Living With The Dead

     There it was again.

      It was quiet in the studio loft located deep in the Courthouse District, and when the noise kept intruding on Briar Dallas’s art, it had to be addressed. The bone-thin Goth sighed as she put her brush down, turning away from the canvas she was preparing. Her pale eyes scanned the loft’s broad, echoing space, seeing nothing but her belongings (mostly art supplies) and the array of pieces, some unfinished, that took up the majority of the loft’s polished floorboards. It was the fluttering of a sheet covering one of her bronzes that made her black-painted lips twitch.

     "Fuck," she murmured, stripping off her voluminous smock and tossing it over the unused art stool nearby. Her socked feet were silent on the shiny oak as she walked towards the shrouded sculpture, her long fingers twitching nervously. It was always a Russian roulette game, investigating something in Briar’s life. She never knew if it was just a mouse, a bird…or something altogether more unsettling.

     It just had to be the latter in this case.

     When the skinny girl pulled the shroud away from her bronze, a glorious sculpture of Joshua Ogniali wielding his hammer over an anvil, she blanched at the sight of the bluish-white woman, dressed in a blood-stained, ragged evening gown, that was lounging indolently against Ax’s bronze chest.

     "Bloody hell, what do you want?" Briar couldn’t help the little twinge of fear that crept into her voice. Even a lifetime of dealing with the dead couldn’t entirely steel one against the horrific sights that occured over and over again. Her delicate nose wrinkled as she looked down, away from the gory wraith.

     "…I want him," the ghost hissed, her reedy voice a mere breath in the room’s silence. Her incorporeal fingers slid through the metal shoulder of the blacksmith, and she almost purred…or would have, if it wasn’t a gurgle that emanated from the torn wreck of her throat. Briar never knew how it was that ghosts could speak, especially the ones that had died in such…traumatic manners, but they always did.

     "You can’t have him, I told you that," she replied irritably, leaning down to retrieve the shroud. "Now get off of that sculpture. I haven’t finished it."

     "I can help you."

     "And have what happened last time happen again?" Briar’s pale eyes darted towards the massive closet of the loft, and she shuddered visibly. "No way. He’s looking exactly as I want him to. You’re not screwing him up."

     "Why haven’t you made me yet?"

     The medium looked back at the ghost, the heap of material hanging like loose skin from her paint-spattered hands. "You don’t…I don’t have colours for you. I can’t figure out what kind of medium to use for you. I can’t just make something up."

     "You always say that."

     "Did you ever stop to think there might be a reason for that?" Briar didn’t bother holding back the snarl as she threw the shroud over the ghost and the sculpture. The heavy canvas settled onto the bronze easily, leaving the ghost clearly visible. She looked aggravated, her milky eyes narrowing at Briar.

     "You should know better than to make me angry," the ghost hissed, the loose flaps of torn flesh at her throat working with her anger. Briar swallowed hard, repressing the urge to reach up and feel her own smooth, slender neck, and turned away with a shrug.

     "You’ll do what you want no matter what I say. Why should I care how pissed you get?"

     She regretted the words almost immediately, as she always did when the ghosts retaliated. A feeling of utter cold enveloped her thin body, and she began to shiver instantly. Her breath steamed as she looked back in the ghost’s direction, and then she uttered a strangled whimper.

     …why did it always have to be blood?

     You would think that ghosts would develop a sense of imagination after a while, but no… It was always blood, always that same bright arterial red splattered across whatever surface would show it best. Currently, it was the canvas shroud covering her bronze. The ghost grinned with malicious delight, rubbing her bloody hands down the cloth, leaving streaks of vermilion in her wake. With a hissing gurgle, she buried her pale hands in her own torn throat and withdrew them, dripping with the etheral liquid. That it wasn’t real didn’t matter. Briar’s eyes tracked the ghost’s progress towards her, shaking uncontrollably with cold and fear, and she uttered that animalistic cry again when the wraith’s hands passed through her. The feeling was utterly repulsive. Clammy stickiness rubbed against her face, and that all-too familiar metallic taste filled her mouth. She gagged, and clamped both hands over her black-p

ainted mouth, closing her eyes. The warmth of her own tears did nothing to dispel the bone-deep cold that racked her thin frame. The ghost dissolved in a non-dramatic way, merely walking into the darkness that clung to the corners of the loft. Why bother being dramatic? She knew what she had done, as had Briar.

     It was always the memories the ghosts brought back that hurt, worse than anything else they could do to her. The feeling of cooling blood drying on her cheeks made Briar gag again, and the bitter sting of bile mingled with the fading metallic taste. She couldn’t hold it back any longer, and ran for the small closet-like bathroom with a stumbling desperation. Vomiting hurt badly, tore her already deteriorating stomach apart, made her throat burn for hours and left her trembling and weak. She couldn’t crawl away from the toilet, and merely curled up on the cheap linoleum. Wrapping her arms around herself, she cried into her sleeve, choking and spitting the lingering taste of bile out of her mouth. In her mind’s eye, she saw it again, over and over again, that image so vividly imprinted into her brain, the picture she could never paint, draw, sketch, sculpt, carve away. The picture they brought back every time… The ghosts knew her secrets, and as if they sought to make her suffer all their pain, they brought them back.

     Briar Dallas, medium and artist of unsurpassed talent, wept into her black sleeves and tried to forget about the bloody beginning of her life. No living things came to comfort her, and the few ghosts which rallied to her protection seemed long distant, their whispers faint through the curtain of her own agony. It had always been so, this life amongst death…and even as Briar cried out her despair on the cold floor of her bathroom, she knew that the chances of that changing grew smaller with every passing day.