Rear View by Chris Scott

I lift my hand from the steering wheel and adjust the rearview mirror so that it’s tilted all the way up, angled at the roof. Right now I can’t focus on the road with my ghost staring at me from the back seat. The left side of his face caved in, skull shattered into white shards mixed with brain matter. One of his more gruesome transmogrifications.

In my mind, I quickly cycle through all the violence that could befall me—shoved from a rooftop, blow to the head with a shovel—and end up landing on the most obvious: car accident. A little too close for comfort. I begrudgingly readjust the mirror, and he’s still there of course. I’m still there.

I study myself in the back seat, headlights streaking past, intermittently illuminating the wreck of my face. What’s still intact is adorned with crow’s feet, the suggestion of wrinkles, a receding hairline. I’d guess a full 10-15 years older than I am now. Still, better not to take any chances. I fix my gaze back on the road, speeding into an empty night sky, sipping coffee from my thermos. I haven’t had an uninterrupted night’s sleep in weeks. I haven’t dreamed in over a year. Not once since he started showing up.

A little after 1:00 a.m. and fading, I know it’s time to get off the road. A motel appears like a phantom, completely alone in all that black space. It occurs to me I don’t even know what state I’m in. Arkansas, I think. I leave my ghost in the car, but he never leaves me, not really. I can feel him following me around the chipped stucco of the motel, the zap of suicide insects hurtling themselves against sodium lights. It’s easy not to turn around. Sometimes it’s easy not to look at me. Sometimes it’s impossible. Inside, there’s a kid behind the desk on his phone, can’t be older than 18. I don’t know how old I am. I would have to think about it. I can’t think right now. He asks how many nights. It takes me a full five seconds to understand what he means. When I eventually tell him just one night, I can tell I’m creeping him out. If he only knew. But just like everyone else, he can’t see.

My room is on the ground floor. I retrace my steps back out around the building until I find my number, and inside it’s what I expect. It is always the same. The smell of cigarettes from twenty years ago, the dead rattle of the air conditioning, the phone, the chair, the television; it never changes.

No, I’m in Tennessee I’m pretty sure. I know by now I will never outrun my ghost, but my body still goes through all these motions anyway. It doesn’t know how to stop. He assumes his usual position, standing in the corner of the room, just watching, always watching me with those desperate eyes. Those sad and frozen eyes. My face is restored now, but my skin is a severe shade of blue. Mid-60s, probably. Drowning or suffocation, I assume.

Every choice I make reconfigures my ghost’s body somehow, but I’ll never fully grasp the correlation, the chain of dominoes a hundred thousand miles long, way beyond my field of vision. I wonder if I was scuba diving. Bahamas, retired, with my wife and kids, maybe some grand kids. Something relatively quick and painless, equipment malfunction, caught in the coral reef, waving farewell to a school of bright red fish. Not a bad way to go. The long road from this motel room to that coral reef is impossible to picture.

I sit on the bed cycling through TV stations for half an hour, several times through. I leave it on a pro fishing show, my arm too tired to lift the remote, watch a couple old men leisurely guiding their boat through a narrow body of water. A lake in Minnesota, the screen says. Am I in Minnesota? My ghost stands perfectly still in my periphery. I focus on my breaths, in and out, wanting sleep so badly I’m shaking. I can’t keep living like this. I turn to my ghost, look him in the eyes. Me watching me. I close my eyes hard, try to push him out of existence through the sheer force of my eyelids. But I open them, and he’s still there. He will always be there.

My ghost is in his most common form now, an old man, withered and weathered, small and lonely. I have no problem imagining him in a hospital or nursing home, surrounded by loved ones or nobody at all, trying with every ounce of his remaining strength to just hold on.

“Why can’t you just let me go?” I ask me. My mouth opens like I’m trying to say something but no sound comes out. No sound ever comes out.

“Please just let me go.” I reach up to rub my face, surprised to find my cheeks wet. But I’m not crying, not really. The tears just drop by themselves, without purpose or volition. I am so, so tired.

“Please,” I whisper, sleep finally, slowly winning this battle. Behind my eyelids, I see the fragile, wrinkled hands of my older self wrapped around the fists of my younger body, desperate to hold on. Begging for one more minute, one more moment of life, please, please, I’ll do anything. And then our fingers are interlaced, locked together in a blur of skin and flesh, until I’ve forgotten who is who.

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CHRIS SCOTT — Chris’ work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Observer, Weird Lit Magazine, The Lit Nerds, Flash Fiction Magazine, and The Fantastic Other. He is a regular contributor for ClickHole, and a public elementary school teacher in Washington, DC. You can read his work at https://www.chrisscottwrites.com.

Art by JOANA SOLÀ — Joana (@sisaliks) is an illustrator from Barcelona, Spain. With a background in engineering, she didn’t start taking art seriously until she entered art school in her late 20s, and has now made her long time dream of working as a full-time artist a reality. Her love for sci-fi and fantasy started young, reading her father’s books of classic authors and never stopped. Her art focuses on cool, relatable, and interesting female characters, concepts with an edgy vibe, and often features eerie or dark themes.