“Well, yeah. I mean, it’s not like there’s anything good about this one,” she said. “School is literally torture, and no one gives a crap about me—I figure I might as well just die and get it over with already.”
“I see,” Ayane replied. “Well, I’m sorry to disappoint, but I can’t be of much help to you there. I don’t really know much about the world after death either.”
“What do you mean? Aren’t you living there right now?”
“Living” in the world after death…? Isn’t that a bit of an oxymoron? At the very least, it struck me as an odd choice of words on Aoi’s part—and apparently, Ryo felt much the same. I turned to my side and shot him a quizzical glance, and he reciprocated with a shrug of his shoulders. The two of us were standing a short distance away, listening in on the girls’ conversation.
“Thing is, I think I’m kind of stuck in limbo,” explained Ayane. “I’ve just been wandering around this general area ever since I died. I’ve never encountered another ghost either, so I’m guessing the vast majority of people just move straight on to the next life and whatever comes after this.”
As she gazed wistfully up into the night sky, Ryo turned to me.
“Hey, so what’s the deal with these sparklers?” He was referring, of course, to the three sparklers that were still hanging in the air, a few feet off the ground. Ryo and I had let go of ours shortly after Ayane appeared, and just like Aoi’s, they now remained suspended in freefall.
“Pretty sure it’s because time’s stopped for everything but us,” I said.
The tall grass all around was no longer swaying, and I could even spot a few winged insects here and there, frozen in mid-flight.
“Yeah? And how the hell does that work, exactly?” he asked.
“Dunno. Could be that we’ve entered some heightened state of consciousness, where our senses have been sped up to such a degree that it feels like everything’s moving in slow motion. So slow that it’s not even perceptible.”
But even if our minds were moving faster, that wouldn’t explain why we were still able to move our bodies at normal speed, or why our vision hadn’t gone dark due to light entering our retinas at only a fraction of its normal rate. Why weren’t our clothes and bodies frozen in place like the grass and the insects? How could we walk around and talk to one another like normal? Perhaps we slipped into some strange liminal space, like a gap between dimensions where the usual laws of physics didn’t apply.
“Eh, whatever,” Ryo said with a sigh. “No point in speculating about the supernatural, I guess.”
Aoi then called out to us from across the runway. “Hey, you two! Come over here and join the conversation!” Apparently, the girls had hit a lull in their chat. “I mean, you guys had stuff you wanted to ask Ayane-san too, didn’t you?”
“Nah, I’m good, thanks,” said Ryo. “I’m just glad we actually got to meet her. That’s more than enough for me.”
Aoi leaned over and whispered in Ayane’s ear. “Just FYI, Ryo-kun’s got some horrible disease,” she said. “He doesn’t have much longer to live.”
“And who gave you permission to share that, huh?!” Ryo yelled back—though I could tell from his tone that he wasn’t actually all that bothered. If anything, he seemed to be in an awfully pleasant mood ever since the Summer Ghost appeared, like a guy who just received some very good news. I couldn’t help but wonder if meeting this ghostly presence had softened his fear of death to some degree. Perhaps the knowledge that there was some form of conscious existence after death, like we could see with Ayane here, had invited some much-needed serenity into his soul.
We were, after all, a group of teens who were seriously contemplating suicide. But that in itself did not mean we were unafraid of death, or even more than that, being erased. Completely and utterly ceasing to be. This was the main reason we wanted to see if this supposed ghost was real or not. We wanted to ask her about her experience with death, as one who already went through it, and to glean some insights on how to best end our lives.
But since Ryo claimed he didn’t have any questions for her, I raised my hand instead.
“So what are some of the biggest changes you’ve noticed after dying?” I asked. “As in, things that are different now, compared to when you were alive?”
Ayane looked at me. There was a deep but beautiful darkness in her eyes—every bit as alluringly unknowable as the night.
“Oh, gosh. Where do I even begin?” she said. “Well… I don’t have to pay my taxes anymore, for one thing.”
“That’s not what I meant. Let me clarify,” I said. “I’m asking if the world looks or behaves differently for you now that you’re dead.”
“You’re not much fun at parties, are you?” said Ayane, folding her arms with a rather displeased expression on her face.
“Yeah, no kidding,” Aoi chimed in, placing her hands on her hips. “You’re never gonna get a girlfriend like that, Tomoya-kun.”
Apparently, I was being chided for brushing Ayane’s joke aside. “My mistake. I apologize.”
“You don’t sound sorry,” replied Ayane. “Are you sure you’re not just saying that to placate me so we can get back to what you want to talk about?”
Now that threw me for a bit of a loop. Not that I wasn’t already well aware of this little character flaw of mine—I always had a bad habit of trying to gauge what response was desired from me based on the other person’s body language, and that strategy had gotten me this far in life, at least—but rarely did I ever truly mean the things I said.
“All right, why don’t we just start over?” I offered. “Let me ask you a different question: Would you say that dying has been a relief for you, overall? Or, more generally: Is death a reprieve from the pain and suffering of being alive?”
The rumors claimed that the Summer Ghost was the spirit of a girl who committed suicide, after all—so assuming that was true, she must have done it for a reason. And what I wanted to know more than anything was…whatever those pains and anxieties she had might have been, was she released from them in death? Or would they gnaw away at her brain for all eternity? Aoi and Ryo seemed very interested to hear the answer to this as well, and we all waited on tenterhooks for her reply.
“I mean, I can’t speak for everyone,” Ayane started at last. “I’m sure it varies from person to person. But just speaking for myself, well…”
She trailed off for a moment, narrowing her eyes ever so slightly. I could only assume she was thinking back on her time amongst the living.
“No, let’s not talk about me,” she finally declared. “Who cares, honestly.”
Just then, a soft orange glow crept up in the corner of my peripheral vision. The sparklers, still suspended in midair, began to shed sparks again—they traced trails of light that then burst and branched out into those telltale pine-needle patterns. Though slow at first, the sparkling was growing faster and more erratic by the second. The flow of time was rapidly returning to normal.
“The worlds of the living and the dead are trying to pull apart from each other once more,” Ayane explained. “They can’t overlap like this for long. It’s time for us to go our separate ways.”
“Wait, you’re leaving us already?” asked Aoi. She clearly wasn’t ready to call it a night just yet, but the Summer Ghost simply smiled softly and waved the three of us goodbye.
“It was nice talking to you all,” Ayane said. “Bye now. Haunt you later.”
Her peculiar farewell caught me a little off guard, but Aoi didn’t miss a beat.
“Bye, Ayane-san!” she called out, waving back. “Haunt you later!”
The wind picked up, and the grass began to sway once more. As the buzzing insects resumed their flights, our sparklers fell to the asphalt and extinguished. I watched with my own two eyes as the ghost of Sato Ayane slipped away soundlessly into thin air—leaving the three of us stranded on the runway, too stunned to say a word.