506 words of metaphor and similie and something in between.

A Rayne Vignette.

"You got to be a Spirit... Can't be no ghost."

She was a girl. And crazy too. Pretty, dark eyed and shaggy haired, but he can't figure out if she's real or not. She's the pale flitting through his dreams, his life, without a rhyme or a reason. Without one thought as to what she does to him.

And sometimes, when he touches her, he expects to feel nothing, except his fingers going through her because she's simply not there. She simply vanishes, not from the ship but from all sense of reality. Else, she haunts him with her empty eyes, always searching for something he can neither see nor hear. Sometimes the weariness on her face scares him, because she's beautiful even though she suffers endless pain.

He ain't so bright, but he's not stupid either, rough around the edges and he knows if he gives in, he'll tear her like butterfly wings. Only not so poetic, cause he don' know how to talk like that. He can talk shell casings and knife edges, he can talk bout whore houses and whisky, things that he knows she doesn't...that she shouldn't know about, anyhow. Leastwise not rightly so, and he knows there are some who would kill him to keep it that way, others who would disagree. She gets to him in the worst of places and the worst of ways, like smoke through a keyhole. A cool breath against the small hairs at the base of his neck.

She makes him feel cheap. And dirty.

And for whatever reason, he loves her for it.

~*~

"But a ghost she is, caught only in brief glimpses of moving shadow, a whisper of cloth and thin echos of bare feet against silent steel. Hardly even a disturbance of air that left impressions against the imagination."

His house is old, old enough for its bones to creak and sway in high winds. In certain light, it was only a slightly larger than normal house. Nothing in particular special about it, a wind porch, halting gardens. A mantel that collected dust on forgotten photographs, a kitchen frozen in time just before the dishes are done, and an old garden shed in which things went in but rarely came out.

A typical house on a typical street.

But in the attic, where memories better forgotten were packed and stored away for later reflection, she stumbled on a small, neglected box. No hesitation groped at her when her small hands opened the flaps, struggling with the tape that had become tacky with age. The smell of fear and sex and sweat wormed into her senses.

But inside was an assortment of mundane things. She felt disappointed at first, having expected something much more exiting, wonderous. Stamps with a currency she did not recognize, blood pooling in her head as she held his face in her hands. A piece of cloth, with tin-cut shapes proclaiming bravery, a talent of not being dead. A portrait of life that's black and white, grainy.

And for whatever reason, she loves him for it.