Cathy de Buitleir

Attendant, Mixed Media, Artist Unknown

On my first day back at work post-death, I hover up to the canteen at my usual break-time. I can take breaks now whenever I please, but old habits. While there, I see on the notice board that my colleagues held a little memorial for me, between 11:45am and 12pm the Tuesday after I’d died. This touches me somewhere around where I remember my heart being. I sigh with remembered lungs.

Someone had bought a box of chocolates — as a sort of salve for the grief, I suppose — and now it’s discarded on the break room table, with only the boring, unwanted sweets left. My memory of my mouth wants them badly. I remember the sweetness of milk chocolate hitting my tongue and then melting, spreading around the inside of my mouth, then maybe buttery fudge dissolving, or the exciting contrast of a hazelnut. After my break, I practically swoon back down to the gallery floor. I’ve learned that my memory of sensation is potent, more potent maybe than how actual sensation felt when living.

But a typical day at work now isn’t that different from how it used to be. I didn’t cultivate that much of a rapport with my colleagues when I was alive, so their current obliviousness to me doesn’t feel so strange. The visitors also ignore me, but they often did that when I was alive too.

My job is to watch and make sure nobody damages the art. I’ve had to adapt the role a little to suit my new circumstances. Back when I had a mouth, I could approach someone who was getting too close to an artwork, and say to them politely, ‘Could you take a step back, please?’ Or, if the situation called for it: ‘Sorry, sir, no flash photography.’ They’d look at me then, sometimes with annoyance or embarrassment, but they’d look at me.

I no longer have a face to look at so I approach these situations more obliquely. I’ve learned that if I hover close to someone, I can provoke a shiver down their spine that is disconcerting enough that they move away. With a little extra concentration, I can focus precisely on a person’s awareness of their own mortality. I can make them hear in their minds a ticking down of all the moments they will ever have. It’s a useful way of getting someone to move, but I try not to overdo it.

But I can sense a person now in a way I couldn’t before, if I hold them in a drifting focus, like doing a magic eye but for human feelings. I sense people in staccato bursts — their wants, irritations, and preoccupations — like tuning into signals they are emitting. I wish I could’ve done this when I was alive.

*

I move back and forth in my assigned area. That is the area I was assigned in my corporeal days. I could probably float around wherever I want, but I see no reason to disturb my routine. I like my section. The works here have the body as subject. Figure painting. Renaissance and modern, abstract and realist, sensual and grotesque.

I watch two women passing through. They regard the works in the room together, chatting a little as they go, then drift apart to look at them again, alone. They linger a long time. Long enough for me to want to practise my new skills, look inside their minds, see if I can feel nerve endings firing. But more visitors drift in, the two women drift out, and I let them leave my consciousness too.

Later, they return. They circle back to my section, going counter-flow against the crowd, taking another look. They sit on a bench then, heads bowed together, deep in conversation.

I watch them. I can see the thread of communication between them but I’m not close enough to hear it or feel it. They are like a single unit of activity in this space, isolated from the people drifting around them. At one point, another visitor sits so near them on the bench that I flinch slightly at the incursion, but the women don’t notice. They’ve made a world between them that can ignore their surroundings.

I’m frozen, watching them. Their warmth sharpens my own coldness. One moment, it seems as if their hands almost touch. I’d inhale sharply, if only I had a throat. I hover closer, and now it’s like a reflex, almost. My focus narrows.

The two are so close together that I need to consciously direct my concentration on one over the other. With a sort of mental click, I tune into one of them. She is calm on the surface, but inside she is all discordant pleasure and fear. The closer she gets to her companion, the more elevated her pulse. I float even closer and I’m enveloped by the heat of her entire life. I feel every sharp note of her anxiety, like a slightly off-key violin wail. There’s a droning bass undercurrent, buoyed by a note of self-loathing, and buried under all of it, a small strain of hope that maybe, maybe —

Oh — she’s shoved me away somehow. But I can still feel something. She has a proactive itch that she didn’t have before. She reaches out and grasps her friend’s hand. But as she turns her head, something catches her eye behind her. Her gaze falls on me, and it sparks some part of me that isn’t dead.

Does she see me? Or is she looking at the painting behind me? I won’t wave, just in case.

I’m fading now, though my shift’s not even over yet. Everything’s breaking. I have no memory of this sensation. I think it’s the kind you only have once. The woman looks away from me, responding to her friend’s voice.

‘What is it?’

‘Sorry, I thought I saw someone.’

Wait! I’d yell, if I had a mouth, but now I’m gone.

Cathy de Buitleir is a writer based in Dublin, Ireland. She was recently awarded third place in the inaugural Knocklyon Literary Festival flash fiction competition. She holds an MA in Film and Television Studies. She works as a technical writer.

Cathy wrote the following about her story:

I visited an exhibition on figure painting, and somewhere in the weeks afterwards I had this notion of placing this desperately lonely, non-corporeal person amongst all these vivid and sensual depictions of humanity. And I also sort of like the idea that behind any impulsive attempt at earnest human connection you may ever make, there's maybe a lonely ghost yelling at you through space and time, ‘DO IT! DO IT!’