Saturday's Storyteller: "She still leaves messages for me on my mirror."

by Belinda Roddie

She still leaves messages for me on my mirror. Not frightening messages, mind you. No I am coming for you or Your time is short or any foreboding specifics such as, Mind your step on the twelfth of September at eight o'clock sharp. No, these messages are curt, to the point, and usually about trivial things. Reminders and tips, mostly. One day, as I was attempting to floss a stubborn piece of popcorn out of the crevice between my back molars, a sentence written in the typical red, sinister scrawl informed me, Don't forget eggs for the birthday cake. On another night, after I was puking my guts out after a particularly bad plate of fish at my father's house, the blood-like words dripping from the glass suggested, Drink plenty of fluids and get lots of sleep tonight. At no time did I particularly feel comforted or charmed by these words, nor did I especially believe she was looking out for me. But she was there, doing some sort of service, and that didn't bother me.

It bothered my friends, though. After some research into the origins of the house I had moved into, as well as digging into several dusty books and photo albums that had been stored in the mandatory creepy cellar where I now kept several bottles of wine, we had discovered that the woman who still haunted the vicinity was named Charlotte Beaufort Langley (Charlotte had made it very clear on the mirror later that afternoon that she preferred to go by Charlie). She had been far from a proper woman, preferring to dress up like a man, all frock coat and brass buttons and bowler hat, and going out for golden glasses of whiskey and holding the gloved hand of another lady. An attempt to cure her with the faulty medical practices of the early twentieth century inspired Charlie to become a recluse, until one day, in one of her bound diaries with cracks forming in its stooped spine, she foreshadowed her own death.

"Perhaps," she wrote, in the same jagged yet enticing calligraphy as she now did on my bathroom mirror, "I shall die in the most ridiculous of ways. The chandelier in the living room falling atop my head, or a bookshelf toppling in front of the cellar door and leaving me trapped and suffocating. Or perhaps it will merely be a cup of tea gone bad. At this point, I don't want a dramatic end, anyway. It would not mark a particularly dramatic life."

While Charlie did not die by chandelier or bookshelf or lousy Earl Grey, she did die in what I'm sure she would have perceived to be in a frivolous manner - by falling down the stairs from her bedroom and hitting her head, quite hard, on the banister. I knew this because the knob at the very end of the rail had a slightly noticeable discoloration to it, as well as a scar where wood must have chipped off. Given that Charlie lived alone, with no family or friends reaching out to her since her escapades as a dapper of the male persuasion, she must have died slowly, painfully, and without outside comfort.

Not that it seemed to greatly affect Charlie's mood in the afterlife. Never did her messages to me turn dark, or depressed, or moody. Nor did she affect any of the mirrors in the rest of the house. When I wondered aloud why, as I brushed my teeth for the third time that day, Charlie naturally replied to me, Because the bathroom, to me, has always been the most intimate. It is also the most dangerous. Watch your head - you left the cabinet door wide open.

After a while, my friends encouraged me to go to their houses and apartments for parties and hang-outs rather than stay at my home. I found this rather annoying. I worked at home, rather than go to an office, as a travel adviser, and in this suburb where so many people were itching to escape the confines of picket fences, green backyards, and frustratingly managed swimming pools, I found quite a bit of business. That meant that I preferred to have company where I stayed, instead of having to interrupt whatever I was doing to drop into a residence that either reeked of pizza and beer or an apartment where the kitchen couldn't even allow two people to work. After a while, I began suggesting that some of my friends return to my place for a bottle of wine and some discussion on literature or history or travel.

"I've just been reading up on Portugal for a client," I told them. "Beautiful country. Maybe we can all arrange a trip one day." But this only served to further alienate my friends, and within that year, I only spoke to half of them. A year later, those people stopped talking to me, too.

My family and I had never been particularly close, in part due to distance and also because we simply did not exactly get on. My mother had visited once, and when she saw another message from Charlie on the mirror reminding me to drop off my check at the bank, she laughed at the presumed novelty of it. "Why not just use a post-it note," she asked me, "or a planner?" When she reached out to touch the sticky words, I pulled her arm back, and that was enough to make her withdraw, physically and emotionally, from me.

"You've always been so peculiar and aloof," she confided to me in a not-so-friendly way as I served her a cup of lukewarm coffee. "Ever since you were a child. I can't comprehend it."

My father was the man who had gotten me to believe in ghosts in the first place. He was particularly superstitious, the kind who threw spilled salt over his shoulder and hated ladders. He never even tried to text me, let alone call me, and thought I was morphing into some kind of ghoulish nightmare as I was growing up. I informed him that I was going through a magical thing called puberty and adolescence, but to him, it was as if my physical changes were a kiss, as if he himself had never experienced the same. Then again, he never had to deal with some the things I coped with, which included a threat of eviction after he had found me kissing my first girlfriend.

My brother was the last connection I really had with the outside world until he suddenly left for Austria due to the migration crisis. He was an avid, as well as rabid, activist, and he told me he wouldn't be able to contact me for some time as he tried to help the stranded in Europe. He kept to his word in that alone. Last I heard from a cousin, my brother was cavorting around Asia, getting himself wrapped up in lascivious matters that I didn't quite care to elaborate on. When I mumbled this to myself as I brushed my hair, I received a simple response: I don't care to know much, either. My brother was not much better than yours.

All this separation and lack of connection with my alleged loved ones left me alone with Charlie, who I eventually wished I could see or hear, rather than simply observe the dry and impersonal notes she left in my bathroom. As I climbed into the iron claw tub and let the hot water scald my skin, I thought about the meager handful of photos I had found of her, though all of them had her in dresses, corsets, and brooches. Her hair was almost always tied up. I instantly wished I had found something of her where she marched into town in a suit and a spring in her step, twirling a silver-topped cane and whistling as she winked and doffed her hat at the dames passing by. Lifting my puckered hands from my personal ocean, I examined my fingers and contemplated whether or not I would have been Charlie's type. I wore jeans, mostly, these days, preferring to dress casual around the house, and my hair had grown particularly shaggy after some months of neglect and admittedly a lazy refusal to go to the barber. Or outside at all, for that matter.

When I finished my bath and went to fetch my towel, I was surprised to find something different on the mirror rather than a message. It appeared to be an awkward, clumsily drawn heart, like a child attempting to fingerpaint. Without thinking much about it, I scooped up a tube of lipstick from a basket on the counter, popped it over, and began to scribble my own red words onto the mirror, hoping that Charlie might see it even though she would not hear it. I wrote:

You are the only person who has had half a mind to pay attention to and look out for me. Thank you.

Then I let the lipstick drop to the ground as I bunched my hair up into my towel and walked into the bedroom to change into my pajamas. To this day, I still await the cold, yet pleasant, touch of Charlie's hand as she finally gathers the ethereal courage to caress the nape of my neck. But not before her latest note recommends to me, Have you tried putting your hair in curls?

This week's spooky prompt was provided by Daniel Bulone.