Light tinkle and warmth across my face, like a passing breath. Like ashes. I opened my eyes—from dreaming of distant wind chimes and feeling homesick, a tangible pang in my breast, my stomach agitating. What is this? Blinking off sleep, catching my breath, gripping my thighs, I perceived a black-winged shadow thing darkening the wall opposite the bed. My heart dipped; I bit my lip and vaguely felt the pressure of my teeth, then tasted blood, and the moment crystallized into a sharp-edged waking reality, not the continuation of a filmy dream, which itself had dissolved into fleeing atoms. The shadow coughed; or rather, I coughed and the shadow fluttered like a windblown sheet—which is not to say I heard this fluttering, but rather I saw it, or thought I saw it. Perhaps I am misremembering. Piecing together the experience is like piecing together a narrative: not exact, never exact. Words always fail to fully represent the events. We lack the proper methodology to understand certain phenomena and make the distinctions needed to reach satisfying and verifiable conclusions. This is my way of saying I could not properly process the experience; its essence escaped me. Or a manner of expressing it escaped me. 

I wanted to say something. That is, I wanted to say something to the apparition or phantasm—or whatever it was—hovering at the end of my bed. Who’s there? Who is that? What are you? What do you want? And I did ask these questions in my mind, but my mouth, locked in an almost painful rictus, failed to voice them. I touched my lips and thought of my widowed mother, dressed in black, standing in the kitchen by the stove, a strange smile on her face as she stirred a pot, ceaselessly stirred a pot, oblivious to my static presence. I could not pinpoint the day, the exact day when I that moment had transpired, though it may have been an amalgam of many such moments, seated at the kitchen table, watching my mother stir a pot, trying to fathom her enigmatic smile, for she was not happy, she could not have been happy, nor could I recall saying anything at that moment to amuse her. When did it happen? Not long ago. So long ago. To think I had not thought of her for—how long had it been? So much time had passed. And time was passing. I could not excuse my negligence. My negligence could not be forgiven. What a terrible son I had been, what a terrible son I was. And then, gulping deep in my chest, pressing fists to my eyes and shuddering, I recalled that my mother had been dead for years. I wept. Then I wiped away my tears and sat up in the bed.  

The black-winged apparition persisted, clinging to the walls like a giant bat. Too frightened to leap from the bed and dash out of the bedroom, I clutched my sheets, drew them to my chin, and tried to assess the situation as quickly and coldly as I could. I did not believe in ghosts as such. Indeed, the supernatural, in all its guises, held no truck for me. The flame of consciousness eventually peters out, full stop. Nothing exists, even at the quantum level, beyond physical fields and particles. When the matter in my brain ceases to be ordered enough to sustain the particular consciousness I enjoy in my waking life, I will cease to be and my atoms will scatter. End of story. And if such was the case, how was it that I now perceived this apparition? Go away, I thought. Just go away. I don’t believe in you.

And, as if reading my thoughts, the apparition fluttered but did not depart, perhaps indicating that it had no intention of leaving at that moment, of letting me off the hook as it were. Given that it had not frightened me to death, perhaps it came to deliver a message, a benign message from the other side. Then it dawned on me that it was possible I was still dreaming, that indeed this event was something like a dream within a dream, prompted by my longing for a vanished past, or the narrative of that past wherein my long-deceased mother was a central figure. Did the apparition represent her spirit, darkened, made monstrous by the suffering and grief she had endured during her lifetime? Ma, it is you? Is it you, Ma? The wingéd apparition fluttered and moved across the wall. I thought I heard it whispering, or rustling. I may have been mistaken. A smell of char filled my nostrils. Was something burning? I wanted to scream—a natural reaction to white-knuckled fear—but my vocal chords produced no sound, a peculiarity I have experienced in other dreams. So I was dreaming this thing, this phantasm, which, however menacing in appearance, had yet to directly threaten my physical being, though I could not preclude, even in retrospect, that its mission or purpose did not amount to simply scaring me out of my wits. 

Only fools and charlatans advance the idea that each and every visitation from the other side brims with meaning or represents the possibility of meaningful contact and even communication between the two sides. Have these unscrupulous individuals ever considered the possibility that sometimes the phantasm’s raison d'être is merely to give the human subject a good fright, full stop? Was it a prank pulled by a mischievous entity from the other side? Perhaps it would be wrong to ascribe to the entity malevolent motives, though one from this side with cardiac issues might vehemently and justifiably disagree. Is that you, Ma? Dressed in black. Smiling that smile. Give me a sign, Ma. Give me a sign. The apparition fluttered and moved toward the curtained window. Was that a sign? I wanted to jump out of bed and rush it, but of course fear kept me rooted in place, trembling, sighing, sheets at my throat. I did not believe in ghosts, and still scoff at people who tell ghost stories or report encounters with inexplicable entities. But I still felt afraid. Was I dreaming? Even though I pinched my thigh and felt the tweak, the materialist in me said of course I was dreaming. I heard the faint tinkle of wind chimes and suspected that this meant something, though I wasn’t sure exactly what. The apparition fluttered. You’re nothing but a dream, I thought. Nothing but a dream. And as if reading my thoughts, the apparition unleashed a final, silent flurry of its wings and disappeared behind the curtain.