A Ghost Story

The old man is here again. Sitting on the side of the bed. Wearing his tatty black trousers and worn tie. He sits solemnly and silently. Merely looking at me. His lady, dressed in white. Flits slowly across the room from my right. Sits on the chair beside, but a distance from him. They do not look at each other. Both have the gaze of the sorrrowful. I refuse to look at either. Accepting instead their presence from the corner of my eye. In life he was her blight. She was his. They never spoke.

Marriage the institution. The prison to both. And now in death, they are still prisoners. Neither permitting a single gaze at the other. Expecting I to be the mediator, as nobody on their side will give them the time of day. As in life, so in death.

The old man stands now and wanders to the corner of the room. Places his arms gently on the shoulders of a crying lady. His daughter. Just a young child when she passed away. Now a grown up watching her parents with tears in her eyes. She was the fault. The reason. Childless they remained after her death. Blaming each other. Seeing themselves as godless and thus unclean. And so it was through their life.

The daughter gazing across to her mother with pleading eyes. Begging her to forgive. But she refuses. Towards the window she walks slowly. Out of desperation, the loss of her child too great to bear. A life time of sorrow. The silent shatter of the glass as she replays the scene again and again ... plunging down to the street below. A wraith-like spectator crying then as he recalls the loss --- Matthew James