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Thomas has been stuck like this for two hundred years. It's taken a while to get used to it. To accept it.
***
Mary was the one who told him.
Thomas said, "Can ghosts—I mean, can we change our appearances? Or our clothes?"
"No," said Mary, "we sort of stays how we dies, see."
"Oh," said Thomas. He was suddenly aware of how much he hurt. God, would this last for eternity?
He thought he heard a drop of blood hit the ground. When he looked down, the floor was unmarked.
***
What Mary said didn't stop him from trying. He imagined it in his head, tried to hold it there, focused. Willed it into being.
Nothing.
He tried describing it with words, since words were what he loved, what came most naturally to him.
Nothing.
Eventually, he gave up, and tried ignoring the persistent ache instead, half from the bullet wound and half from somewhere else.
Ignoring the bullet wound was easy. Ignoring the other half was not.
***
Thomas went to sleep under a dark sky. His remaining family members were all inside the house, and he felt that if he heard his name come out of their mouths one more time he would go irreversibly mad. So here he was, outside. He wasn't cold.
He had been surprised to learn that ghosts could sleep, and dream, when other things were impossible. It seemed almost cruel to him in a way. He wondered if there was a way to stop himself from dreaming now that he was dead.
He found that there was not.
A sunny day. Swallows singing. An ink bottle shattered on the floor. Ink on his clothes. Naked in the pond. Stealing her dress. Drying in the sun. Hiding.
Thomas woke, his heart pounding, and vowed to never sleep again.
***
It was still hardest at night. He didn't sleep, didn't dare risk a dream again, but all that meant was more time for unwelcome thoughts. He tried to drown them out with poetry.
A tree is like…
A tree is like…
Without anything them write them down, the words fell apart. It hurt him more than the bullet tearing apart his insides every time he took an instinctive but unnecessary breath.
***
The ache never subsided, not really. It became easier to make terms with; compromise was something he was taught after decades with the same people, day in and day out. He bargained with the ache.
If you get the nighttime, give me the daylight. If the sun is shining tomorrow, you get the next rainy day. And so on.
***
Sometimes he thinks it's funny that even though he is the master of words and feeling, he has no words for this feeling.
Irony.
***
He once tried composing a poem about the feeling, but gave up after three days of struggle. He'd managed only the first two words.
The ache...
Poetry had never failed him so spectacularly before. He usually got in at least three words before the inevitable happened.
***
He had tried to describe it before, in a letter. He'd finished that, at least, but in a fit of panic he'd held the corner of the paper to the candle on his desk and watched the flames lick up the page, turning it all to ash.
He'd written a few previous drafts; they joined in the fate of the final copy. Thomas Thorne, a regular pyromaniac.
He can't remember anymore exactly what he'd written in that letter, nor to whom he'd meant to send it. A metaphor had been involved: after dinner, when women go on to the parlour and men stay in the dining room, I stand in the doorway, unsure.
Thomas thinks now that perhaps he never meant to send the letter to anybody. Perhaps it was meant only for him.
***
Thomas fell asleep once more, and dreamed.
It was an accident.
A dark night. Standing in front of the mirror, blankets draped around him. Reflection, dim and false. A lady. Alone.
Thomas awoke and cursed, breath tight. He had lapsed in his self-control. He was becoming too comfortable. This would never do.
***
His older brother had died when Thomas was twelve. The pressure had increased after that, to prepare for being a lord one day, and all that that entailed. Being a man. Marrying. Producing heirs.
He proved a colossal disappointment in the end. More in love with words than women, though it was tight competition (in the end, the women were fleeting and the words enduring). He didn't marry, had no children, and when he died that was the end of the Thornes.
In the time just after he'd come back as a ghost, Thomas searched for the ghost of his father. He thought perhaps he would have stayed on to inform him of just how disappointing a son he had been. But when he asked Mary if she'd seen him, all she said was, "He was the fastest to go on I ever did see."
***
He's come to terms with it. He's stopped fighting it, wrestling with it, arguing with it, bargaining with it. Two hundred years is a long time, and he might be here still two hundred years from now, or longer. So why bother?
He still doesn't know any words for it, which is the only part that still bothers him. Maybe he'll never know.