Visiting
Nicole Ravas
Mario and Karina were having the same conversation again. It was late autumn. The sun was setting behind the glass of the bay window framing Mario’s head. The waves splashed against the stilts of their two-story house.
The apparition, the newly arrived spirit Karina was just becoming accustomed to, like grief, arrived then, as she had these past two weeks, just as drops began to patter the lake’s surface.
Mario sighed and raised his arms above his head, his arm ripping through the spirit’s neck, unseeing. The spirit’s pale face frowned. Her long, brown-gold hair tinted to a cool patina by her passing. She appeared to Karina as if through mist. Once again, the spirit was familiar, though unreal, like a passing thought, lost and irretrievable in a moment.
“You told me we could talk about this again, that you’d be open to it.” Mario said.
The spirit hummed. Karina couldn’t quite make out the tune, but the rhythm soothed and numbed. She drifted toward the fireplace mantle on their left. Behind Mario’s head, the sun sank a little closer to the horizon, the sky starting to dissolve.
“I didn’t mean weekly,” Karina said. The humming continued, turning to brass in Karina’s ears, repetitive, tinny.
“If we’re going to try again, we actually have to try,” Mario said. “It could take more time, this time. You’re older—”
The spirit tried to pick up the glass candlestick, the one given to Karina by Mario’s mother. It was tall and boxy. Its rough angles didn’t fit with the soft contours and mauve and cream furnishings of this room. The spirit was unsuccessful, her spindly hands drifting through it, like wind through gauze. She was trying to expand her reach into the room. She stopped humming as she continued to swat at the glass.
“It’s a fruitless venture,” Karina said. She wasn’t sure if she was responding to Mario or the spirit, but the words were out now.
“So, you don’t want to try again?” Mario said.
The spirit resumed the humming. What unfinished business can you possibly have with me? Karina thought, considering the immemorial logic.
“Karina, if you don’t want to try to get pregnant again, that’s all you have to say.”
Karina couldn’t see the spirit’s face now; the figure had shifted so her back was to the living inhabitants. She seemed to be looking at the photo of Mario and Karina on the beach two years before, before the trying started and failed. The spirit hadn’t been there then, didn’t know them then. That day was similar to today, brisk, but sunny.
“It’s not that,” Karina said, moving past Mario so she could see the ghost’s face. But the ghost was moving back toward the window. The ombre sky was darker. Karina stopped at the mantle and looked at the photo.
“When does it become futile?” Karina said, looking at their cuddling faces, suddenly tired.
Karina had tried before to communicate with the spirit to no avail. Each time the spirit appeared, she seemed to consider Karina and the house for the first time. Sometimes, Karina wondered about the reliability of the spirit’s memory, how she seemed to forget crisp details. Karina wished hers was as dulled.
Mario sighed. “You heard the doctor,” he said. “Last month could have just been a fluke. Your body’s—our bodies—are… fine.”
“Fluke….” Karina said.
Mario reached out and squeezed her arm. “That was the wrong word. I’m sorry.”
“What he actually said,” Karina said, “was anomaly.”
The ghost had gone back to humming, but now had raised one hand to the window, and made circles with her fingers through the air as if tracing the waves. The sun was barely a shimmer on the line of the water. Karina shivered, though she wasn’t cold, and Mario’s hand fell from her shoulder.
Nicole Ravas
Nicole Ravas is a visiting assistant professor in the Creative Writing program at Carlow University, where she received her MFA in Creative Writing in December 2020. She won The Ekphrastic Review’s first Flash in a Flash contest in March 2021 and was a runner-up in the Loud Coffee Press 2021 Summer Micro-Fiction Contest. Her work was published in Volume XXVII of Voices from the Attic. She is a Madwomen in the Attic mentor and a fiction and nonfiction reader for the Northern Appalachia Review. She lives in Pittsburgh with her husband, her son, and their three dogs.