This week’s short story
Not all spirits move on right away. I offer you a story of two spirits intermingled after death. It’s quite loosely inspired by George Saunders’s book Lincoln in the Bardo.
Having some fun with Vinny and Lewis, a couple of dead guys whose spirits are stuck together in the transition. Can they move on?
My Dance Space
Bob Gillen
Margie Pasqualino slipped out into her small backyard after dark, pulling her sweater tight around her torso. The moonless night wrapped the neighborhood in silence.
A ten-foot tall bottlebrush tree graced the rear of the yard, a handful of rocks circling the base. Margie knelt in the grass near the tree, next to the hole she had asked the gardener to dig for her. About a foot square, eighteen inches deep. A square of sod and the excavated soil sat on a flat piece of cardboard to the side of the hole.
Margie held her dead husband Vinny’s ashes in her hands, in a box made of thick biodegradable paper. She kissed the box gently, lowered it into the hole. With a garden trowel she scooped dirt over the box. When it was level with the rest of the lawn, she patted the soil firm. “Rest in peace, my love.” Tears fell, soaking into the soil.
Eighteen inches below the surface, Vinny Pasqualino’s spirit moaned, stretched, wriggled into his new home. “Sure beats sitting on the bookcase,” he told himself. “I love my yard.”
“Move back. Gimme some room here.” A voice squeaked in the space.
Vinny’s spirit swirled around. “Who’re you? What are you doing here?”
“My name is Lewis. Lewis Bomer. Most of me is somewhere else, but a bit of me is here.”
Vinny stared at the wisp of a figure. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“I got cremated before you. Some of my ashes got left behind as they cremated you…so here I am.”
You want a piece of me?
“Shit, this is my space.”
“You know the old line? ‘You want a piece of me?’ Well, you got a piece of me.”
“This is my yard.”
“Yeah, I get it. This is your dance space.”
“Dance space?”
“Yeah, you know, dancers don’t like to be crowded.”
“Okay, okay. Let’s start over. You’re Lewis. I’m Vinny.”
“Hi, Vinny. Was that your wife put us in here tonight?”
“Yeah. Margie. We were married fifty years when I bought the farm. Heart.”
“Good for you. I was single, still playing the field. Drunk driver got me.”
Vinny shivered. “Okay, so what the hell? You stuck here with me?”
“Beats me. My first time doing this.”
“Cramped in here. Can we move out of this box?”
The two spirits scrunched and wiggled, and found themselves up in the yard in the fresh air.
“Hey, this feels good,” Vinny said.
“Quiet here. Peaceful.”
“It would be more peaceful without you attached to me.”
“No worries. We’ll figure this out.”
Vinny nodded toward a faded red Adirondack chair. “I spent lots of hours after dinner in that chair. Margie would fall asleep watching her TV shows, and I would grab a cold longneck and sit out here.”
Lewis smiled. “The yard feels right for that kind of sitting.”
“I barbecued every weekend. Mostly burgers. My last year even some vegan burgers. Docs were all over me about my heart.”
“I had a studio apartment in the city. Cooked ramen noodles in a microwave.”
“Ouch.”
“I wasn’t home much. Ate a lot of snacks and happy hour food in bars.”
Dragging Lewis, Vinny’s spirit drifted around the yard. He hit a wall a few yards in each direction. “Looks like we got some restraints here.”
“Won’t last long, if we’re lucky.”
“How does this whole thing work?” Vinny asked. “I don’t think we’re supposed to be floating here forever.”
“Yeah, you know, shouldn’t we be part of that whole spirit world now? Back in touch with everyone we knew?”
“Sounds right.”
“This is truly weird.” Lewis shook his head. “Maybe some kind of transition.”
Vinny tested the boundaries again. No change. He said, “I feel like I should be standing in a rowboat paddling with one oar down a long dark tunnel with mist swirling around my feet, Phantom of the Opera music wafting around me.”
“Hah,” Lewis said. “More like going through Disneyland’s It’s a Small World ride.”
Vinny held up his hand. “Don’t make that song the last I ever hear.”
Lewis peered around the space. “I wonder where the rest of me is. I have no idea what my mom would have done with my ashes.”
“Maybe in her living room.”
“I don’t know…she would be too sad looking at me all the time. She’s kinda the move-on type.”
“My ashes will be here for a long time…my spirit, that’s another issue.”
Lewis laughed. “You know what would be cool?”
He paused.
“You gonna finish that thought?”
“I would like my ashes to be stuffed into a giant fireworks canister and shot off on the Fourth of July.”
He gestured to the sky. “Spread everywhere… in a blaze of glory.”
Vinny shook his head. “Who’s going to do that for you?”
“I know a guy, who knows a guy, who works on the fireworks barges for the Macy’s celebration every year.”
“Yeah, but does he actually fill the canisters?”
“He could just tape my ashes to one of the canisters.”
Vinny shook his head.
“No, really. Think about it. My ashes would explode high over the East River in New York, then drift down all over the city.” He laughed again. “Picture this. Some tourist is walking down Fifth Avenue looking in all the store windows. He takes in a deep breath. Says to his wife, ‘What a beautiful night’… while he breathes in a speck of my ashes. Don’t you love it?”
“I gotta hand it to you, Lewis. You got a big imagination.”
“I’m feeling kind of diminutive right now, if I may use a big vocabulary word. I wish I knew where the rest of me was.”
“So do I.”
“Hey, not my choice to be here.”
Scraps of night fog began drifting into the yard.
“Am I missing the obvious?” Vinny said. “Are we expected to let go…somehow? Are we keeping ourselves here?”
“Like I said, it’s my first time. And I’m not all here.”
“No argument there.”
“You won’t let this go, will you?”
Vinny shrugged.
“I should consider myself lucky, you know? My ashes could have mingled so much with yours that we became one spirit.”
Vinny pointed at Lewis. “Maybe you got a point there. If I can figure out how to move on, you can just come along with me. Find the rest of you at the next stop…wherever that is.”
“What are you saying? We swirl together and float out of here? Like the fog?”
“Yeah,” Vinny said. “We twirl around, mingle our spirits, drift up and out of here.”
“Sounds too easy.”
“Got a better idea?”
Lewis whirled his spirit around Vinny’s. The two mingled. Spun together. Shaped themselves into a single wisp.
Nothing happened.
“This is bullshit.”
“Damn, I can’t find the rest of me till we move on. We’re stuck together.”
Can’t stay here forever.
“Yeah, I’m not happy with the situation either, but it’s the best we got.”
“Can’t stay here forever.”
“Maybe I can stay here. I like my yard.”
Lewis shook his scrap of a spirit. “Think of moving on in this way, Vinny. You can have an endless longneck. Ice cold, condensation running down the bottle, every sip crisp and cold.”
Vinny shrugged. “If I go, I would have to spend time with my dead in-laws, right? They hated my guts…”
Lewis wrapped himself around Vinny’s spirit. “What would you love to do, Vinny? Something you never got to do in your lifetime?”
Vinny did not hesitate. “I always wished I could play the guitar. Just one song. The delicate guitar melody Jerry Garcia played on ‘Ripple.’ You know, the Grateful Dead. That is one fantastic line.”
“Yeah. The song had such cosmic wisdom.”
“Don’t get sappy on me. It’s just a good song.”
“Ironic, though,” Lewis said.
“Huh?”
“Ironic you would want to do a song by the Dead.”
“I get it. Yeah, ironic.”
“Wouldn’t that make you want to move on? Spend forever playing ‘Ripple’ with a cold longneck at your side.”
“You’re starting to make sense, Lewis. Scary if all of you was here. You’d have me running to hug my in-laws.”
“Come on, Vinny. This life is over. Time to move on.”
Vinny smiled. “Maybe you’re right. Let’s try again.” He floated around the yard one more time.
“Bye, Margie. I’ll play guitar for you when you join me.”
Vinny and Lewis faded into the night fog.
Silence.
“Shit!”
“Yeah.”
“We’re still here.”
***
Let’s see what happens with Vinny and Lewis. More story to come.
