GFP 026: My Dead Girlfriend

Dead autumn leaves crackled underneath old hiking boots. Crickets chirruped the song of long black nights. The smell of pine filled his lungs with a sense of eternal loneliness.

Jack stepped into the small clearing, his Martin acoustic strapped to his back. His warm breath fogged briefly before the wisp dissipated. He stared at the black sky glittering with diamonds and drowned in it.

A tingling sensation washed over him. This is the place, he was certain of it. I will see Lily again tonight. I will call to her and she will appear.

He sat down on a stump, swung his guitar across his shoulder into his lap, and began to fingerpick a sixty-seven chord song he’d been playing since he was seven. He remembered Pop Pop’s rough hands over his on the fretboard. We’ll start with a simple E-minor chord, his husky smokey voice whispered. You put your pointing finger here, and your middle one here. That’s right.

Jack didn’t remember much from that first lesson, but he did remember the strong smell of whiskey, oak and lemon. And the mojo rising up inside of him from his belly. The moment he had laid eyes on Pop Pop’s old spruce top Martin, he was in love.

And it had felt like he was stealing Pop Pop’s mistress when it was left for him in his will. Jack held her gently in his hands now. There is magic in these strings, Pop Pop explained. It can call forth angels and demons, spirits and dead things. You best learn the songs I teach you. Some can harm. Some can heal.

Jack’s fingers skittered across the strings like a busy spider. In steady eighth notes, his thumb and middle finger alternated: 6, 4, 5, 3, 4, 2, 3, 1… then back up the ladder: 2, 1, 3, 2, 4, 3, 5, 4. 
And then blindingly quick, his left hand leapt to a new chord. And Jack repeated the pattern again and again and again… each chord more complex, more intricate than the last, his left-hand fingers twisting, bending, stretching in unimaginable, inhuman ways.

By the twelfth bar, he could fill the chill of Lily wrapping tightly against his chest. At the twenty-fourth bar, a faint glimmer of white and grey flickered and shimmered. The figure of a short, slim woman. And when he reached the D min7+9, when the bones in his fingers were about to break, if only out of sheer exhaustion…

Lily apparated.

Her grey Grecian nose. Her dimpled cheekbones. Her windswept tresses. All in its glorious, ghostly form.

“Jack,” she cooed. “You’ve come for me. I missed you.”

“I missed you too, baby,” Jack replied, unstrapping the guitar and leaning it against the stump. “It’s been a full moon cycle since we’ve been together.”

“Come with me. Into the woods,” she said, offering a pale white translucent hand to Jack.

Jack reached for her hand, and she quickly pulled away giggling. Jack got up and smiled, at once amused and helplessly ingratiated. He chased her into the woods. Several times he attempted to tackle her, to hold her and pin her down. Without fail, Lily escaped at the last possible moment.

At last, Jack held the bark of a tall elm for balance, breathed raggedly and chortled and couched, filled with immense complete joy. “O.K., Lily, I give up. You win. You win.”

Lily’s soft hands held Jack’s cheeks, and lifted him towards her. They kissed longingly. Rain fell. Storm clouds gathered and the sudden flash of lighting pierced through Jack’s eyelids.

“Wait,” Jack said, opening his eyes. “Wait, Lily. Something’s wrong.”

“Nothing’s wrong, Jack. Nothing.”

The rumbling of thunder deafened the night. Another flash.

“No, something ain’t right. Not right at all.”

“Jack, you worry too much. Come here.”

The thunder came quicker this time. It was getting closer… closer… closer…

Jack turned away from Lily and began to ran. He could hear Lily calling out angrily to him, “Jack! Jack, what are you doing? Come back!”

Jack hesitated, took a brief glimpse behind his shoulder. Another flash. Lily’s shadow was starkly profiled against the sheets of rain.

He didn’t turn back. He kept going. The stump. The stump. I need to get back.

A blinding white flash. And keeeeraaaaaaaaccckk!!! The sharp smell of burnt wood. Jack couldn’t see. He tripped, fell, hit his head against a rock and slipped into the unforgiving arms of unconsciousness.

When he came to the next morning, he saw the splinters, curled strings and broken body of his Pop Pop’s Martin acoustic, shattered. Destroyed. And no Lily to be seen. ☣