good too.

The next day there was brightness in the house, making the living room seem bigger than it was, the porch enticing with its chilly gust of wind and cloudy skies overhead. We were supposed to be mourning but we were not. Grandmother was already busy in the kitchen preparing breakfast from the whiff of bacon and eggs that greeted me as soon as I stepped out of my bedroom. My uncle had stayed that week, preoccupied with his work on his laptop. Mom didn't take any days off from work. We all went on with our lives as if we didn't just lose the family patriarch.

So that night, instead of locking myself in the bedroom like I did for the past two years, I once again stepped out onto the porch to enjoy this little space I had stayed away from.

Then there he was as if he never left.

I was transported back in time before the accident, before the devil took his final breath and freed me from my shackles. My grandfather, in the flesh, sat on the rattan chair, the smoke from his cigarette spiraling in the air. The disappointment of once again seeing my grandfather, after the unspoken promise of never having to deal with him again, almost killed me.

But I didn't go back in time. It was still a week after his death. I knew because I spent the flush of adrenaline I gathered to run back to the living room, making sure that his urn still sat on the same spot my uncle placed it on yesterday. And it was. It merely sat there as quietly as the clutter that shared its little space.

Slowly I walked back to the porch, my mind racing as I tried to figure out who it was that I saw sitting on the rattan chair. But I was sure about exactly what I saw for my days had never been clearer before the fortunate accident. I couldn't possibly blame it on the day's haziness like I used to. I knew what I saw and I knew it was my grandfather in the form of a devil. But when I came back out to the porch, the rattan chair was free of its usual dweller.

That was the first time I saw my grandfather's ghost. Yet as I spun around with my flashlight in the dark hallways of the Hacienda, little did I know that I would be seeing his ghost again. Slumped on the floor with his crushed legs, his blood not staining the carpet beneath him. Unlike the first time I saw him on the porch that one morning, he acknowledged my presence this time, the slits in his eyes as devilish as I remembered. He made a sad attempt to reach out to me with his arms, laughably weak and pathetic now, his mouth gaped open as if he was to say something. But before I could choose to ignore his spirit, a chuckle coming from the staircase had caught my attention.