I could always tell, down to my wispy ether, that there was something more to death than what we could see. I don’t simply mean that there’s something beyond my work at the Terror Farm — there’s something deep and important about reality that we’ve forgotten. 

Other ghosts say, “Happy Halloween,” and I say, “A merry Samhain to you.” But what do we really mean by that?

It was a normal year and a normal night like any other. Jack O’Lanterns prowled the pumpkin patches. Howls echoed in the distant woods, no doubt aimed at the blood-red moon. Foul, ancient things rumbled nameless in the deep. Thursday. The most I’d ever worked with bones were the boring manual labor shifts I had at the Terror Farm. “Great existential dread comes from happy skeletons. Happy skeletons come from Halloween-ifornia.” Everybody knows the ad, can sing along like it’s a hymn, but what the heck is a happy skeleton? 

I was on one of those manual labor shifts, raking over the bone-field and trying to ignore the jaws clacking up at me as if they were somehow capable of speech. I pictured myself a farmer from the olden days, trousers stained with the milky white of marrow. Really, I didn’t like the work, but I was grateful to have a job at all. In the recession, most of the ghosts I knew were stuck drifting aimlessly as indistinct fog. Talk about an uninspiring way to spend your death. Still, if something didn’t change there would be no chance I’d afford a house of my own to haunt, though I tried not to think of that. I was trying to concentrate on my work and make it to the end of my shift when my hoe caught on an eye socket. As I wrangled it out reality began to seethe and evaporate away. 

Truly. The blood-red moon, the bones chattering below, the blank, unknowable stares from faraway eyes in the ink-black clouds — all of it dissipated away until I was left surrounded by a bare, uncompromising light.

Briefly, I had a vision of a being of concentric circles and blue flame. “Curious,” it said, chewing on a cigar.

Then I was standing in a pile of meat, that acrid waste from which we source our organic decay. But this meat wasn’t decayed at all. It wasn’t even decaying. Instead, it was encased by a tender, dry outer coating permeated by tiny hairs. 

I couldn’t have made up such an outlandish story if I tried. But somehow, I knew it was real. And strangest of all, I felt an utter absence of terror. It did not surround me one bit. 

As the world came into focus I saw a body standing in front of me. I knew, intrinsically, that it possessed a skeleton, meat, and ghost. Friend, I thought. 

“You doing alright?” he asked me.

“Yeah,” I said, “I only got a chill.” I moved my mouth-parts to speak, saying this sentence as if by instinct. 

He came into focus. Skin flaps blinked over my eye parts and my entire previous existence escaped me and was replaced by another. Best friend, I thought about the man in the three-piece suit. 

“It’s entirely normal,” he said. “Everybody gets cold feet. You’re not the first. You won’t be the last.” 

“I was so disoriented.” 

Synapses fired. My skin was not cold. I remembered.

“I feel so warm,” I said. 

And then I was threaded back into my regular existence like fiber threshed and spun on a turning wheel. Everything twisted and tumbled until I was back in my death, in Halloween-ifornia, raking the open-faced skulls that clacked with innumerable, indecipherable words. I was filled with the strangest feeling. “Warmth,” I said to the skulls. If they said anything back, I didn’t understand.

Minutes, nights, years — one October rolled into another and another. 

I lost my dead-end job at the Terror Farm and, truth be told, I barely cared. They cited that I was no longer a ‘team player,’ but I suspect it had more to do with my constant nightdreaming. My death had no meaning. It wasn’t long before I found a solid apprenticeship under an experienced poltergeist, but they turned me out shortly after. I drifted the dark, lonely wind until one day I got a job on South Nausea Blvd assembling skeletons. 

I found out I liked skeletons. 

I liked discovering new ways to put them together. The business owner was an old green sea monster called Baphot’s Bane who had a tentacles-off policy and let me assemble the bones any which way I wanted. I still remember the magic feeling, like the shock of sprite-flame, when I found that strangely familiar, bipedal bone arrangement. I couldn’t say precisely why, but the shape felt oddly correct. 

The economy improved in Halloween-fornia. Still, I liked my job on South Nausea, so I didn’t search for anything better. I rode there each night in a locomotive made from the stomach of a feral nightmare. We’d passed the wailing void of doubt and I’d noticed the old zombie and Frankenstein’s monster seated beside me, and I wondered what it was like, truly, to be them. The zombie fell back and forth on his seat, unable to move his arms from their position locked straight forward. The Frankenstein’s monster fidgeted at the bolt in his neck. I wondered if death would be any different if I weren’t incorporeal. 

Then they all stopped. I stopped. The wailing wind stopped. 

Perhaps a great dread passed out of the world and froze everything in its path for a moment—  that was my first thought. It happens every now and again. 

We unfroze and continued past the grim grave of the betrayer. The zombie ambled into the cemetery and down into the murky crypt where a giant stone eye inspected us each with immeasurable spite. 

Everything stopped again. 

“Do you have vows prepared?” a voice spoke somewhere in the back of my mind.

By this time I felt like I was going crazy. I looked over at a murky lion made of rotten leaves, seaweed, and muck and asked, “Is this really happening?” 

Reality opened up as it had so many Octobers before. 

Light poured into the church in brilliant blues, reds, and greens. This place was not frightful at all. The man in the three-piece suit nudged me. “C’mon, don’t freeze on us.” 

“Of course, vows,” I said with my mouth. 

A woman in a sparkling, white dress stood facing me. I felt terrible for her. The delicate bones of her fingers trembled with all the vulnerability of a soap bubble about to pop. A crowd watched. Hadn’t I just spent a life somewhere else, an eternity away but nearer than the reach of my breath?

In my mind’s eye, I saw witches riding broomsticks over a cherry-red moon. 

“This feels like a memory,” I said. 

Everyone looked at me oddly. Inside of each of them was a skeleton. I knew more about the bones inside them than I knew about any of the people there. 

A woman with brown, disheveled hair burst into the room with all the urgency of a stream turned river in a deluge. “Stop the wedding!” she yelled.

“Anne,” I said. She was so much more than a skeleton to me.

The scene melted away. I was back on the dread road in the belly of the nightmare. That night I stacked skeletons in my familiar, favorite shape. I began to understand why that shape felt correct.

Death continued as before.

I met another ghost and we haunted a house together. Eventually, I told her about the other place I’d seen, how it was not at all like our existence, how briefly I was a being of flesh and skeleton, and how in the other place ghosts were bound within the walls of their bodies. 

“Flesh? Why would we want to live in rot?” she asked.

“But it isn’t rotting in the other place.”

“And skeletons too? You can’t expect me to believe this. It’s insufferable. Please stop making up such outlandish stories.” 

I wanted to tell her more — about love, about warmth. But I didn’t. I backpedaled as far as I could and never brought it up again, but the damage was done. Soon, she found another manor to haunt in the middle of a terrible swamp. She didn’t invite me to join her. On her way out she passed right through me and I didn’t feel anything. 

Death went on.

Even so, moments of warmth came more frequently. I would be floating by, incorporeally minding my own business when I’d be swept up in the opposite of a cold breeze. I’d see a flash of that life of flesh, then everything would go back to the cold normal. 

Then one night the giant being of concentric circles, who was made of wings and mouths of azure flame, came to the skeleton shop on South Nausea. After I’d passed a tedious night of mostly paperwork it came to the door and inspected the skeletons I’d arranged in the windows. “Most interesting,” it said, burning down the building in a fire that was made of shrill shrieks of frozen anguish. 

I was definitely having a case of the Mondays. 

“An unorthodox one, this ethereal wisp,” it said, inspecting me with its mouthlike eyes. 

“What do you mean by that?” I asked. 

“You will continue your work with the skeletons. Come with me,” it said. 

I followed it back to the Terror Farm where I found out that the being of concentric circles was actually the president of the corporation’s governing board. News of my innovative skeleton design had spread, and they were always actively seeking top talent. “Great Existential Dread Comes From Happy Skeletons” was the company’s motto, but even the CEO and board had no idea what happiness was. They believed my work might one night provide insight into the deeply contested topic. 

Death began passing quickly. I was promoted in rapid succession. I was given an office, then a showroom for my skeletons, and it seemed like every night I’d devise a new, creative way to exhibit the bones. 

In one show I posed a series of skeletons standing up mostly straight, poised each on one foot, opposite the one before it, almost as if one skeleton were hopping forward rapidly from one foot to another. I called this exhibit, “Staying in Shape.” 

For another piece, I balanced a skeleton on its tailbone and crossed its legs. Its hands I raised and brought together near its ribcage. Beside it I had a skeleton striding forward on one knee with its arms straight up. I called this exhibit, “Calm.”

I was beginning to almost feel like my death had meaning. Still, some nights I’d stare at the ceiling until I was almost certain I didn’t exist at all, and even my biggest accomplishments passed through me. 

Then one October the being of concentric circles floated into my showroom. 

It gravitated to a work in progress I’d yet to title in which two skeletons had fallen onto a bed grasping each other, skulls pressed together while their jaws clacked and clamored. 

“Compelling,” the being said. 

It gestured with its flames for me to follow it, and we passed into a labyrinthine network of caverns somewhere below the Terror Farm. We navigated tunnels and chasms while eyeless, cursed things scurried under violet stalactites. If I were alone the creatures would surely fall upon me, but they dared not approach the being of concentric circles. A great wyrm glared out from the depths of an abyss. 

We came to a door of stone that had neither handle nor lock. The being mumbled something incomprehensible to me and it swung open, and we ventured through it and up a long flight of stairs that must have taken us far into the sky. 

Eventually, we passed into a room of blinding, golden light that burned away at my essence. 

“My office,” the being announced. 

“Uncomfortable.”

“For you,” it said. “Now sit in the center of the room and breathe in and out.” 

“What’s breathing?” I asked.

“Breath in,” 

“and out.”

The radiance enveloped me as my reality slipped away and was supplanted by another.

Breathe in.

And out. 

My body — yes body that’s what it was called — was contorted in an uncomfortable position. I was stretched with my legs further apart than I thought they should be going, and I had one elbow bent down to my knee and the other pulled over my head toward the ceiling. A vague vision of posing a skeleton in this very same position flashed through my mind. 

It hurt.

The leader at the front of the class led us through a series of such positions, each one more painful than the last, while a waterfall poured out of my skin onto a wet mat that soon soaked through. 

“This is a spine-strengthening series,” the leader said. “It will give you a happy skeleton. You want that, don’t you? How are you going to be happy if your body isn’t?” She had a comforting, sweet voice, but her commands were cruel. 

My skeleton didn’t feel happy. It felt like it was trying to escape my skin. 

The world froze except for me. At first, I didn’t notice since I was lying on my back watching one spot on the ceiling. Then I noticed the being of concentric circles had appeared in the front of the room. 

“What the instructor said about happy skeletons, you must explain it to me,” it said. 

“I can’t say I understand entirely. My body hurt pretty terribly for a while there, but now it feels nicer. Maybe I gave my skeleton some extra space to move around.” 

“Unsatisfactory,” it said. “What is happiness?” 

“I’m not sure. I just got here,” I said. 

The world resumed and class ended. Anne met me outside. “I’ll never understand how you can make it through those classes. It’s so uncomfortable I think I’d die,” she said. At some point, I don’t know when, I lost focus and the world evaporated away.

I was in bed with Anne. We were married and had a small house at the edge of a small lake. She was reading a book about the noble octopus with its eight limbs and strange, cephalopod brain. Her glasses kept falling down, as they always did when she read. She refused to get a different pair because they were sharp and pink and made her feel like a spy who moonlighted as a librarian. “Knowledge is dangerous,” she’d say, squinting her eyes in mock intimidation. I yawned and listened for the beat of my heart. I had a heart. 

The world stopped again and the being of concentric circles appeared in the corner of the room. I was afraid our spider plant would catch fire. The little thing had always clung to life, even when we forgot to water it. It didn’t deserve to be burnt. For the first time, the being’s appearance felt like an intrusion. 

“What is happiness?” it asked.

“I can’t say, but I feel it,” I said. 

“How, where?”

“I feel it in my heart.” 

“The heart is merely an organ,” it said. “This woman beside you, what does she mean to you?”

“I can’t say exactly. I know things about her. She loves finding the strange in the ordinary. She grew up on a lakeside so she’s always been an exceptional swimmer. When I was a ghost everything passed right through me. But nothing about her passes through me.”

“Interesting,” it said.

“What is this? How am I both alive and dead?” I asked.

“Life marked your essence. As the brightness consumes your essence, you remember.”

The being disappeared. 

I was in bed with Anne. She was reading a book about the noble octopus. 

“Sometimes I feel like I’ve spent an eternity away and am only now returning,” I said, half to myself. She smiled and clicked off the light, and what happened between those satin sheets nobody needs to know. 

A year passed so quickly I barely noticed. Often, for days at a time, I’d forget all about death. Anne moved up in the firm, and with that received an ample raise. On weekends I sat out at the lake and listened to the frogs and crickets as night set in. For Halloween, I dressed as a flying saucer and Anne was a green alien with enormous eyes. It wasn’t at all like death, not really. We invited over friends and drank spiked cider, carving pumpkins into lopsided sneers. We talked about our secret fears. Jeremy had once dreamed he was a serial killer. He saw the blood on the knife.  It was such a long, vivid nightmare that he spent the whole day searching the news to make sure it wasn’t a repressed memory. Anne played with a ouija board and was convinced she’d communicated with a demon. 

That night, as we stood by the misty chill of the lake, the world stopped. 

Blue flames reflected in the water as the being of concentric circles once again appeared to me. “The corporation is dissatisfied with your progress. You may cease remembering,” it said. As it spoke, the Halloween drenched in clear moonlight dissolved from my eyes. 

I was once again in that room of blinding gold light. 

“What now? Am I supposed to go back to work at the Terror Farm building skeletons?” 

“This process has dissolved too much of your essence. You will fade from existence once you leave this room,” the being spoke with objective distance.

Perhaps it was the logic of the living still throbbing in my ether, but it hardly seemed fair for me to stop existing for nothing. “Why?” I asked.

“The board and CEO firmly believe there is great profit to be made from understanding happiness. It will allow us to produce the highest quality existential dread.” 

“I liked living,” I said. “Life gives death meaning.” 

“Interesting,” said the being. “Perhaps you yet have secrets to reveal.”

The brightness increased until I became the golden light.

It was Halloween. I stood with my arm around Anne’s waist as our friends, Jeremy, Quince, and Anita shouted out over the lake. We drank from hot mugs that steamed like little, drunk ghosts trying to become clouds. My mug was shaped like a snowman. I was like that, always two seasons at once. Our friends dared each other to go skinny dipping and we all laughed until Anita stripped down. Anne covered my eyes, giggling, “No looking for you, mister.” And soon we all joined, stripping off our costumes to leap into the chilling, Autumnal water. It was too cold, and we were too old, so none of us lasted long. 

A blue star streaked across the sky and I said, “That thing has mouths of blue flame. It wants the secrets of our universe, but it is too greedy.” 

We warmed by the fire before sleeping.

Years passed. I had nightmares of being consumed by a blinding, gold light. 

Anne and I had children. I told them each there were no monsters under the bed. 

Eventually, I saw the brightness even while I was awake. 

I read my children the same books again and again until they memorized each word. They wanted to read about the fox and the bear, no matter how many times the same story had played out. I supposed memories were like that too. I tried to memorize the sound of their voices, the way each brown curl bounced as I ruffled their hair.

One night, the brightness was too powerful for me to see the pages. I had my children tell me the story instead. They asked why I hugged them so tightly, and I said, more to myself than to them, “I want to hold onto this moment as long as I exist.”

I closed my eyes and spoke, not sure if anyone was still listening, “See. There’s so much you will never understand.”