{"id":2797,"date":"2023-12-04T17:24:17","date_gmt":"2023-12-04T17:24:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ebling.library.wisc.edu\/corpus-callosum\/?p=2797"},"modified":"2024-09-04T21:08:08","modified_gmt":"2024-09-04T21:08:08","slug":"griefs-ghost","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ebling.library.wisc.edu\/corpus-callosum\/griefs-ghost\/","title":{"rendered":"Grief’s Ghost"},"content":{"rendered":"

Edith-Marie Green<\/em>
\nSchool of Medicine and Public Health, Population Health Sciences<\/em>
\n2023<\/em>
\nShort story<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The Charlotte Wymond Memorial Library closes, on most nights, promptly at eight. Any students still browsing the stacks are ushered out, the random senior napping on the couch woken up, last check-outs completed, and research paused for as long as it takes to get to the next location. Finals week is the sole exception, when the Char (as students at the college like to call it) is open twenty-four hours a day for the entire week.<\/p>\n

You\u2019d be surprised if you decided to stay there all night. Students who could finish a paper in a couple of hours somehow manage to drag it out until midnight. Cups from the library\u2019s coffee shop (which typically shutters its doors at five but is pushing it to the library\u2019s typical eight o\u2019clock hour for finals) litter the tables. In the middle of the common reading area on the first floor, a group of students gather around a white board, trying in vain to balance seemingly impossible chemistry equations.<\/p>\n

At around two or three in the morning, the crowds start to taper off. Some students are simply too exhausted to keep studying, the effects of their large coffees wearing off, while others have given up. The paper will be done when it\u2019s done, and they\u2019ll get the grade on the exam that they get. It never gets fully empty, though.<\/p>\n

What it does do is get dark.<\/p>\n

Eliza wasn\u2019t expecting it. She\u2019d been flipping through yet another book on the development of germ theory, trying to find the hook for the final essay for her history of medicine class. The paper is due in about thirty-six hours, and nothing has seemed compelling enough. It isn\u2019t a surprise, though. Eliza\u2019s been having trouble with her work ever since her aunt passed during the fifth week of the semester. Most people haven\u2019t noticed; her grades have been fine, she only missed three days of class, and she\u2019s still (at least physically) attending all of the social events she normally goes to. The only thing out of the ordinary, it seems, is the headspace she\u2019s in.<\/p>\n

When the lights in the library snap off, Eliza drops her book in surprise and then glances at her wrist, pressing the light button on her digital watch. It\u2019s three on the dot.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019re not going to find what you\u2019re looking for, I\u2019m afraid,\u201d a woman\u2019s voice, lilting and sad, says, and Eliza turns around, looking for the source. But she appears to be completely alone in the stacks, surrounded by thick tomes of history.<\/p>\n

\u201cWho\u2019s there?\u201d Eliza whispers. This is a library, after all.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy apologies.\u201d There\u2019s a light shimmer in the air in front of Eliza, and then the transparent form of a woman that Eliza thinks she recognizes appears. The woman has, as far as she can tell (since the woman might be a hallucination brought on by the stress of finals week), thick brown hair that has been carefully braided and pinned back, and she\u2019s wearing a long dress made of a cream fabric dotted with little pink flowers. The bodice of the dress is criss-crossed with ribbons and the skirt puffs out from it. \u201cI forget that you can\u2019t see me. I\u2019m here all the time, you know.\u201d<\/p>\n

Eliza realizes where she recognizes the woman from: it\u2019s the portrait that hangs in the front entrance of the library, with a gilded frame and a neat little plaque listing birth and death date, along with societal contributions.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019re Charlotte Wymond,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

She\u2013Charlotte\u2013nods. \u201cI was once a student just like you.\u201d<\/p>\n

Eliza remembers the story from the tour of campus that was part of orientation a couple of years ago. Charlotte Wymond was the university\u2019s first female student, in the late nineteenth century, earning a degree in English literature, and published two novels that are generally required reading in the first-year writing courses; Eliza herself has read them and found them fairly enjoyable. Charlotte would have gone on to have quite the illustrious career, except for the fact that she caught pneumonia the winter she was twenty-seven and passed.<\/p>\n

And then got a library named after her, which is more than most people can say.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut it\u2019s not the work that\u2019s troubling you, is it?\u201d Charlotte has the kind of voice that makes her immediately sound like a friend, like she understands.<\/p>\n

Eliza has been having a lot of trouble finding people who understand.<\/p>\n

In the past couple of months, her friends have slowly drifted away. At first they were supportive, reaching out and checking in, bringing her homemade cookies and sending her affirmations, but then, Eliza kept on being sad, and apparently that put too much of a damper on junior year for them. It feels like her professors won\u2019t understand why she\u2019s distracted in class, and she can hardly call her family, who have been dealing with her aunt\u2019s passing, too.<\/p>\n

Eliza shakes her head.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019ve suffered a great loss.\u201d Charlotte drifts closer to her. \u201cWhen I passed, I had to watch my family mourn. I have many pleasant memories of my childhood, of holidays filled with cheer and outings to the theatre and reading books around the fire. But once I was gone, I saw my parents wither away in sorrow. What was once a happy house became cold and silent.\u201d<\/p>\n

Aunt Meg didn\u2019t have a grand manor house like Eliza is sure Charlotte\u2019s family did, but she did have a little bungalow that was crammed with all of her unique vintage finds and furniture she\u2019d fixed up herself over the years and dozens of cookbooks, each promising the best cupcakes or meatloaf or whatever else. After the funeral, Eliza and her mother had spent days cleaning out the house, and eventually they had a yardsale once they decided what they\u2019d keep. Eliza couldn\u2019t bear to come along when they donated anything that hadn\u2019t sold, leaving that task to her mother alone.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey built you a library, though,\u201d Eliza says.<\/p>\n

Charlotte nods, smoothing down her transparent skirt. \u201cTo preserve my memory. But you don\u2019t need to build a library for whoever you\u2019ve lost. You\u2019re mourning them right now, which means they haven\u2019t really gone, have they?\u201d<\/p>\n

They\u2019d scattered Aunt Meg\u2019s ashes, but then Eliza\u2019s mom still wanted a place to visit, so she got a memorial plaque for one of the benches in the park by Aunt Meg\u2019s house. It wasn\u2019t quite a library, but it was something.<\/p>\n

\u201cI guess.\u201d Eliza swallows. It\u2019s better, she\u2019s sure, to have known Aunt Meg, to have had endless movie nights with all their favorite eighties rom-coms and made pies together for the holidays every year. Aunt Meg was the one who brought the biggest bouquet to her high school graduation, and the one who sent her a letter every week during her first semester of college.<\/p>\n

\u201cI know. I\u2019m certain, because I\u2019ve been here long enough to see almost everything.\u201d Charlotte smiles. \u201cBut it\u2019s getting late, and you\u2019re not a ghost.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI have to finish my paper,\u201d Eliza argues.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut you\u2019re not going to finish it right now, are you? As I said, I was a student once myself.\u201d Charlotte\u2019s expression is knowing, and besides, the ghost is right\u2013Eliza is exhausted, and has been for weeks now.<\/p>\n

She takes the pile of books she was looking at into her arms and starts to make her way through the stacks to the circulation desk (at the very least she can check these out and the night won\u2019t have been in vain), but before she gets to the end of the shelf, she turns back to look at the ghost one last time.<\/p>\n

\u201cThank you,\u201d Eliza says.<\/p>\n

\u201cOf course.\u201d Charlotte waves at her serenely. \u201cI am always here for my students.\u201d<\/p>\n

After she checks out the books, Eliza heads for the library exit. She hasn\u2019t been outside in hours, and the warm, fresh air hits her as soon as she walks outside. Campus is quiet except for the fountain in the middle of the quad facing the library. The bells in the chapel just beyond the fountain start tolling, and Eliza realizes that now it\u2019s closer to four in the morning than three.<\/p>\n

But she\u2019s still not quite ready to go home.<\/p>\n

In her chest, she knows, lies Aunt Meg\u2019s heart, still beating. She\u2019s felt, as she\u2019s traversed the rocky enclaves of grief, like she\u2019s pulling along both of their dreams now. Aunt Meg was so happy for her to get into this university, so excited to see what she would do with her career. Now she has to do it alone, but she knows where she got her determination from. Unbidden tears, heavy and silent, flow down Eliza\u2019s cheeks and drip off of her face onto her stack of books.<\/p>\n

She doesn\u2019t leave until the tears have stemmed on their own, and it is as if a weight has been lifted.<\/p>\n

******
\n\u201cBut now, I don’t feel silly. I just feel a rush of something up through my heart, wide and deep as a river of light, and it rushes over the banks, and up through the throat and into the mouth and out my eyes, a great big surge of something that for so long had no name, a fugitive animal in a wood, and I know the name of it now, and what it is, is love.\u201d \u2014Harrison Scott Key<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Edith-Marie Green School of Medicine and Public Health, Population Health Sciences 2023 Short story   The Charlotte Wymond Memorial Library closes, on most nights, promptly at eight. Any students still browsing the stacks are ushered out, the random senior napping on the couch woken up, last check-outs completed, and research paused for as long as… <\/p>\n

Read <\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[80,10],"tags":[25],"class_list":["post-2797","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fall-2023-issue","category-writing","tag-short-story"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ebling.library.wisc.edu\/corpus-callosum\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2797","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ebling.library.wisc.edu\/corpus-callosum\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ebling.library.wisc.edu\/corpus-callosum\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ebling.library.wisc.edu\/corpus-callosum\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ebling.library.wisc.edu\/corpus-callosum\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2797"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/ebling.library.wisc.edu\/corpus-callosum\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2797\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3104,"href":"https:\/\/ebling.library.wisc.edu\/corpus-callosum\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2797\/revisions\/3104"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ebling.library.wisc.edu\/corpus-callosum\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2797"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ebling.library.wisc.edu\/corpus-callosum\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2797"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ebling.library.wisc.edu\/corpus-callosum\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2797"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}