Ghosted

`April 13, 1886

Emma stopped with a foot poised almost on the softly shining heart of pine floors at the base of the stair case. Her heart thudded with the slight out of rhythm beat that had worried her for months. Her slender gloved hands gripped the banister as she staired at the apparition hazing out of sight in her front entryway.

Her mouth went dry as she caught the scent of foreign perfume, evocative of an exotic flora she had never smelled until the weird moments of being caught between times started happening. The visions had begun around the time her heart had started to experience a decline. All in all she was beginning to believe she might be going insane.

"Hello?", Emma asked in a light voice to the shadowy woman sitting in her entryway before a quilt frame plying a needle into the quilt stretched across it. However odd the woman's clothes were to her, Emma recognized a quilt frame with a quilt upon it. The see through woman quilting never looked up.

The strangely dressed woman was wearing spectacles much too large for her small face. Her hair was bobbed to her shoulders. Perhaps she had been terribly sick and had her hair shorn to rid herself of the awful fever. Emma felt a wave of compassion gripping her with the thought of the stranger being ill and losing all her crowning glory to the illness. The quilting woman leaned forward and a locket came out of her shirt.

Emma gasped when she saw the oval locket. It was carved with ornate scroll work in rose gold metal. The center of the locket held a square shaped diamond. The outer edges of the diamond had carved stars that were 4 pointed in design. She knew the locket well as it was currently sitting on a chain around her own neck.

Emma fainted. The apparition vanished as quickly as it had appeared.

June 7, 2024

I heard a gasp and turned toward the sound in time to see the ghost of the lady who had originally built the house vanish. Her hand had reached for her throat and she'd vanished when I looked up. I'd seen her off and on since I'd bought the house during the year of the pandemic to get out of the city and have room to be free. I'd been affectionately referring to her as my guardian angel. She'd shown up once as a would be porch pirate had thought of making off with my Amazon delivery. Her sudden appearance had caused the thief to pee his pants and run off screaming.

I stabbed the need into the quilt I was working on and rubbed my wrists. The arthritis was bad today and I could see the swelling around my rings. I reached up and petted the locket my late husband had gifted me after finding it at an estate auction in New Orleans. It was 24k rose gold. The locket had been repaired at some point prior to my acquisition and no longer opened. The front was ornately carved scroll work with a one carat old mine cut square diamond accented by four pointed stars on each corner of the diamond. The locket was my most prized piece of jewelry.

William had found the locket in an auction brochure we had been given by a street attendant outside an antique store on Royal Street. The picture of the back of the locket had caught his eye and he showed me the engraving, I fell in love. The inscription on the back read, "To Anna from William with love 1861". The couple to whom the locket had belonged had our names, it felt like kismet that it should be mine.

William had paid an exorbitant amount to make sure he won the auction. The history of the piece was almost non existent, the few scant pieces of information seemed to be that the necklace and locket had belonged to a Civil War soldier's wife. The repair to the locket that had rendered it incapable of opening had been done sometime not long after the date inscribed. What had become of the first William and Anna was a mystery. The locket had been my Yuletide Solstice gift.

The last three years had been hard for me since my William had passed. The house in Metairie had felt too empty after his early passing. He passed away two days after his forty fifth birthday. He had been the victim of a random mugging while walking to his car after work. He'd been shot and left to die in a parking lot near the Marigny. The assailant had never been caught.

I stretched and turned off the lamp on the table overlooking my quilt frame. I double checked the door locks and made my way upstairs to bed. I'd stayed up way too late again seeking to find solace in my handiwork as I had many nights in the last years since becoming a widow. My childhood friend who was my business partner was determined we go appraise a quilt collection tomorrow. It is a service we offer in addition to the usual things a fabric store sells.

I took the locket off and placed it on the sink counter and pinned back my shoulder length hair while I washed my face. I gazed into my eyes without my glasses and thought the green looked haunted. The purplish smudges under my eyes gave me a look of having been permanently tired. The light smattering of freckles are out of place to my way of thinking on an almost fifty-year-old woman. Brandy, my business partner, assures me I have aged well. I think she's being kind to me. I wrung the cloth out and dried my face and clicked off the light on my way out.

I climbed in bed and pulled the quilts over my head and drifted off to sleep.

May 19, 1863

Smoke and screams were disorienting under the bright blue skies. The day was one that in a different lifetime would have been the perfect day to grab a cane pole and head to the Big Black Creek for some catfishing and whiskey. William looked up at the sky beseeching the noise to abate as he groped for his bayonet. His munitions and powder had run out after the last volleys were fired. His read was ringing from the blast that sent him backwards half a dozen feet landing roughly against the rocky ground.

The scent of the dirt he was laying in was strongly indicative of having landed on or near a cow patty. It was probably the cleanest thing he'd smelled in days. Not much could overpower the stench of wounds that were festering and the overriding scent of men unwashed and some covered in their own excrement. The only thing more deadly than gunfire was dirty water's gift of dysentery.

He'd lost his bayonet. "Please God, please", he thought in fear. The sweat was taking on a new reason other than the ever-present heat and humidity of summer in the south. His skin was starting to feel cold. He swiped a hand across his stomach to stop the stream of sweat that was rolling hard toward the waistband of his trousers. He scotched himself up into a half sitting position leaning against the pine tree he'd crawled toward for safety.

Once he'd used his shirt to soak the hot rivulets of sweat he noticed it wasn't sweat. It was bright red blood, the kind that a doctor had once remarked was the bright red of arterial blood. To William, blood was blood and it belonged in the body not leaking out in a steady stream from just under his last rib on the right hand side. He felt around his back and was relieved to find a rather larger hole than that of the front side.

The battle raged on and the noise grew dimmer despite the closeness of the fighting. His grey trousers were absorbing the copper scented liquid leaking from him and he wished for the hundredth time since Corinth a year ago that he'd followed Captain Knight out of this war. He prayed for his wife and the child he'd yet to meet, conceived as she was just before he left in 1861. His vision went dark and the last thing he saw before death took him was the bright blue skies through the pine needles above his head.