by Adrienne J. Odasso

As she’s come to understand it, the gig is a joke. She was alive, once, a long time ago, but that’s behind her now, and the water is as deep and safe as ever. The only change, perhaps, is that swimming is easier, and she rarely feels hungry. It’s a shame, because fish used to be her favorite. Living in a place like that, she’d gotten used to fish growing scarce. It was easy to frighten people by showing up and politely asking for picnic scraps, though the feeling afterward was kind of hollow. The trouble is that people don’t speak her language anymore.

Usually, it calls for something more impressive than harassing picnickers. She hates appearing on roadsides; that takes a lot out of her, somehow. She’s so accustomed to the water (it’s not the sea, it’ll never be the sea) that stepping ashore has become a discomfort. Often, she’s afraid, and she runs away faster than her targets do. She wonders about the nature of the contract and knows she should have given it a little more thought. People think there’s not much to do when you’re dead, but the truth of the matter is that a lot of strange opportunities spring up. It had seemed like a good idea at the time.

Long ago, before there were sailors, she’d had the sea. There was something about living seaside that you couldn’t get anywhere else, and, nowadays, she can’t imagine why she’d thought that haunting a lake would be diverting. If she was alive, maybe, but then it wouldn’t be a haunting, and she would be in great peril. She’d already been trapped once. The water is safe, though, and home enough when, by rights, she ought to be gone.  She shies from the thought.

Today’s target is a man with a camera. He’s photographing the lake. The shamefully easy part is sneaking up on him without making so much as a ripple, then silently breaking the surface. What he sees will be up to him, be it dead thing or disturbance, monster or ghost. Dead things and ghosts aren’t exactly the same, although the man with the camera doesn’t seem to know this. For long seconds, he stares, unblinking.

See me, she whispers, and believe.

The man doesn’t, and he won’t. He yawns, rubs his eyes, and squints at the water. He shows signs of confusion, as if something’s amiss with the current or the weather, and, unhurried, takes a picture. He lowers the camera and sighs. It’s the slow days that are the worst, she thinks, and swims off to find some picnickers. Things aren’t what they were in the old days, for certain. People are hard pressed to believe in happy endings, let alone in ghosts.

Sinking, she opens her yellow eyes wide in the dark.