What You Carry

First posted December 2022.

The wooden stool beside Nora Baker’s grave creaked as Isobel shifted her weight. She bounced her foot on the ground, shivering and pulling her threadbare cloak tighter around her bony shoulders. Inside the lantern, the candle burned low, and she considered whether to blow it out to conserve what was left of it, or keep its comforting light as long as possible.

Bare tree branches rattled in percussion as the wind blew harder, whistling a tuneless melody in Isobel’s ears. Clumps of freshly turned dirt rolled down the mound atop the fresh grave. She thought of the mending she had left at home, and the half-knit scarf. If it was going to be this cold every night, the scarf would be a useful thing to finish soon.

There had been no time to grieve; at least, that was what she had been telling herself. There was the mending, but also the laundry, the cooking, the washing-up, scrubbing the floors, dusting the shelves, feeding the chickens, collecting the eggs, not to mention sorting everything with the burial. Now she was finally still, sitting at the side of her mother’s grave without anything to do but rub her hands together for warmth, and the tears would not come. Perhaps the cold had numbed her emotions as much as her fingers.

With a final fizzle, the candle in the lantern went out. Isobel told herself the increased chill in the air was only her imagination. Thankfully, the moon was full enough to cast some light over the graveyard, refracted through the creeping mist. The rustling in the bushes by the fence, though startling at first, was quickly attributable to early birds after their proverbial worms. As she watched the chaffinch hop out of the hedge, another movement caught her eye.

She hadn’t really expected the bodysnatchers to come. Though the evidence of their recent crimes was too plentiful to ignore, it was still difficult to picture them as anything but fictional bogeymen from children’s stories. It wasn’t the sort of thing you thought of as inhabiting your own reality. But they were, after all, the reason she sat beside her mother’s grave in the amorphous hours between night and morning.

Soreness throbbed in her throat as she swallowed. Her shaking hands tensed, and despite the chill, she felt beads of sweat form on her forehead. Not expecting them to come meant she had not really prepared, and now her mind raced with possibilities. Would they attack her to get at the grave? If she screamed, would anyone come?

Her freezing limbs felt sluggish and heavy as she rose from her seat, reaching behind herself to pick up the stool and hold it before her like a shield. Bitterly, she thought of her brother’s insistence that no one would come, and his refusal to take shifts with her. She hated being right. She was almost always right.

The figure in the shadows moved closer, their footsteps so light they made no sound. Tightening her grip on her stool, Isobel stared wide-eyed into the darkness. She did not dare to blink. The cold burned her drying eyes. Steadily, the figure approached, gliding through tombstones.

Isobel frowned. It was someone — something — even less likely than a bodysnatcher.

“M—Mother?” Isobel stuttered, shivering.

The ghost stepped into the moonlight. “No,” she said.

Indeed, she was not the ghost of Nora Baker. This was the ghost of a young woman, thin and frail in her spectral form. Her limp, matted hair was loose down her back, and her style of dress was at least a century old, if not older: unadorned, utilitarian. When she spoke, her voice sounded distorted, as if what Isobel heard was merely the echo of what had been said on the other side of a deep valley.

“You can see me?” the ghost asked. Her eyes blurred like watercolours, seeping out of the lines of her face.

The early morning air weighed lightly on them, devoid of the heavy density of danger. While waiting for the bodysnatchers she hoped not to see, Isobel had felt the darkness tight around her shoulders, humming in her ears, pressing heavily on her back. The steam of her breath floated in weightless moonbeams as she looked at the delicate phantom and nodded.

The ghost’s expression mirrored what Isobel imagined her own to be: fading terror, persisting confusion. “No one’s ever seen me before.”

Unsure how to reply, Isobel opened her mouth and closed it several times in succession, hoping in vain that the right words would come to her. She pressed her lips together in a tight line and leaned down to put the stool back on the ground, not letting her eyes leave the ghost for a moment.

“What are you doing here?” the ghost asked. She didn’t move any closer towards Isobel, and Isobel did not move to sit on the stool.

“Keeping watch,” Isobel replied. “For the bodysnatchers.”

“Oh.” The ghost turned around toward the graveyard gate. “Yes, I’ve seen them come to take bodies away. Why do they do that?”

Isobel shivered and rubbed her arms. Quickly, she swept her gaze down the fences, as if speaking of the bodysnatchers could summon them. “They sell them to the medical schools. Cut them up and study them.”

“Oh,” the ghost repeated. She frowned in thought, looking aside from Isobel. “That’s clever.”

“Clever?” Isobel’s cheeks prickled with faint burning. “It’s barbaric.”

The ghost cocked her head. “Why? It’s only a body. It isn’t a person any more.”

Pointing to the fresh grave, Isobel snapped, “This isn’t my mother?”

“Well, no,” the ghost calmly replied. She pointed to another corner of the graveyard. “That isn’t me in the ground over there, either. I’m me.”

Isobel pursed her lips. With a sullen flounce, she sat on the stool, turning her back to the ghost. She screwed her eyes tightly shut, silently telling herself that she was hallucinating from exhaustion. It was no use getting angry at a figment of her imagination.

A mellow, quiet voice spoke from behind her. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you.”

Isobel didn’t respond. She stared at the dirt on her mother’s grave, dull and dark. The last gasp of night was leaving the sky, and the promise of sunlight wove itself into the still-deep blue, glowing impossibly without its source visible.

“It’s kind of you to keep watch.” The ghost’s voice was distant and timid.

Kindness had not been part of Isobel’s considerations. They could not afford a mortsafe, and the watching needed doing. It was never discussed, when things needed doing, who would do them; it was either Isobel or her mother, and now, it was Isobel. The fact that she had even asked her brother’s assistance had been met with shock and disdain. She could not have said what possessed her to ask. It was only that she was so tired, and she wanted so badly to rest.

A kinder girl would not have tried to get out of it. A kinder daughter would have leapt at the responsibility, would have taken it on gladly. A kinder daughter would be able to shed a tear for her mother.

Isobel turned over her shoulder to see the ghost still hovering several paces away, fidgeting and biting her lip. “Have you seen my mother? I mean…is she…is she like you are?”

The ghost shook her head. “There have been others who lingered for a time. She was not one of them.”

Isobel’s gaze drifted back to the mound. Breath slowly expanded her ribcage; she felt the air hit the bottom of her lungs. Exhaling in a faint puff of steam, she found her vision slightly swaying. She lowered her shoulders, only just realising they’d gone stiff from being raised.

Light shimmered in the corner of Isobel’s eye. “I’ll leave you alone, if you want.”

“No,” Isobel replied, so automatically that the word had left her mouth before she’d thought of it. “No,” she repeated. “Company helps.”

The ghost’s expression was unreadable, wavering and rippling like the surface of water. She sat down on the ground beside Isobel. “I’m Molly, by the way.”

“Isobel.”

“That’s a lovely name.”

Seafoam green crept into the sky achingly slow. Isobel yawned. Even the daydreams in which she would normally take refuge seemed unreachable. Her head felt full to bursting with absolutely nothing: a tangible absence that took up every bit of space in her mind.

“I could keep watch,” Molly said. “If you wanted to rest.”

Isobel shook her head. “No one would see you, would they?”

“Oh. Probably not.”

Molly spun herself around and stretched out her spectral legs, leaning back on her arms braced behind her to look up at Isobel. “Would you like to tell me about her?”

Isobel could not recall the sight of her mother smiling. She could not picture her outside the house, on a holiday, having an adventure. There was no story in the daily chores that had comprised all of her life as Isobel knew it.

She looked at Molly, and wondered why it was that she could do so. To her knowledge, she had never seen a ghost before. Maybe she had, and simply hadn’t had the time to notice.

Molly’s expectant expression gripped Isobel’s chest. It was compelling, somehow — the desire to give her that for which she asked. She closed her eyes and imagined, with effort, a different life: a dream half-remembered, from a distant world. “My mother,” she began, “was a dancer. She danced through fields and forests, and once, into a fairy ring…”

* * *

Isobel did not see Molly as she entered the graveyard the second night. She rubbed her sore eyes beneath the darkening sunset, setting her stool, lantern, and basket by the grave. This time she had brought some socks that needed mending, to give her freezing fingers some work to warm them.

With the lantern’s light at her feet, it was difficult to look far into the darkness. The candle’s glow touched the top of her cheeks and cast everything she saw in orange. Sighing, she turned her attention to the socks.

As she worked, she hummed a cheerful waltz to herself in the otherwise silent graveyard. The wind was not as strong as it had been the night before, and the trees’ harsh staccato softened into a murmuring rustle. Clouds covering the moon stayed in place, shielding the graveyard from natural light.

“You look tired.”

Isobel turned to see Molly standing behind her. She flashed a quick smile, returning to her work before she replied. “I got some rest.”

Molly frowned as she walked over and sat down beside Isobel. “Not enough.”

“I’ll manage.”

“Don’t you want to do more than manage?”

Isobel paused, holding the thread in her hand taut as she met Molly’s pleading gaze. Without saying a word, she dropped her gaze to the sock and continued stitching.

After a few moments of silence, Isobel resumed humming. She felt Molly’s eyes fixed on her, but did not look up. The candle flame in the lantern flickered in a quick stutter. Isobel’s tune stopped abruptly as she glanced at it.

“Sorry,” Molly whispered, pushing herself a few inches backwards.

“It wasn’t your fault.”

“Candles do that around me,” she said, raising her voice to a normal volume. “It disturbed you.”

“No, just caught my attention,” replied Isobel.

Molly nodded, and they fell into silence. Clouds crawled away from the moon and light filtered into the graveyard.

The monotony of the work unfortunately gave Isobel’s mind leave to wander. There was a tightness in the centre of her chest she could not account for, and a stubborn refusal of her thoughts to make sense. Rather than words, it seemed fragments of sounds filled her head, utterly defying the chance of being understood.

She felt Molly’s gaze on her again, and this time, lifted her head to meet it.

Molly’s blurry eyes widened. “Are you alright?”

Isobel placed the sock and threaded needle in her lap, and pinched her nose. “My head is spinning a bit.”

“How can I help?”

Her voice echoed in the stillness; the reverberation thudded dully in Isobel’s ears. She waved her hand in a vague gesture. “I don’t know. A song? A story?”

“Mm,” Molly hummed thoughtfully. “I have a story, I think.”

The frantic energy crackling through Isobel’s body mellowed as Molly spoke, and she resumed working on the sock as she listened to the ghost speak of things she never did. Ships she never sailed, distant lands she never saw, dances she never learned. Molly was, at least, honest about her dreams; “had I lived,” she kept saying, without the bold lies of Isobel’s own narratives.

“Anyway, it’s no use regretting what your life wasn’t.” Molly paused, her eyes twinkling as she looked up at Isobel with her chin tilted downwards. “We can’t all be abducted by fairies, I suppose.”

Isobel flushed, squinting as she moved the sock closer to her face.

Laughing, Molly put a hand on Isobel’s knee. Isobel jumped in her seat, breath caught in her throat. “Don’t worry,” Molly whispered. “I liked the story, all the same.”

A sheepish smile curled across Isobel’s face. “I’m afraid my mother’s life was much like mine. Very boring, nothing interesting to tell.”

“Did she dream of dancing with the fairies, then?”

“I don’t know.” She thought of the weary lines etched in her mother’s face, the way she limped across the floor, the raw and blistered hands that Isobel had never once seen idle. “I think, more than anything, she wanted to rest.”

Molly’s wavering eyes stilled into sharp focus, only for a moment before the watery blur resumed. “Let her rest, then.”

* * *

On the third night, Isobel was too exhausted to hide it. She had no fortitude left to defend herself against the cold, and ice crackled in the spaces between her bones. Shaking hands had dropped the basket full of mending on the walk to the graveyard so many times, she had given up and left it in the street.

A kinder sister would not have shouted at her brother, she thought. A kinder sister would have made their dinner without complaint, rather than begging that her brother do one thing for himself and let her get some rest before she went back to sit with their mother’s body all night. A kinder sister would work herself into a tomb, watched over by another exhausted girl whose life consisted of nothing but thankless toil.

Isobel sank onto the stool with her arms wrapped around herself. Her fingers burned with cold; pain throbbed relentlessly through them, and she was too tired to do anything about it. Breathing steadily, she stared at the headstone bearing her mother’s name.

She felt Molly’s presence before she saw her. The ghost sat down on the ground in her usual place beside Isobel’s stool, crossing her legs and resting her arms on her knees.

The days since Nora Baker’s death had passed in a haze; Isobel’s hands had moved mechanically, and chores had been finished without a single conscious thought passing her mind. Though her nights passed without rest, they were still a relief from the overpowering wave of work that swept her away in sunlight. The longer she went without rest, the less she felt part of the daytime world; her daydreams materialised and pulled her into their fantasy of fairy dances and distant shores. Stories resurfaced in her memory, stories of revenants walking the earth, of ghosts re-enacting moments trapped in time day after day, night after night, unable to change or avoid or delay the constant cycle of repetition.

Grief hit her suddenly. Every tear she had been unable to cry, every frustrated scream she had held in her gut, every wail of despair and sadness and terror pierced the still night at once. Her mother had only ever wanted one thing, and even in death, it was denied her.

Molly’s arms encircled her, delicate and warm as loose fleece. Heaving, shuddering breaths beat against Isobel’s rib cage as she fell to the ground, rocks embedding themselves in her palms. Tears froze on her cheeks as she leaned forward into impossibly solid light. She felt hollow, dizzy with lightness. Opening her eyes, she saw her head pressed to Molly’s shoulder, and drowsily closed them again, content to stay there.

Morning had not yet broken when she drifted back into consciousness. Ghostly arms still twined with her own. The lantern had gone out, and the stool had been knocked over. Isobel sat up, looked at the grave, and felt nothing.

Slowly sitting up beside her, Molly rubbed her eyes and murmured, “Are you alright?”

Isobel smiled, leaning over to kiss her cheek. “I think I just might be.” She felt small within her body, light-headed and fragile as a fallen leaf, whirling in the wind. The image of it in her mind brought a trilling chuckle to her lips. She stood, brushed off her skirt, and extended a hand to Molly.

“Where are we going?”

Isobel shrugged. “Anywhere.”

Without taking her hand, Molly looked at it warily. “I can’t leave here. I’ve tried.”

“I’ll carry you with me. One way or another.”

As they walked toward the graveyard gate, Isobel remembered the dreams Molly had shared with her: voyages to distant islands, dances on foreign sands. She thought of herself on the deck of a ship, bringing a restless ghost back to life as she hauled ropes and danced a sailor’s hornpipe.

On the other side of the fence, a man with a shovel slung over his shoulder froze as he made eye contact with Isobel. He hunched down, unable to fully conceal himself behind the bushes. She laughed, and his brow furrowed.

“My mother is resting. The body is yours,” she said. Turning to Molly with a grin, she held her hand, and together, they walked through the gate.