Natie and Jake, she's here now

He took several pictures of the outside wall while I stared into the mimosas. The blooms were gone now, and large pods covered the ground beneath the trees. As I stepped into the foliage, carcases of seed pods crackled and shifted with the weight of my feet. I was pulled away from my grief momentarily by the speech of their dry dead bodies. Dead, they were dead too, come and gone so fast and no one cared. Does anyone really care about anything after its dead for a while?

 “Natie look!”

 I turned toward Jake who stood directly in front of the back brick wall of my house. He was staring at the pictures he had taken just a moment ago. Something was obviously stealing his attention.

 “What is it, Jake?”

 He turned to me and smiled. His shaking hand revealed that he wasn’t altogether happy, part of him was terrified. “Look at this.”

 Jake pushed the camera toward. I took a look for myself. The picture was nothing special at first, just a brick wall with a high window. Then I saw what he was talking about. It was a face, or at least, it looked like a face.

 “It’s her, right?”

 I didn’t speak for a moment. I stared at the window with the image smeared onto the glass. It wasn’t that clear and so I handed the camera back to Jake.

 “I’m not sure. I cannot tell who that looks like, if it’s really a person at all. I think it’s possible that you could be grasping at things. My son could have pressed his face against the glass and made that impression, you know.”

 But I did notice the face and I didn’t remember my son pressing his face against the glass, yet I didn’t want to get too excited or frightened, not yet.

“Natie, that’s a face, and see…” Jake clicked through the images. “Here’s another one, but the face is gone. Oh Natie, that ghost is in there, and it wants to contact us.”

 I stared at the clear window in the photo. I was terrified by the fact that my aunt could be in that room, the room where my children sleep every night. The nightmare images flashed momentarily through my mind and I shivered. The thought of Franklin was completely gone now, only the thought of coming face to face with a dead thing prevailed.

 “Jake, do you think we should stop?”

 Jake put his undivided attention on my face, then my chest and then my face again. “I…I don’t know. What do you want to do?”

 I took the camera from Jake and looked at the images again. There in one image was a face, and in the next one, nothing at all, Just the edges of the curtain. “Take another one, Jake.”

 Jake took a couple more pictures of the window and then took pictures of the wall, the mimosas, and a few pictures of me.

 “Smile babe.”

 But I didn’t want to smile. I wanted to cry and go somewhere else, but I had nowhere else to go. “Let me see the pictures.”

 Jake chuckled softly and looked down at the camera. He clicked to the viewing screen and nodded. “You are beautiful in front of the Mimosas. The green of the leaves contrasts with your red hair…sexy.”

 “Jake, can you get on with it. Do you see anything?”

 Jake clicked and clicked until he stopped. I saw his face change, his smile dropped.

“What is it?”

 Jake looked at me and then back at the screen.

 “Is the face in the window?” But the face wasn’t in the window, and the face wasn’t looming within the mimosas.

 “Look, don’t freak out.”

 “Give me that!” I snatched the camera from the idiot who thought it was better to drag things out.

 Maybe a face wasn’t in any of the other pictures but there was a face in the image on the view screen. It was a picture of me standing by the wall, and there within the bricks were the contours of a face. Rounded surfaces pulled the hardness of the wall into a bulging image. It seemed to be scowling. Dark brick eyes were glaring at me. I didn’t mean to, but I dropped the camera. Thanks to the dead pods from the mimosa, Jake’s camera was cushioned and safe.

 “Jake?”

 “Yes Natie.”

 “Don’t leave. I’m scared.”

 “Okay, sure.”

 Later that night, as Jake and I sat at the dining room table, I retraced everything we had done. We tried phantom writing, we tried EVP, Pictures, and video and checked for temperature changes. We even kept a close check on the electromagnetic readings. I was exhausted and the hard chair was hurting my butt. I stood to give my tailbone a little relief, and my chair moved backward of its own volition.

 “Jake! Did you see that?”

 Jake’s mouth was hanging open so I assumed he saw it too. “Yeah, I saw that.”

 A soft tapping started somewhere near the refrigerator which was behind Jake and across the room. The tapping grew louder and then cereal boxes, and a cake plate flew from the top of the refrigerator and across the room. I screamed and tackled Jake in his chair. One hand was full of Jake’s leather jacket, gripping just as his shoulder, while the other hand hugged him for protection. He pulled me off him and stood to face the clutter.

 “wow. I think we’ve started something.”