As the Halo Faded, So Did the Ghosts of Us by Mathew Gostelow
You missed it all – the halo of light in the midday sky, the echoes and projections. You were scouring the pebble beach for fossils when it happened. A timequake, they called it later.
Moments before, you stood triumphant, smiling with your cola-coloured eyes, showing me a flat round stone peppered with snail-like fossils, frozen for millions of years.
Your joy sparked my own and I marvelled at their beauty; white swirls and flecks against the ink-blue stone, like Van Gogh’s night sky. Constellations and galaxies, dancing in the palm of your hand.
I thought of a phrase I’d heard years before, naming the stars ‘šitir šame’ – the writing of heaven. It was comforting to imagine our story printed clear and sure across the sky, fixed and waiting to be uncovered, like a fossil on a beach.
I flushed with affection as you crunched away deliberately across the stones, utterly rapt, back on your search. But even as I smiled, an icy nervousness fluttered through me. My hand, suddenly sweaty, reached into my jacket pocket, touching the box containing the ring. This was the same clammy panic I’d felt again and again, those last few months, bringing the ring to restaurants, the theatre, a walk in the woods. Each time, I’d convinced myself the moment wasn’t right, the stars were not aligned.
It was a nearby star collapsing into itself that caused the timequake, they said – that halo flash like lightning in a clear blue sky. The gravity of it was enough to briefly shake the fabric of space and time.
Our pebble beach was filled with ghosts. You were looking down, absorbed, but I saw them. I cringed to see my past selves all around me. The podgy boy, too timid to stand up to playground bullies. The lanky teen; too desperate to be liked, too scared to talk. The quiet student hiding in his self-made shell.
Myself, standing, hand in pocket, touching the box with the ring two weeks ago, five weeks ago, eight weeks ago, frozen in the headlights of an uncertain moment, too petrified to take it out and say the words.
Our future selves were present too. I saw you saying yes – the two of us embracing on our beach beneath an exploding star. I saw you saying no. We turned with tears and walked our separate ways. I saw myself alone. I saw us playing with our daughter, her cola-coloured eyes sparkling with joy.
As the halo faded, so did the ghosts of us, until it was just you and I on that crunching pebble beach. I understood then. Our lives weren’t fixed in stone, not written in the stars. We’d never know the future ’til we lived it.
I knelt among the pebbles, called you over, pretended I had found a stone full of fossilised galaxies. My hands trembled on the box as you hurried toward me, smiling.
Mathew Gostelow (he/him) is a writer in Birmingham, UK. His strange tales have been published by Lucent Dreaming, Janus Literary, Ghastling, Ellipsis, Stanchion, Roi Fainéant, and others. He was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2022 and has won prizes from Bag of Bones and Bear Creek Gazette.
Copies of See My Breath Dance Ghostly – Strange Tales by Mathew Gostelow are available to purchase from the FFF Bookshop – click here
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Beautiful story.
Thanks for the read.