The ghost of Sarah Wells, underdressed and out of place in her skinny jeans, doesn’t like to hang out by her grave in Green-Wood Cemetery. The cherry blossoms, contemplative waters, and colossal, gnarled trees always feel like a thin sock slouching down a cold foot. It’s something about the quiet, or the lack of people, or maybe it’s the tittering green parrots that nest in the Gothic Gates.
But it’s not like she’s not bound to it or anything, so she sails aimlessly up the cemetery’s highest hill, making eyes at perching angel monuments and giving terse nods to stone beasts guarding columned mausoleums. At the top is the black statue of Minerva, goddess of crafts and war and other womanly pursuits, who always has one hand raised toward somewhere else.
Sarah squints northward alongside the goddess, past the bowels of Brooklyn and across the harbor to Lady Liberty far, far away. Minerva stares at her sister statue like it’s freedom, like it’s her black heart’s desire, like she yearns not to be stuck in the same damn spot.
The ghost of Sarah Wells suddenly remembers that she likes lower Manhattan much more than the cemetery and, unlike Minerva, she isn’t made of stone.
She exits the cemetery via the Gothic Gates, leaving the parrots behind, thank God, and descends into the subway to catch a Manhattan-bound R. Somehow, this train takes even longer to arrive in her death than it did when she’d been alive. She gets out at Union Square, ignores the buskers, and walks eastward, headlong into a cold wind. She can’t feel it, but she sees it in the hunched shoulders and hurried stride of everyone walking past the garbage along the curbs.
No one looks at her twice, and it makes her feel alive.
Eventually, when the numbered avenues turn to letters, she walks through a doorway underneath a familiar neon sign. The ceilings inside are low, closing in like the black of a winter night, like a warm blanket by the embers of a dying fire. If she could feel it, the cement floor would be sticky, and if she could breathe, she’d taste the cloying sweetness of old beer lingering in the air. Amps stand sentinel behind a lone microphone along the front wall. Sarah’s ghost imagines what it would be like to stand on the makeshift stage with corporeal feet, to cough before she starts to sing, to hear the echo of it come back at her through the monitor like a threat.
The bartender is distant, from his tousled hair to his half-worn smiles to his careless pulls at the taps, even though he’s right in front of her. Sarah tries to remember the prickle of bubbles on her tongue, but the memory is as far away as the Statue of Liberty from the top of the cemetery hill, too amber and faded to pop.
Suddenly, it matters very much that other, living people can come into the bar with one another, fog the windows with their breath, cringe as their shoes stick to the floor just enough to notice. They can laugh and point and push buttons on the antique 45 jukebox, pressing the arrows to turn the pages of music, left and right, left and right, but the ghost of Sarah Wells can’t pick better songs. She tries, but her fingers slip right through the damn buttons, and she remembers that slowly, surely, she’s slipping away.
And then she stops trying because the scene is dead, and no matter how much the ghost of Sarah Wells prefers Manhattan, she always ends up back at Green-Wood among the cherry blossoms, the goddamned parrots that shouldn’t even be there, and the acres and acres of decay. She wanders the twisted paths, trying her level best to ignore the tourists oozing “respectful contemplation” until she can’t fucking take it anymore.
And that’s when she glides up the hill and goes back to Minerva, always back to Minerva.
The ghost of Sarah Wells can leave any time she wants. She is not stuck in one place like the goddess of things that both bind us to this world and take us from it, forever ready for a battle that will never come, staring at a liberty that will always and forever be out of her reach.
Rose Ciesla writes short and long form fantasy and speculative romance. As a former school librarian with a dusty music history degree, she takes great pleasure in finding esoteric resources for her very tolerant friends. You can read her work in Archive of the Odd (March 2025) and Trollbreath (Winter 2026).