Exhale was originally published in The Fictioneer.

1736 Kelton Avenue is not on any registry of haunted places. There are no neighborhood stories of ghastly murders, and it has never been featured on “Ghost Hunters.” It is a standard apartment building, rectangular, cream-colored, 150 units with balcony, elevator, and underground parking. Looking up at the complex, I saw nothing sinister about the place—only my first official home-away-from-home.

I remember a cloud passed over the sun, and I shivered as I bounded up the entrance stairs, through the front doors paned in frosted glass, and into the elevator. The floors ticked by in a dull red shade and the elevator doors opened. The sour smell of trapped air followed me down the long hallway. I unlocked the door to apartment 323 and the sounds of a football game and the stench of overcooked hot dogs torpedoed my senses.“Sara! Queen of the lair!”

Sam pinched my bottom on his way to the recliner. “What took you so long, Blondie?”

Before I could retaliate, Joe seized me up and squeezed me fiercely. “You should be a cheerleader, they could toss you to the moon,” he said, chucking me onto the candy-wrapped sofa.

Being tossed about and fondled inappropriately by my two male besties was expected and not terribly annoying—lines had been drawn and parameters set, however loosely. But one quick sweep and I was convinced living with Sam and Joe was not the most sanitary of decisions. They had only moved in the week before and already a pile of dirty dishes and several large flies held the kitchen hostage. I wondered if perhaps there was still a room available in the dorms.

“This place is disgusting.”

Sam handed me a half-eaten hot dog. “Go ahead and do your thing.”

“I’m not cleaning up after you slobs.” I had already grabbed a trash bag and was collecting empty beer bottles.

“No, leave those. We’re gambling. If you can spit your toenail into one of the bottles, Joe pays up. Five bucks per nail. Want in?” Sam asked.

I figured I had two options. I could coerce with feminine charm, or I could beat them at their own game. Literally.

“If I can spit my toenail into one of those bottles, you have to help me clean,” I bargained. “On a regular basis.”

Sam stared blankly, as though caught on the word “clean.”

“Okay. But you can’t use clippers. You have to bite off a piece of your toenail for it to count,” Joe said.

“Deal only if you help me bring up my boxes.”

Joe laughed. “Dude, you’ll never make it.”

I was raised with two brothers. Biting my toenails was cake. And the expression on Joe’s face when I sent the nail flying into the bottle was worth ruining my pedicure.

“I told you this was a stupid game, man,” Sam said, giving Joe a smack on the head.

By the time the sun had cast a rusty sheen over the Formica tiles of the kitchen, my new apartment was the poster child for a Mr. Clean ad and my belongings were waiting in neatly stacked boxes in my bedroom. Standing on my private balcony, relishing my Juliet moment, the energy of twilight brushed against my psyche. I decided to abandon the night of unpacking I had planned. Wrapping myself in my faux fur jacket, I strode out of my haven, but not before noticing the chill just outside my bedroom door.

δ

“I got one,” Alicia, a pretty brunette said. Sprawled beneath the black Los Angeles sky, upon the manicured lawns of the football field, four college students gossiped. “I was fourteen years old, and we had recently moved into this old house my parents were refurbishing. They did that. Bought houses, fixed them up, and then sold them. I never actually had a real home.”

“Is this a sob story or a ghost story?” Sam asked.

“Well strange things started to happen. Doors opening and closing by themselves.”

“Lights turning on and off?” I guessed, knowing the story’s direction.

“Yes, exactly! And then one Monday morning before school, I was fixing my makeup, and all of a sudden in the mirror, I see this woman, with long dark hair and sad eyes, standing right behind me. I screamed bloody murder and ran out of the bathroom, butt naked, into a hallway full of construction workers.”

“Did your parents believe you saw a ghost?” Joe asked, wide-eyed. (I’m guessing at the visual of Alicia naked, rather than the image of the ghost.)

“They believed I saw something. I’ve never been the type to flash my privates willingly.”

“That’s a shame,” said Sam.

I sighed and stretched my legs in front of me. The classic ghost story. Everybody has a version. Same legend, different players. Discouraged, I lay down in the damp grass and turned my eyes to the sky, looking for a shooting star. But in the City of Angels, the sky is blank, and no matter how hard I tried to affix my dreams on the empty canvas, it remained bare. The red light of a plane held my attention. Flying east. For a moment, I ached to be on it, heading east, heading home.

“Hey, Alicia. Betcha ten bucks Sara has a better ghost story,” said Joe.

“Stop trying to gamble with my date, Joe,” Sam warned.

“Betcha I have a bigger dick than Sam.”

“Yeah, whatever dude. You piss sitting down.”

“Sara, save me,” Alicia said. “What’s your ghost story?”

“You should’ve bet Joe. I don’t have one.”

“Damn. I need to go to Vegas for a tune-up,” Joe sighed.

“Ah, you’ve never seen a ghost,” said Alicia.

“And I never will,” I said.

“You don’t believe in them?”

“Of course I do. Just because I don’t see them, doesn’t mean they aren’t there. Ghosts are like atoms. I know they’re there, all around, hiding…invisible…working their magic.”

“How do you know you won’t see one some day?”

I pulled my jacket tighter around my neck. “Because I don’t want to.”

“My turn then,” Joe said, saving me from further nosiness. “When I was ten, my parents sent me to this farm camp. I had to learn how to milk cows and feed chickens and shit…”

Turning onto my side, I closed my eyes, shutting out Joe’s prattle. I smiled at a memory of two gangly boys. When I was a little girl, my older brothers would taunt me with stories of ghosts: frightening specters with red eyes and long robes, bony fingers and misty outlines. Proudly, I never took the bait, never melted into girlish wails or cowered underneath the hem of my mother’s skirt. I was not so foolish as to declaim that there was no such thing as ghosts. On the contrary, I believed wholeheartedly in these ghouls. But I was a practical, down-to-earth sort of five-year-old who swore that a ghost would never haunt her because she didn’t want to see one. “In order to see a ghost, you have to be open to seeing them,” I would patiently explain to my brothers. “And why should I be afraid of something I can’t see!” And they would always reply, with their most serious teenage expressions, “Ah, but you should be…you should be…”

δ

I was glad to be returning to my new home. The evening had drained me.

“’Night, gorgeous. Come visit if you have a nightmare,” Joe yawned, shutting his bedroom door.

I paused. I don’t ever have nightmares, I thought. Isn’t that odd? Lucky, a voice in my head chimed, a much higher one than I was used to.

I walked heavily towards my bedroom, my feet ached and my legs felt wooden. A searing cold jolted my spine straight, knocking out my exhaustion. Right in front of my bedroom door. I shuddered and pulled my coat tighter around me. That first night’s sleep was a restless one.

δ

I have a special talent. When the alarm sounds, no matter the early morning hour, I can hop out of bed and do a jig if required. No snooze button for me. No wiggling of the toes and fingers to get the circulation pumped, no yawns, stretches, and mental rundowns of the day’s planned activities. Getting out of bed in the morning is the one thing I am skilled at. And so my first morning in my new apartment was an early one, and as I darted out of bed and into the hallway, a glacial freeze, the kind that makes your toes tap in rhythm for some warmth, gripped me forcefully. Turning around in a circle I held my palms against the cold, searching for a draft to explain away the phenomenon. No breeze, no ventilation, merely dead wintry air. Two steps to the right, safe inside the bathroom, and I could breathe again, the chill nothing but a remembrance.

“Heya, Princess.”

I screamed. “Jesus, Sam, you scared the pee out of me!”

“Those ghost stories last night get to ya?” He chuckled. “I need the bathroom. Hurry it up. You want a pop tart?”

“No thanks.”

I watched as Sam passed by my bedroom door, but he took no notice of the patch of shivery air. “Hey, Sam,” I called after him. He looked at me impatiently, anxious for his pop tart and shower. “Never mind,” I said, shutting the bathroom door.

δ

Two weeks into the first semester of my sophomore year at UCLA and I was seriously considering checking myself into the Neuropsychiatric Institute. I feared I had developed an acute mental disorder, one whose symptoms did not fall within “normal” parameters. I would spend hours at the edge of my bedroom door. Two steps into the hallway and I always felt it—a penetrating cold. Once I had gathered together the courage to step into the chill (my balcony was far too high up to offer an escape route) I would stand in that icy Antarctica for hours. My thoughts would tumble chaotically, banging against my skull, but I could never grab hold. It was as though rooted memories—the first time a jello pudding pop froze to my tongue, burning it raw; the day my mother left and the weeks after when her scent faded from the house; the sleepover that left me in tears because my best friend dumped me for another girl who “needed” her more—became snipped pieces of mismatched fabric. Burned tongues waggled, scents overwhelmed, and the right faces said the wrong things, not at all what I had remembered.

My bedroom was just two short steps away, but still I could not abandon the spot. I turned this way and that, like Alice looking for the rabbit hole. Gradually my body would still and I would wait with my arms outstretched. I could touch the warmth with my fingertips. If I could just embrace it, as I would hot water pouring from the faucet and into a tepid bath. A mere shift to the left, and the spell was broken, the air no longer suffocating. Sometimes I stuck my arm back into the cold, testing its limits. Always, anticipation tapped me on the shoulder, and often I returned. I cultivated a severe case of chapped lips, my grades tanked, and my relationships became…distant.

And so it became quite the ritual, getting in and out of my bedroom. I learned to time it with the comings and goings of Joe and Sam. You see, if they rounded the corner at just the right moment and saw me, I could break my cycle, I could walk towards them as if nothing unusual had taken over, and out the door we would walk. But the nighttimes were different. If I didn’t make it home in time and the boys were already asleep, I would spend the midnight hours walking zombie-like until the sun came as an antibiotic, and the alarms followed, and their doors opened, and I was released. And so it continued, just like that, for months….

δ

I firmly believe that inventors, looking for the missing piece that will secure time travel, are searching the wrong corridors. They fiddle with their science and their technology, chasing faster-than-light wormholes, but the answer to time travel lies in our sleeping consciousness. Who has not been sucked into the vacuum of timeless space that is our dreams? Who has not felt the key turn in the lock and remained suspended for what seems like hours in a repetitive senseless thought? I lay in that space between waking and dreaming the night terror seized me.

I woke with a sharp intake of air. My breath released in a short gasp and I could see a vapor of cold circle my nose. My eyelashes were wet with ice, my teeth chattered willfully, and my toes and fingers were numb with cold. It was below freezing. I stared at the windowpane in front of me. It was laced with icicles. Something was in my room.

I heard it before I felt it: a rush of wind, a cat-like leap, springing from nothingness onto my bed.

I sat up; my legs stretched straight before me and my arms laid numb at my sides. “Who’s there?” I asked, as though these words would help me. Run, I thought, but instead there I sat…paralyzed…talking away fear.

A high-pitched whisper chattered through my brain, rushing through the secret places that carry pain, disappointment, panic. Not words but syllables streamed through my conscience, and I felt my head might split from the shrill sound.

A body slammed into me, pushing me backwards and pinning me to the bed. I could feel the hands; they were small and dainty around my wrists, but the grasp firm. A body pressed against mine, slim, and skeletal, soft breasts that knocked against bone, yet I saw nothing but a haze of cold. My lips parted as if to scream, but betrayed no sound. I struggled against the…being…that held me fast. It lay against me almost erotically, twisting on top of me as if it were trying to melt into my core. It pressed upon me without compassion, choking me with its weight, for although its frame was thin and feminine, its spirit was all power. Mute, I begged with my eyes for release, but the shrill voice in my mind squealed gaily as my fear grew.

Flashes of images flipped through my memory Rolodex, but they were not my own: The edge of a dock and a young boy smiling. A girl with stringy hair waits on the sidewalk, splashing water with her foot; her eyes look straight at me, accusingly. Two tongues inside one mouth, swirling happily together. A hand strikes a cheek, staining it red. Blood squirts fantastically from a vein, and I think I have never seen a fountain so beautiful.

Wanting to escape the slideshow, I concentrated on the foggy outline of my breath. I shut my mind against the piercing echo of ghostly music. The heaviness grew deeper and my breath shallower. I did not know the broad strokes of who I was, but knew the fine details of the being I was becoming. My breath no longer carried its shadow, and to an observer, I might already have appeared dead, lips parted, gaze fixed, breath minute. Sweet Jesus and Hail Marys failed me as I hunted for the right prayer of release. My thoughts formed shape from the maddening torrent of sensations. Go away, my mind murmured. Go away, my thoughts boomed. “Go away!” my voice shouted. The wind rushed backwards and the cold swirled angrily through space as I bolted from my bed, my legs carrying me across my room, over the threshold of my door, and into the safety of the living room, where all was warmth and quiet.

δ

The morning brought the sunshine and the jarring clang of the garbage trucks. Wrapped protectively in a quilt, lips still purple with fright, I recharged my breath to the sounds of life. I hummed to keep myself awake, forever eyeing the cold outside my bedroom door. The buzzing of an alarm clock brought an inane smile to my lips, and I listened like a child for the creak of a bedroom door. I sat, smiling dumbly, as Sam rolled out of his cave. His brow furrowed when he saw me rocking frenziedly back and forth on the littered sofa. I reached out my arms, but he stood bewildered, not reciprocating. “What’s with you this morning?” he asked.

My face crinkled. “Nothing. Couldn’t sleep, I guess.” I folded my arms perversely inward.

Sam yawned and walked toward the bathroom, determined to claim the shower first, but before closing the door, he looked back. “Hey Sara, have you ever noticed how cold it is outside your bedroom door?”

“What do you mean?”

“Right here,” he pointed. “It’s ice cold, and then over here, it’s normal. You’ve never noticed that?”

“No,” I answered, with the steadiest voice I had found all year. “I’ve never noticed it at all.”

δ

I spent the rest of that week on friends’ couches or the occasional bed. At the week’s end, I moved out. Only a week earlier than intended, and the school year had ended so no suspicions were aroused. Sam and Joe helped me pack my belongings, mistaking my silence for girlish moodiness. We lost touch quickly thereafter.

Still I have not shared my ghost story with another living being. Is it shame? A refusal to believe? Or does jealousy cause me to protect our secret? For I cannot deny I feel a connection. I have etched a figure, a face, a color to her being. Her memories still live inside me, and I protect them as I do my own.

I realize now that it is much more frightening to feel what we cannot see, than to see that which is not supposed to exist. A vision can be blinked and rubbed, blurred away as if a dream. Explanation and coincidence erase its validity. But a feeling etches a permanent place in your consciousness. A feeling cannot be reasoned away and will haunt you whenever you try to ignore or disown it. A feeling can suck the life out of you. But a vision, a vision passes right through you, unnoticed. I forget—slip into my illusions. But occasionally I will feel a breeze, or suffer an icy cold, and wonder if she is here with me, if she has followed me, or if she is still trapped in that room, looking for an exhale upon which to escape.