Tuesday Flash: Afterimages

I was eleven, and my mother had tried to kill herself for a second time. They locked her up in the State Hospital, and my father, weary from working double shifts in the tractor factory, sent me to the country to live with Grandma Gypsy, just for the summer, he promised, and lied.

She lived in a well-kept farm house in Linn County on a thousand acres of cattle land. We never called her Grandma Gypsy where she could hear, but she had been a gypsy once, before she married a farmer twice her age, Great Granddad Hawkins, who died years before even my father was born. She liked to tell me stories about life before the farm, but never why she left her family to marry a Kansas farmer. I thought she was madder than my mother, until she taught me how to see ghosts.

Her farm was just down the road from a Civil War battlefield. It wasn't much more than an overgrown field with a small brick visitor's center, but it was the only thing interesting to a child in a hundred miles. I walked there every day after my chores and pretended that I was a cavalryman, running down the Rebs on my stallion.

Grandma Gypsy must have seen me there, playing at war. One night at dinner, she asked, in her old croaking voice, "You ever seen the dead, Jim?" I liked how she called me Jim, and not Jimmy like everyone else. I shook my head.

"I'll teach you how," she said. "You need to see." I didn't like the way she said that though. I liked the trappings of being treated like an adult, but I didn't really want to be one yet.

I forgot all about her promise until the next summer thunderstorm came rolling across the plains from the west, a wall of gray and black laced with silver-green threads of light. I watched the storm press closer until it was leaning over me on the battlefield, casting a shadow dark as twilight. The other children had run home already. Then Grandma Gypsy came hobbling across the field, laughing, waving her walking stick over her head. Her wispy gray hair had come undone and blew in the wind around her shriveled head.

"Here, Jim," she said to me, turning back to face the storm. "Focus your little eyes between here and the storm, and you wait. You'll see them."

I was too frightened to do anything other than what she told me. Lightning crackled close, so close the thunder came almost at the same time, and I blinked. Afterimages burned my eyes, but they weren't the shape of the bolt of lightning. They were the shapes of men, rows of them standing on the field. Another flash of light, and another afterimage. The cavalry charging through the ranks of men, horses twice my height rearing up, kicking and flailing. Another flash, and the shapes of men were scattered on the field like driftwood on a beach. Again, the lightning struck, and now, a silhouette standing just before me, so close I can make out the outline of his uniform in the bright spot against the insides of my eyelids. He was missing an arm.

I screamed then, and I ran, all the way back to the farm house. I never played in the battlefield again. And I have only looked for ghosts once since.

A few years later, and my mother finally got what she wanted. An open window in the hospital, and out she flew in her white hospital gown, like a dove, only the wind did not carry her up.

I never understood what made life so miserable for her. Not knowing why kept me thinking late into the night. Wondering if it was me, or if it was my father. Wondering if she was happier now.

I hitchhiked to the city, and I rode the bus to the hospital. I'd checked the weather the night before, so I knew that a storm was coming. I sat down in the shade of a cottonwood across the street from the hospital just as the storm began to crest overhead. I held my eyes open against the flashes, and then I squeezed them shut. A shape, something like the small, slight woman that had been my mother, hovered in the air between the second and third floors. The shape hung there through the entire storm, and never fell, never moved downward, or upward, or any direction at all.