Your mind plays tricks on you, but not as often as you’d think. A lot of the time you are seeing what you think you’re seeing but your mind sorts it so it can make sense of it. It doesn’t want you to feel distressed or upset, it just wants you to process the details and move on. Your conscious mind is all about moving on, about getting to the next thing. If we didn’t have our unconscious minds, I think we’d be like mental sharks, just swimming swimming, swimming until we die. But that misshapen lump hangs out in the back of our brain somewhere, coughing up forgotten details, registering facts, filing things away and we don’t even know it is happening.

I guess that’s why Emilia seemed so familiar when I first registered her presence. The fact was that I had been seeing her for months out of the corner of my eye or reflected in the glass but I hadn’t really accepted that she was there so I just glossed over her. My conscious mind didn’t want to accept that there was a ghost in my apartment, so it just overwrote her details. My unconscious mind was on the task though. Once I admitted that she did actually exist, that a decidedly modern looking ghost woman in jeans and a Buffy t-shirt, barefoot, with a bandanna pushed down over her forehead, was wandering around my place all hours of the day and night, my subconscious coughed up all the other times I had seen her. It created a context, a pattern of sightings that suddenly gave meaning to a lot of weird noises I had heard and to the way that my things kept showing up in unexpected places.

My subconscious can’t explain, however, why I know that the ghost’s name is Emilia, and that she died on the sidewalk in front of my place one night when she heard a loud bang and ran outside in her bare feet. I have no idea how I know that, but I do. I don’t know exactly how she died though, but I know it couldn’t have been good. A good death probably doesn’t leave a ghost. Or at least that’s my suspicion. I’m also in the dark about what she’s doing here. She hasn’t actually tried to speak to me or anything like that. She just seems to be hanging around, sitting on the end of my couch, looking out the window, strolling up and down the hall like she’s talking on the phone – waving her arm around like she is illustrating a point to someone on the other end of the line.

You’d think I’d be creeped out, but I’m totally not. She’s kind of a comfort really, kind of like an incredibly unintrusive roommate, but a roommate that has made me wary of strange noises outside. I don’t wear Buffy t-shirts or jeans, and I don’t own a bandanna but you still won’t catch me investigating outside after dark.

I’m a patient woman, you’ve gotta understand that. I don’t care if you’re late for dinner, I don’t care if you don’t pick up your socks, I don’t care if you keep forgetting to call me. I’ll just call you if I need you. But see, everyone has their limits, right? You can’t just let everything slide, that just doesn’t make any sense. That’s no way to live, you end up taking crap from everyone that way and I’ve got a crap limit. And last night, Gerard hit that limit.

We’ve been together almost three years now, and I’ve been picking up his socks and waiting while he finished phone calls so we could go to dinner. I didn’t care when he got my birthday mixed up with his ex-wife’s birthday – even though they are two months apart. I didn’t even do that passive aggressive thing where you pretend it doesn’t matter while you seethe. I just called him out on it, told him that he mixed my day up with Serena’s and so we were going to be going out to the movies on Saturday and here was a list of suggested birthday gifts. I’m straightforward, there are no games. I’m not playing around. I’m a grown up woman not some teenaged girl in a sit-com. I gotta mention the sit-com part because I don’t think any real teenaged girl is so wrapped in boys as the shows pretend they are and they are definitely not as over the top dramatic either. Anyway, so my point is, that most of the stuff that will bug people don’t even faze me. I’m not worried about them.

I won’t stand for being disrespected though. I’m having none of that. You can’t just toss me aside, or pretend that I’m not important. I know exactly how important I am, thank-you-very-much. And that’s why I was so put out last night. Gerard was talking to some ladies at a fancy party we were at for his work. We looked great, me in a cocktail dress and him in a suit so fancy it was almost a tuxedo and he’s talking about dancing. About how he loves to dance. It’s his favourite. And this a man who has refused to dance with me at weddings for the past three years. I’m a good dancer too, everyone wants to dance with me. Everyone except him.

But there he is going on and on about how much dancing is an important part of his life and how he wanted to be a dancer when he was a kid but it was impractical so he went into accounting instead. Then there was the big line, the one that snapped everything in two. That’s when he said that dancing was his first love.

Imagine. Not only is he some sort of secret dancer, so secret that his girlfriend doesn’t know about it, but dancing is his first LOVE? I am a patient woman but I cannot put up with that. He didn’t even make a joke about having other loves, it just him and dancing.

I walked out. It was the only thing to do.

I hope him and dancing are very happy together.

(15m writing, no editing (busy day!))

The italics in last line of this story were today’s Story a Day prompt. I like where this story is going, I’ll definitely come back to develop this one.

The gun was a last resort, of course. Everyone knows that. You don’t break out a weapon first thing, you start with words, or maybe even a dirty look.

In our case it had started with a note, which is technically words, but it’s a shitty way to deal with a roommate. Her first note said that I had better stop drinking her milk ‘or else’.

‘Or else?’ who says that in real life? Not grown-up human beings I tell you that. Of course, grown-up human beings would be smart enough to realize that their lactose intolerant roommates are the least likely culprit for drinking the milk and would instead ask their greasy, human flotsam of a boyfriend if he had drunk the milk. She didn’t think of that of course, and he probably liked the entertainment of stirring up drama.

So, yeah, that’s where it started, with some missing milk. It shouldn’t have gone on beyond that, but things unfolded in the way that things tend to do, and nothing got resolved about the milk. The whole situation soured after that. My food started disappearing out of the fridge, my laundry ended up with stains, one of my sneakers went missing, those were the relatively minor things. I could have maybe waited her out if that was as far as it went but I had vastly underestimated the nature of her cruelty and I had no idea that such a small thing could set someone off so throughly. There is no roommate test that could have predicted the trajectory.

I think my relative calmness about the small indignities threw her for a loop, she felt some sort of need to get me as riled up as she was. Her next campaign was subtle, I’ll give her that. There might have been a reasonable explanation for the basket at the top of the stairs that I tripped over. And the shard of glass might have gotten into the tub by accident – say if she had broken a water glass in the bathroom and the shard had gone flying.

There was no reasonable explanation, however, for the knife that I found buried to the hilt in my pillow or the hypodermic needle jammed point-outwards between the seats of my car. I called the police but they didn’t seem to think that they would be able to prove anything. My landlord didn’t even answer the phone.

If I had anywhere else to go, I would have left, but I didn’t, so I stayed.

I bought a gun.

And then I waited.

When I heard her and the greaseball come in, I clicked off the safety, swearing that if she showed her face here today, my room would be the last one she ever entered.

(15m writing, 2-3 editing)

The worst thing you could tell Maria to do was relax. She thrived on her tension. She held herself tightly, like a cord had been pulled taut in her spine and if you introduced any slack, her whole body would collapse. She talked fast, she moved fast, she acted fast. She was like a caricature of the uptight career woman, all well-cut suits and clicking heels. She was one of those women who seemed to be carrying a clipboard, even when she wasn’t, like she was checking everything off on some sort of list that only she could see. Her eyes scanned every room quickly, her movements were precise and she kept her arms pressed tightly to her sides, like her elbows were sewn on to her ribs.

The contrast here in the waiting room was almost unbearable. Here, Maria’s cord seemed to have been cut. She was slumped in a corner on one of those peculiar yellow chairs that seem to exist only in hospitals – you know the kind, a sort of mustard-y vinyl with chrome arms with a chunk of wood stuck on as a handle? The square edge of the handle looked to be digging into the side of her bicep but she didn’t notice. Her suit was rumpled, her high heels were under the chair – one stood up and one on its side. She seemed to have misplaced the inner clipboard. There was no movement at all, fast or otherwise. Looking at her gave me a pain like something jammed up under my ribs.

It was one of those times where you know you have to say something but you have no idea where to start. I figure though, that if you don’t know where to start then the beginning doesn’t matter that much.

“I guess the Doctor has been out?”

She turned her head toward me so slowly that I couldn’t be certain she was actually moving. Her eyes didn’t seem to be focused on me at all.

“Oh, Mandy. Uh, no the Doctor hasn’t been out. We still don’t know anything.” She spoke like her audio had been slowed down for effect. Hearing her was worse than seeing her, it made it all seem too real. My Dad was in the operating room, they weren’t sure he was going to make it, and the Doctor was still in the trenches. I had held it together throughout the phone call, and the flight, and the taxi ride to the hospital, but seeing my step-mom like a puddle in the corner of the hospital waiting room was the thing that tightened my chest and brought the tears down. If Maria couldn’t keep it together then I was lost.

She knew that it was supposed to make her feel bad, the way they talked about her, but really there was a sort of power in it. If people couldn’t help but talk about you it was probably worth it no matter what they had to say. And if her legs drew the eye, if her breasts held attention, then she had them for those few minutes, didn’t she?

It seemed like it would be worse not to be noticed at all. The thought lurched her stomach like she was hitting turbulence. What would it be like to just be there? To not be noticed? To blend in with the walls, with the desks? To be just one of the girls, curlers and make-up testing on a Friday night. Or worse, to be just one of the guys, drinking beer and stirring up girly belches to make her guy friends laugh.

She was more than that, she was bigger, she was better. The guys might have thought they were using her, rolling off and hurrying home, but they were fools. She had drawn them in to her web, and they were helpless – when she was done, she just cut the threads loose and let them drop.

She wasn’t stuck with some loser boyfriend that way. No one told her what to wear or how to cut her hair, or expected her to laugh at their jokes. They didn’t joke with her at all, and that was how she liked it. She didn’t have to be coy or play any games, there was no one to please but herself and that pleased her just fine.

The mothers talked, and the teachers gave her warnings of increasing sharpness, but she wasn’t buying into it. The guys tried to brag, and the girls tried to shame her, but they were missing something. Guys can only brag when they get one over on someone, but she was in charge all along. Girls can only shame you if you feel ashamed. She had been tired, bored, excited and satisfied by the guys she drew into her web, but she never once felt ashamed.

She slipped into her heels in front of the mirror, tugged down the hem of her skirt and the neckline of her shirt. She fluffed the sides of her hair, and put another layer of red on her lips. She nodded at her reflection, grinned and winked.

She had the web ready, it was time to draw a few pathetic creatures in.