People See Us Together

Mists rose around the crypts in New Orleans’s “City of the Dead”. I’d joined the cemetery tour on a whim that morning. Maybe looking for Jeremy. Maybe looking to mourn. Still, I let out a startled squeak when he fell into step beside me. The tour guide gave me a lazy look of reproach.

“People see us together,” I hissed. Yesterday, he’d insisted, we cannot be seen together. A tourist stopped in front of a crypt to read the inscription, and I stepped around him. Jeremy didn’t. He walked straight into and through him.

“Only you, Cassie.” Jeremy wore a wolfish grin, the same one he’d worn last night on a side street between Bourbon and Royal before the deal went sour and a man lay dead at our feet.

“You’re buried here?”

“Naw. Naw. Body’s still in the morgue.”

“So ghosts just appear here?”

“They say you get stuck to someone if you’ve been through a traumatic experience with them there at the end.” He shook his head. “Deal soured fast. That’s on me. Overreacted again.”

“Always do.”

“Yeah. Yeah. But we’re free of that loser. Just dumb luck I trip in front of that streetcar.”

The tour ended at the wrought iron gates, and I prayed specters couldn’t pass, freeing me of one more loser. But no such luck. Jeremy grinned, pleased he’d gotten through.

“Guess you’re stuck with me.”

“Guess so,” I said, thinking maybe I shouldn’t have pushed him in front of that streetcar after all.

Photo by Ameer Basheer