“Ouch! That’s hot…!” Aoi cried out. She dropped her sparkler as she yanked her hand back, and the sparks immediately subsided.
“What the hell was that?” asked Ryo.
“Don’t ask me…” I said. Maybe we got a pack of faulty ones?
An eerie silence fell over the area. The wind stopped, and the softly swaying grass grew still. Not even the faint buzzing of insects could be heard anymore. Only our sparklers still burned on—except now, I could see the arc of each solitary spark as they traced slow and gentle curves in the night. The pine-needle patterns that burst and bloomed so erratically before now hung still in the air, as if the very flow of time itself had slowed to a crawl.
“What is this…?” Aoi breathed out, bewildered. I followed her line of sight to see exactly what had baffled her—the sparkler she relinquished her grip on just a moment ago was still suspended in midair a few feet off the ground, as if it had been frozen in its freefall.
Something was not right. It was as if we’d been plucked out of the flow of time and dropped into a world at rest. Soon, even the sparklers stopped shimmering, and all I could see were a few microscopic beads of light hanging in the orbit of their molten tips. I quickly recognized that those were the actual sparks, and that the only reason the “sparkling” phenomenon occurred was because time had been moving fast enough for their light to leave a momentary afterimage along the arcs in which they fell.
And then I felt it: There was a presence here, watching us.
But it wasn’t just me who noticed it, apparently. Ryo and Aoi raised their heads and started nervously scanning the vicinity as well. A palpable tension loomed around us—as if the very air had suddenly gone cold and stagnant. Unbreathable.
Then, from over my shoulder, I heard a sigh…yet I knew, rationally, there should be no one standing behind me.
Warily, I turned around—and there she was.
A woman now stood at the edge of the cracked runway, right where the overgrown weeds met the pavement, having crept up on us without a sound. She bore a startling resemblance to the impression I’d drawn in my sketchbook at the café prior to our departure. It was a young woman with long, black hair, a deathly pallor, and yes—two stockinged legs slid snugly into black Mary Janes that stuck out from beneath her dark, ankle-length skirt. And yet despite all these vivid details, there was a surreal, almost hallucinatory quality to her. She seemed fleeting, ephemeral—as though if you tried to reach out and touch her, she’d simply vanish into thin air.
Aoi and Ryo were both too stunned to say a word. I was pretty shaken up myself, admittedly, but I felt compelled to at least try to say something.
I called out to her. “Summer Ghost… Is that you?”
There was no reason for me to think she’d answer to that name in retrospect, given that it was simply a moniker made up by supernatural enthusiasts on the internet, nor was there any reason to assume we could hold a conversation with her to begin with. But my mind wasn’t working properly at the moment, and it was all I could think to do. The ghost, meanwhile, simply tilted her head and stared at us curiously.
It was then that I noticed she’d been standing on her tiptoes this whole time. No—upon closer inspection, the tips of her toes weren’t even touching the ground, and instead floating a few centimeters above it. It was as if her entire body was weightless, or at least lighter than air. There could be no doubt about it: We were looking at a true apparition.
The Summer Ghost was real.
In certain corners of the internet, there were private message boards where disaffected youths gathered to discuss a variety of socially taboo subjects—suicide being among them. For some, these forums were a sort of coping mechanism—a place where they could go vent their frustrations to people in similar situations, and whom they knew would actually take their suffering seriously. And for others, these functioned as a place to seek advice regarding the most painless or practical methods of taking one’s own life.
It was on one of these message boards that Aoi, Ryo, and I first met. I’d started a thread asking if there were any other high schoolers in my area who were contemplating suicide, and the three of us started corresponding from there. After exchanging a number of messages, it became pretty clear that we were indeed all high school students living in the same general area, not just creeps trying to meet up under the veil of anonymity. And, perhaps most importantly, we were all quite serious about committing suicide.
Aoi was being bullied relentlessly at school, and her teachers refused to do a thing about it. According to her, not even her family could be convinced to care about her or her problems even for a minute. It was making her life a living hell.
Ryo was suffering from a serious disease that was all but incurable. According to his doctors, he didn’t even have a full year left to live. So, he made up his mind to go out on his own terms—before his illness ate away at him completely, while he still had his dignity.
My problems, meanwhile, seemed pretty darn minor by comparison. I wasn’t a victim of bullying, nor was I suffering from some terminal disease. Sure, my life was stressful—but more than anything, I was just…disillusioned with living. There was no major impetus that I could point to—I was just sick and tired of it all and had been for quite a while now. Simple as that, really.
“So are there still, like…high school cliques and stuff after you die?” Aoi asked.
“Y’know, I’m not sure, really. Think we’re pretty much on our own for the most part, though.”
“Phew. Okay… That’s good to know. I’d rather be alone, honestly.”
“Yeah, I get that. Not always a good time being around other people, is it?”
The Summer Ghost had proven to be far more talkative than I ever would have thought and was fielding questions from Aoi. Now that our initial shock had died down, we were all surprisingly calm about this whole ordeal. You’d think that most people would panic and run for the hills upon seeing a ghost (and indeed, that’s exactly what she claimed all of the people who previously encountered her had done). The three of us, however, were not so easily spooked, given that we came here with the express goal of having a conversation with her about death in the first place.
When we explained that to her, she seemed utterly baffled. “You’re a weird bunch of kids, you know that?” the ghost had said.
Her real name, incidentally, was Sato Ayane. I could only assume that this had also been her name while she was alive—barring, I suppose, the possibility that she was some nature spirit that had never been human to begin with. In terms of appearance, she did indeed look to be around the age of twenty. In addition to the aforementioned long black hair and long dark skirt, she wore a thin silver necklace with a blood-red pendant around her neck. Her beautiful visage and delicate figure brought to mind the sorts of women that one only ever seemed to see in museums—in paintings displayed behind panes of glass and velvet ropes. There was also a gloomy air of melancholy about her, and a sort of transient paleness to her complexion—both of which only served to accentuate her mystique. As far as I could tell, she could choose to levitate at will. At the moment, her feet were planted firmly on the ground as she crouched down to Aoi’s level.
“You seem awfully curious about the world after dying, Aoi-chan,” said Ayane.