Page 14 of Living with Death

“Hey. How was your day?” I take a seat on the crate beside him.

“Fine. A good bit of traffic came through here.” He rocks back in his chair. “How was yours?”

“Fine, too,” I reply.

He looks up at the sky. “Storm’s coming,” he says, and just as he says it, I hear the thunder roar in the distance.

I debate on telling Cook about the voice I’ve been hearing. I don’t want the man to think I’ve lost it, but I feel like I must tell someone. And frankly, he’s the only one I’d like to tell.

“Cook, what would you say if I told you I heard a voice?” I grimace.

He looks over at me, and I feel my ears burn. He thinks I’m crazy.

He sits still for a minute, and then he says, “Well, I’d say, what’s it been saying?”

I smirk, looking down. “My name. Um, it told me one of the girls I work with is dying. I don’t know. It’s weird.”

“Does it scare you?”

I think about this. “No, I’m not scared of it, per se. More worried that I’m hearing it at all.”

“I can understand that. Think you’ve lost your marbles, huh?”

“Exactly.”

He laughs a little.

“You ever heard voices before?”

“Nope. I can’t say I have. Saw visions before, though.”

“Visions?”

“Yep. During the war. We lost people every day, and sometimes at night, when I’d go for a smoke, I’d see them.”

“You’d see ghosts?”

“Ghost, spirits, hallucinations.”

“Did they scare you?”

He rocks and nods. “Sometimes. They’d be bloody like they looked when they died. But other times, they’d be smiling and waving at me.”

I raise my brow. “Dead people waved at you?”

“Yeah.”

I look down at the ground as an ant crawls up and over my shoe. I swat it off and look out at the small parking lot. The fluorescent light flickers above the small gas pumps. Leaves tumble across the pavement, sending a chill across my neck. I move my hair behind my ear.

“You know yesterday when you told me I should take that money and see the world?”

He nods.

“Sometimes I think about doing that, but that money reminds me of how awful he was. It’s like blood money. Using it to enjoy myself, it just doesn’t feel right.”

“Want to know what I think about it?”

“Yes.”

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