The Dead Romantics

by Ashley Poston

EVERY GOOD STORY has a few secrets. At least, that’s what I’ve been told. Sometimes they’re secrets about love, secrets about family, secrets about murder—some so inconsequential they barely feel like secrets at all, but monumental to the person keeping them. Every person has a secret. Every secret has a story. And

bought things when I was nervous. Mainly books but—I guess now I bought houseplants, too.

Love was putting up with someone for fifty years so you’d have someone to bury you when you died. I would know; my family was in the business of death.

Because when you put your hand in the fire too many times, you learn that you only get burned.

I needed a drink. No, I needed a book. A murder-thriller. Hannibal. Lizzie Borden—anything would do. Maybe I needed both. No, definitely both.

I will never regret ending things with him. I just regretted being the kind of girl who fell for someone like him in the first place.

But I ignored the ghost, as I had done for almost a decade in the city. It was easier when you were surrounded by people. You could just pretend like they were another faceless person in the crowd.

They’d been married for thirty-five years, and it was the kind of romance that I’d only ever found again in fiction. They fought and disagreed, of course, but they always came back together like a binary star, dancing with each other through life. It was the small moments that tied them together—the

hated that I cried when I was angry, or upset, or annoyed. I hated that I cried at the slightest flux of emotional nuance.

tighter. “Your grandma—my mother—told me once that the wind is just the breath of everyone who came before us. All the people who’ve passed on, all the ones who’ve taken a breath—” And he took a breath himself, loud and dramatic, and exhaled.

“You’re a ghost,” I started. “A spirit. Working through a post-living experience.”

I’d always written how grief was hollow. How it was a vast cavern of nothing. But I was wrong. Grief was the exact opposite. It was full and heavy and drowning because it wasn’t the absence of everything you lost—it was the culmination of it all, your love, your happiness, your bittersweets, wound tight like a knotted ball of yarn.

He nodded, agreeing. “In my experience, women with sharp tongues usually have soft lips.”

Bruno nodded. “Always said you were up in the big city, chasing your dreams. That you could write words that could wake the dead.” “He said that?” “Absolutely.”

Have you seen a ghost float through, by any chance? Six foot sexy, with just the slightest hint of nerd? I wanted to ask, but instead went with, “Just looking.”

maybe also his six-foot-three

Because loneliness was the kind of ghost that haunted you long after you were dead. It stood over your plot in the cemetery where a lone name sat carved in marble. It sat with your urn. It was the wind that carried your ashes when no one claimed your body.

Not only that, but I had my dead editor to contend with, Dad’s funeral preparations, and Ann’s manuscript. Everything all at once.

“Fuck that son of a bitch for twisting every good memory you told him into some deranged Twilight Zone. We aren’t a gothic horror novel. We’re a love story.”

“There’s nothing like the sound of the sky rattling your bones, you know?” he once told me when I asked why he loved thunderstorms so much. “Makes you feel alive. Reminds you that there’s more to you than just skin and blood, but bones underneath. Stronger stuff. Just listen to that sky sing, buttercup.”

began to realize that love wasn’t dead, but it wasn’t forever, either. It was something in between, a moment in time where two people existed at the exact same moment in the exact same place in the universe. I

Love wasn’t a whisper in the quiet night. It was a yelp into the void, screaming that you were here.

She told me that you don’t ever lose the sadness, but you learn to love it because it becomes a part of you, and bit by bit, it fades. And, eventually, you’ll pick yourself back up and you’ll find that you’re okay. That you’re going to be okay. And eventually, it’ll be true.”

“This is exhausting,” he agreed softly. “All of it. Pretending to be okay while the world changes around you and leaves you behind to sit with whatever loss you found.”

“Everything that dies never really goes. In little ways, it all stays.”

‘Love is a celebration,’ ” I read, my voice wobbling, “ ‘of life and death. It stays with you. It lingers, my darlings, long after I’m gone. Listen for me when the wind rushes through the trees. I love you.’ ”

“But she didn’t. She asked me herself. After she died,” I realized, and sighed. “I took a job from a ghost. Never had that on my bingo card . . .”

“These last few days have been . . . beautiful. It’s a good ending, darling. As your editor, I have no notes.”

“I’ve said goodbye to so many people—shouldn’t it be easy now?” Alice gave me a strange look. “Who told you that lie? It’s never easy. It’s also never really goodbye—and trust me, we’re in the business of goodbyes. The people who pass through here live on in you and me and everyone they touched. There is no happy ending, there’s just . . . happily living. As best you can. Or whatever. Metaphor-metaphor-simile shit.”

Because ghost stories were just love stories about here and then and now and when, about pockets of happiness and moments that resonated in places long after their era. They were stories that taught you that love was never a matter of time, but a matter of timing.

I knew Mom had requested only that word because it was her word to him. Her soft I love you. Her beloved.

beginning. We were an author of love stories and an editor of romances, weaving a story about a boy who was once a little ghostly and a girl who lived with ghosts. And maybe, if we were lucky, we’d find a happily ever after, too.

Florence’s dad said that the people we love are in the wind, and I believe it. I think that the people we love can be in the pages of books, too. I hope you find yourself in a book someday. And I hope that book lives forever.