amphibi.us

They descend, the six of them and the tour guide, below the streets of Edinburgh, just as the drizzle thickens.  The tour guide is wearing a top hat and lace stocking and deep red lip stick. She has covered up her corset with a sweater because it’s so cold. One girl, as they hit the damp passage, decides the tour is too scary and goes back up the stairs, back into the cold oatmeal rain of Scottish November.
Sally takes a picture with her camera, looks at it, and wonders if some strange orbs of light are ghosts. She taps the guy next to her on the shoulder.
“Hey, take a look at this picture.”
She shows him the orbs.
“Think they’re ghosts?”
He shakes his head and waves his hand in front of him.
“No English.”
“Oh. Sorry then.”
But she keeps standing next to him anyway.  He’s in a bright green soccer jersey and he’s tall and his dark hair is long and curly. He grins at the tour he can’t understand and stoops when the underground passages get too low.
The tour guide tells them, as they go into a room large enough for the man to stand up in, that one particular ghost of the catacombs, a little girl, sometimes picks a favorite visitor of the many that come into her resting place and doesn’t let them leave.  The tour guide shines her flashlight into the corners and then makes a show of turning of it off.  There are squeals, a big laugh from someone. The room is big and the laugh can’t find the ceiling or the walls.  It floats until it finally hit, like a pebble in a deep well.  Sally finds herself reaching out to the space next to her, where the tall man is, to take his tan and hairy hand.  But there is nothing but air in her grasp.

© Heather Whited, 2010