The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!

Borrowed Air
by Kathleen McCluskey

   They called me lucky for years after the fire, as if survival was a trophy handed out to the most deserving. Neighbors brought casseroles and hugged my shoulders with careful hands. Reporters used words like miracle and blessing while the house behind them unveiled its blackened ribcage to the winter sky. My sister’s name was spoken softly, reverently and mine was spoken with relief. I was the spared thing. The proof that tragedy has limits.

   I learned to carry that word like an heirloom. Lucky. I polished it. I repeated it until it was true.

   The first time I saw her was in a dim apartment hallway years later, when the building’s ancient radiator hissed and filled the air with a metallic vapor. The mist did not disperse. It thickened. It drew inward, folding over itself with deliberate grace, until it suggested the curve of a shoulder. The fall of something like hair. Pale ribbons drifted outward from her body as if she was woven from breath made visible. She was neither solid nor transparent.

   The sound reached me a moment later. It was breathing, but not the breathing of a single chest. It layered upon itself, dozens of soft inhalations overlapping , rising and fraying into shallow exhalations. Beneath it threaded a fragile rasp, the raw drag of air forced through heat and ash.

   I did not scream. I did not move.

   She did not approach. She simply occupied the space, as though the air had decided to remember a shape it once held.

   I moved cities. I changed apartments. I kept the lights on and the windows cracked, convinced that circulation would prevent her from forming. It did not matter. She gathered wherever the air lingered long enough to grow heavy. Hotel rooms. Office stairwells. The dark reflection of a mirror at night. Always at a distance. Always patient. When she lifted her arms, the drifting strands extended and recoiled, testing the space between us without crossing it.

   Therapists told me that trauma imprints itself onto the senses. They said my mind was recreating the conditions of the fire in order to process why I survived. They said the mind prefers ghosts instead of guilt because ghosts are easier to fight.

   They did not know about the door.

   When the smoke alarm split the night air, I was awake. I had smelled it first, that bitter sweetness that did not belong in a sleeping house. The hallway beyond my room churned with black heat, the ceiling groaned as if something large shifted above. My sister’s room was only three steps away. I remember the carpet scorching my bare feet as I crossed the distance. I remember wrapping my hand around her doorknob.

   It was hot enough to burn but not yet unbearable. There was still time. I could feel the house straining to breathe, a fragile pause.

   I called her name. I heard something inside. A cough? Or perhaps only the roar gathering beneath us. The sound from the first floor came then, a violent concussion of splintering beams and shattering glass. The heat surged up the stairwell in one single, monstrous exhale. In that moment I understood two futures with clarity that has never left me. In one, I opened the door and stepped into the furnace, in the other, I ran.

   The body is an honest creature. It chooses survival without consulting the soul.

   I chose the back stairs. I chose cold air. I chose lungs that would still work.

   The officials said that the fire spread too quickly for anyone to have saved her. They said the smoke would have taken her before any flame. They said I was a child and couldn’t have altered the inevitable. I let them hand me those conclusions like a blanket.

   She grows denser whenever I remember the heat of that brass knob. The breathing within her thickens. Her layered inhales sharpen into desperate pulls that never quite fill. Tonight she stands at the foot of my bed, vast enough to dim the lamp beside me. The air has become viscous, each breath a measured effort. The drifting strands extend from her and hover inches from my face, cool against my overheated skin.

   I understand now that she is not my sister’s spirit, nor is she a hallucination stitched together from grief. She is the accumulation of unfinished breaths, from hospital rooms, highways and burning houses. She forms wherever survival cleaves cleanly through love and leaves someone standing in the ashes with functioning lungs.

   The strands press softly against my mouth, waiting for invitation rather than forcing entry. The room thins around me as the first thread of borrowed smoke slips past my teeth. Now I finally understand that luck was never what spared me.

   It was vacancy.

Fiction © Copyright Kathleen McCluskey
Image courtesy of Pixabay.com 

More from Kathleen McCluskey:

The Long Fall: Book 1: The Inception of Horror

Lucifer always cunning and intelligent challenges father to a battle of wits. Being the angel of light he casts a judgemental eye upon mankind. He begins a war with his fellow archangels and God. Michael, along with his siblings defend their home and mankind from their deranged brother. Broad swords and hand to hand combat drench heaven in blood. The four apocalyptic steeds are released, each having their own destructive power. Betrayal and lust are at biblical levels. Understand the very creation of evil and the consequenses that transpire in the first of THE LONG FALL series.

Available on Amazon!