Work Text:
A ghost lingers by the bulletin board.
Nothing binds it there; it could easily drift off and find some other place to haunt. But mirrors stand empty now, unable to reflect the invisible, and they want to remember what they looked like. And here, pinned to the board, is the only reflection they have left to them.
Intangible fingers press through the paper, tracing the picture. It’s in black and white, and just a bit out of date, but it’s enough. It has to be, because the words alongside it grow more meaningless each day. A corpse does not long resemble its living counterpart.
The paper stirs as people pass by, and they pretend it’s their own touch, their own will that it trembles under, before they turn their gaze to the true originators.
See me, the unheard voice says to them. Tell my family…
But there is nothing to tell, even if the words could have gotten through.
There’s other posters here, mixed in between event notices and informational fliers. Missing children, missing pets; they get put up and taken down around their own little mirror. They hope that the posters getting taken down means that those others were found, alive. But it could mean they were found dead, or that people just stopped asking “where are you?”.
None of them have ever joined them at the bulletin board, at least.
But other ghosts do drift through, and they must look enough like their frozen image that these travelers immediately understand what they’re looking at.
Why do you not go see them? Your family? one asks.
There would be photographs there, they know, better ones, ones from all across their life. If they haven’t been hidden out of grief. But they are afraid to see what has and hasn’t changed at home, afraid to see hope or despair in those eyes.
So they stay put, lingering by that lying, unchanging mirror, until it fades, and gets taken down like all the others.