Final Words

by Paul Stephen Bryant

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        This classroom is dead. The wood beams creak and the desks are tangled together like a bed of vines, and if I peer hard enough I can see threads of webs caressing the brick walls, and even harder, two dead spiders enmeshed in what seems to be coitus in the far right corner below the cracked windows, their image barely dodging the moon’s eyes, which provides cold light for the troughs of blotted earth outside, an area that was once the biology department’s garden, but now is a graveyard of flora, with untamed roses thrashing into each other, their gulping smacks a monument of what used to be.

        The white words on the chalkboard must have been written by a living hand. Artasia has only whispered in my ears simple identifications, her occupation and her name. She didn’t die too long ago so she is incapable of amassing the spiritual power needed to immerse herself in long conversations, or any conversation for that matter.

        Her occupation is obviously that of a college student. A lonely college student. Over my last three visitations her humid breaths clung to my ears like a child clinging to his mother’s leg, begging me not to leave, and requesting my return.

        And I can’t help but come back. Her wordless pleading tightens my mind into transient thoughts, thoughts outside and distant from the gloom of this place, a gloom where stars curl up over dry rot and dragged dust, and my heart shimmers for the past, her past, of her incessant tugging at book bag straps while her sneakers squeak across immaculate hardwood, maneuvering across the bodies of student chit chatter until she stops with an invisible smile and turns to gawk through the window out into beauty inescapable, mocking birds and finches cluttered in between stems of crocuses and daffodils, and bluebells droop their lazy petals toward the early morning dew.

        Yet I blink awake into darkness. My forehead propped on my coated forearm. How rude of me, a guest, to sleep in Artasia’s eternal chamber.

        I pry my head from the peeling desktop in time to spot a silhouette at the door. A gray eye, the color of soot, peeks from the jamb, and chestnut hair brushes against the shoulder of a white T-shirt. She doesn’t startle me. Her presence is so minute it is as if she is part of the room. I know her. From somewhere. Maybe she is another guest from the hotel. Maybe she is like me and has a fascination with the stories of the dead.

        She seems frozen in place, and I do not know whether this is because she did not want to wake me up by moving around, or if she is literally frozen because she is devoid of layers.

        “Do you want my coat?”

        She blinks at me and smiles with thin lips purple from cold. She walks in and reaches out to me open palmed. I unbutton my coat and push it towards her ice thin hands.

        There is no doubt about it, she must be an investigator. No one else would be passionately stupid enough to be unprepared for the dropping weather of a fall night, yet still come to a haunted and abandoned college. But I must ask to make sure.

        “Are you investigating too?”

        She nods her head in a trepid motion, like that of a turtle.

        “I am investigating a particular person who has been showing up in this room recently.”

        Oh, she must be talking about Artasia. She goes to one of the overthrown desks and rummages it out of the pile. She drags it across the floor so she can sit beside me, all in such a delicate motion that it sounds more like sand sliding down an hourglass than hustling unused furniture across a dingy floor.

        “Do you know the name of the person who comes here?” she asks.

        Her hand is cupped against her mouth, probably to get the warmth of inner air onto those bloodless lips.

        “Her name is Artasia. She is the girl from the scandal that shut this school down.”

        She looks straight at the chalkboard, staring at the words someone wrote not too long ago, while her leg bobs up and down faster than a buoy in a storm.

        “Do you think if she was happy she would still be alive? Do you think it could have gone differently?” she asks.

        My shoulders start to shudder from the cold, but I check myself because this woman needs my coat a lot more than I do. I can’t have her feeling guilty and giving it back.

        “That’s what I want to ask her.”

        She turns to stillness. Her legs tense motionless before she leans forward, using all of her upper body strength to get out of the desk. She walks toward me and unbuttons the coat. She gives me a smile that tells me she is lost in this world and always will be. But it is a genuine smile. A smile of acceptance. She is about to leave so I must ask her.

        “Were you the one who wrote those words on the board?”

        She holds out the jacket with arms stretched forward as if presenting a robe. I reach out for it, but instead she drops it on my head, her hands pressing my hair down gently.

        “Yes, I felt like reaching out today because I was tired of waiting for responses. I wish someone would have given me a coat. If there were guys like you, I think I could have lived a little longer.”

        I could no longer feel her hands. The coat sagged down onto the desktop. She was gone, those chalk letters her final words.

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