The Haunting of Maddy Clare

by Simone St. James

“I don’t have an opinion about ghosts. It’s people I don’t believe in, I suppose.”

Happy people did not leave ghosts; or perhaps they left quiet ghosts, who sat in their favorite corners or wandered the banks of their favorite streams, never bothering the living.

There are large moments in life; but sometimes it is the small moments—the casual moments—that change everything.

For there was no way to convince him that, with all his scars, the terrible truth was that he was still the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.

You can’t imagine how hard it is to come home from hell and be expected to pick up the threads of a life. Apply for jobs, go to a factory, punch in, punch out. Put your lunch in a bag and get on the omnibus every day. Like nothing happened. Nothing.”

Then we all went to France and ran for our lives through the mud with death at our heels. No parlor game—just death, breathing down your neck day and night. At first you’re sick and then you’re used to it, which is worse.

“There’s a theory that when a person dies in great emotion, great unrest, or with something important undone in life—that is when a manifestation occurs. People come back, or their echoes.

“I think the war annihilates ghosts,” said Matthew. “If we have mechanized death—and we have; I’ve seen it—then where do the ghosts go? I find that most frightening of all. That the ghosts disappear with our humanity.”

He was so alive the room vibrated with it: a vital, fascinating, intelligent man, damaged perhaps in ways I did not understand, but also strong in ways I was only beginning to see. You. I believe in you, I thought, but could not say.

For a shy girl unused to men, it is easier to hurl the moon from the sky than it is to turn away from a man who truly wishes to pursue her.

“Soldiers are the worst to treat,” he confided, as if Matthew were not sitting three feet away. “Surly and usually ungrateful, but I can’t bring myself to blame them. It’s a right mess we put them in, if you ask me.”

Matthew didn’t believe in heroes, and he wouldn’t want a naive girl who saw something in him he didn’t believe existed.

It was the girls who locked themselves away, who had never felt the loving touch of a man, who, when they loved, loved the fiercest.

We all went to war, all of us, and we all went to the same war. But it seems that every man went to a different war in the end.