The sky was silver, as it had been so many years ago. A wind, sharp and swift, streaked its numbing fingers through her hair.
Twenty-four years old, she walked through the town alone. It was mostly empty now, but that was besides the point.
Her boots made a racket in the silence, scraping the ground as she trudged up the sidewalk to the apartment marked 1419, up the concrete steps and then up the wooden ones of the porch. How many times had she walked up these steps and hardly even noticed?
She paused to lean on the porch railing and look out at the familiar view down the hill. She had expected it to be vastly different, but it was still as it had been eleven years ago. Those little stucco houses, that road shaded by those enormous trees. The front door was green, just as she remembered, and unlocked, just as she predicted. No one was living there, of course. Everyone was gone, what with all that had happened, and she had wanted to see her old town one more time before she too left to go north.
Even though she knew logically that the living room would be empty, some long-buried part of her fully expected to come in and hear Adele singing on the stereo, to see her mom standing at the stove making hot chocolate and her little sister sitting on the green couch playing with her Barbie dolls. The picture shelf, the TV, the brown curtains on the windows. But no. Only dust and ice and silence.
As she stared at the wall where the couch had been, the room changed. It was gradually illuminated with a dim golden light, and the freezing temperature let up a bit. Two girls, one thirteen with short dark hair and the other eleven with short blonde hair, burst suddenly from the hallway, sailing down the floor in their socks. They hit the edge of the couch and flipped, rolling off the cushion onto the floor one right after the other, giggling maniacally. She smiled to see them sitting on the floor, laughing so hard they couldn’t breathe. Not fighting.
She went to the kitchen, where the absence of the brown table and the various culinary devices on the counter startled her again. Here she saw herself sitting on the edge of the table talking to a friend, a short girl with long brown hair, when the table suddenly toppled over, sending glass bottles to the floor and shattering and leaving the both of them stunned.
At the sink, she and another friend were having a water fight.
At the stove, her mother was standing, making some sort of pasta for dinner. Her mother with hair the color of redwood trees and hazel eyes deeper than eternity. The girl stared at her contemplative face for a long time before turning to see a boy in the doorway—a boy wearing a cape and a skull mask. The girl laughed, because it had been her idea for her best friend to scare her mom; when she finally turned and saw him…well, it was a good thing she hadn’t been holding the macaroni pot.
She left the kitchen and went down the hallway to her old room. Her bed. Her beloved bookshelf. Her brown recliner. All were absent in reality, but present in her eyes. She laid down on the floor in the very same spot her mattress had been that first night, before her bed had been set up, and looked out the window. Lightning flickered across the dark clouds in her imagination, wild lightning that she was sure was about to smash through the window.
She got up and left her room, not having anything she particularly loved in here. Everything she loved moved and walked and breathed, at least before.
She was at her bedroom doorway when suddenly she remembered something else. Her mother, standing before her, smiling and holding her hands out. Dance music was coming from the stereo next to the television in the living room. The girl, forgetting herself, reached out to take her mother’s hands and dance with her, but her own hands met nothing but empty air and darkness and the painful rush of forgotten cold.
She didn’t cry. She merely blinked and put her hands in her jacket pockets.
Turning away, she withdrew her hands to pull her jacket hood up and left the apartment through the back door. The ghosts made of memory continued to glide down the hallway and dance and sing and make dinner and watch TV and read, while a new one walked away, never to come back.