The Final Days of Springborough
Chapter 37: The Ghost Guard

Jimmy had a lady, this he remembered. Once dead, you didn’t remember many specific details about life. Perhaps that was a blessing when it came to, maybe, being nostalgic for all the things that you would never experience again. Or maybe it was to show you that not everything you experience in life is worth remembering, or worth taking with you once you are dead. Either way, Jimmy knew his name, he knew his occupation (he was a guard for the Kingdom of Springborough) and he knew he had a lady. Her name escaped him, and he punished himself when he was alone for not remembering what exactly he used to call her, but her face was emblazoned in his memory.

In fact, the first thing he remembered when he awoke back on the cliffside, the same cliffside he had fallen off of, was the image of the love of his life- an image of brown hair, a smile that appeared as if deep in thought, and twinkling eyes that shown like stars when looking at him. He tried to run back to the Kingdom for her, to tell her what happened, to not be afraid of any news that might come across the horizon, but the moment he took his twentieth stride from the cliff, he stopped, not as if being jerked back by a hook, but rather as if his mind shut down his body, saying- “No further.”

His conscience thought was- “Go! Go back to her! Strive! Move!”

His subconscious reaction was- “Nope. Your legs won’t move. Your feet won’t step. You will remain here.”

He marked just where he could get to with the natural surroundings, because he could not move things himself. So, up until a rock one way, up to a small weed up to the North, just beyond the hut in the way back to the Kingdom, a rooted tree marked his furthest way to the South. These were his death boundaries. He was able to figure out that it all tied into his bones amongst the rocks when, one day, he dove off the cliff, getting over his fear of heights, to plummet to the sea.

Of course he didn’t make a splash. His body held no mass, as far as he could tell. He jumped from the cliff, and slower than a live man would fall, he descended to the rocks below. This brought back the memory to his original fall, a dark night, misty all about, and the sudden feeling of weightlessness when he took one step too many and fell to his next adventure, of death. But, this time, when the rocks came up to greet him, he simply fell on top of them, like a feather landing on a pillow, just simply perched and ready for the next gust of air.

The sight of your own body, Jimmy was sure, was nothing that any man should see. He didn’t see his face, he didn’t have to. He recognized the body, the clothes (he had gone without armor for his quest to watch the weather for the King and instead wore leather tunics) and his hair. He was face down in the water, his body splayed on the rocks, his arms still trying to brace himself from the fall. It was a long couple of weeks, but Jimmy sat down there with his body, making sure it did not wash away. He kept himself company, watching the water on the horizon.

Getting back up to where the hut was was easier than he thought. At a moment when his living body had lost most of its weight due to decomposing, the water, and the wildlife in the water feasting on him, his body was swept by the rocks by a wave, and sent somewhere below the surface, out of sight. Jimmy felt his watch was finally over, and made the climb back up to the surface. As a man, he could never ascend the rocky cliffside, but as a ghost, simply grabbing a piece of the wall with just a bit of his fingertip, was enough to propel him in the air. He would simply continue on his climb, jumping from one perch to the next, easily scaling, almost feeling as if he had superhuman powers.

At the top, he quickly found that he could not move as far as he once had. His death boundaries had become too far for him to reach. He thought that maybe, with his living body mostly gone back to the Earth, he would be freer as a spirit, but it was just the opposite. His body falling from the rocks to the bottom of the sea tightened his range of motion at the top of the cliff. His prison cell had gotten a little bit smaller, his daily routine had less to look at, and so the young lady named Brynn, and her family of dreamers, became Jimmy’s only sense of amusement.

He tried to ignore them at first, but as they began to talk of the Lost Kingdom of Gambrille, he couldn’t help but be interested. He felt odd, slightly creepy, looking in on them, watching them, but he thought that perhaps this is just what dead people do. Perhaps, if they couldn’t see him, maybe he couldn’t see the spirits around him as well. Maybe, in death, everybody just became alone, and nobody knew of anyone else in the area. Jimmy wondered if he was the only one around watching this family, or if he was one in a crowd of invisibles.

He saw them all, saw them when they didn’t know they were being watched. He saw Brynn’s mother, Jaklyn, contemplate life while overlooking Quakenfalls, watching the sun set on the waters of Cornwall. A beautiful woman, face covered in freckles, hair that got lighter the more she was outside. Brynn’s mother was exceptionally bright and understood human interaction like nobody else Jimmy could remember remembering. Brynn’s father, John, moved more with intuition than her mother who seemed to scrutinize most of the moves she was going to make. Brynn’s father was more moved by passion than contemplation, although he seemed to contemplate inconsequential matters very hard.

The moment the family planned the next step in their life was very hard to watch for Jimmy. John and Jaklyn had walked away from the hut when Brynn and Jage were asleep, farther than Jimmy could walk, so he ventured back to where the kids were sleeping. He looked in to replace them wide awake. Brynn was telling Jage what she thought was about to happen- that the whole family was going to go off together on an adventure.

An adventure to replace their family’s lost kingdom.

But, Jimmy knew better. He knew by the way Jaklyn was stewing over the decision that it wasn’t as easy as that. She had ventured off to the South, coming back with fruit for the family. She had ventured North, coming back with small rodents for them to eat as well. She stood, every night, watching the sunset on the waters, squinting at it, not appearing to enjoy the sight like one does when the clouds in the sky begin to burn a vibrant orange. No, Jaklyn was looking for something. She was looking for something in every direction, and Jimmy knew it. And while John stayed around, maintaining the house and the kids, Jaklyn was thinking about the next step, and it seemed to hold too many directions for one family to take. But, it would be quite fine for a family of four to take on.

What the family didn’t know was that when they gave their final hug goodbye, when they draped their arms around each other, standing shoulder to shoulder, letting tears fall from their faces down inside the circle of their feet below them, as they sniffled together, wishing each other luck, promising to hold each other, as a family, once again like this, that Jimmy was hugging them as well. He pressed himself against the backs of the travelers carrying on; of Jage, John, and Jaklyn, holding the arms of Brynn to complete her hug. He was going to miss them.

The ghost hoped upon hope they had luck, and would not meet a fate similar to his.

For awhile, Brynn was quiet. It reminded Jimmy of his time spent on the rocks, watching his own body slowly become part of the circle of life. It saddened him and scared him that she would sit on the cliff, holding her knees to her chest, and simply stare out at the world. While she was given the lamest task of staying behind and waiting for the three scavenging family members to come home, Jimmy knew that she must entertain herself, or she was going to sink into a worse hole of despair.

When she began to speak to herself, Jimmy got excited. Thinking, somehow, she knew he was there, he thought maybe he was resurrected. Maybe, for a similarly strange reason as being a spirit who was tied to the cliff, he had become alive again, and could then disappear into the forest, heading back for the face that he saw every time his translucent eyelids would blink.

“Maybe the kingdom doesn’t exist,” the young lady, Brynn, had said to herself, “Maybe it was just a stupid fairytale somebody told someone to make them feel more important than they actually were. Maybe it was all a lie, and now my brother and parents are out in the world; together, but not. Together, but alone, and I’m here, and maybe we’ll all die because someone at some point lied to someone else.”

Jimmy had thought of answering, opening his mouth to do so, but Brynn stood up quickly and walked off after that. Jimmy closed his mouth, and watched her sulk back into the hut, fall on her cot and pull up the blankets, sinking into her comfort or reading her book of Kingdoms.

But, if Brynn was going to talk to herself, Jimmy was going to talk back. And, he did. Since he couldn’t remember much about his life, he simply talked of the observations around him. Perhaps he began to notice her noticing the things he pointed out, but he took that as coincidence. Of course she noticed the butterfly when he did, it was the only thing moving at the time. But when he said- “What a dynamic butterfly! Look at the colors!” Brynn had looked up from shaving down a stick to make an arrow, and watched as the butterfly came in and out of sight.

He pointed out everything, where the sun was in the sky, any spiders that appeared in her hut, if her fire had begun to catch on the kindling, any birds or rodents in the area that she might be able to hunt for, if the tide was high or low, if the waves were powerful or nonexistent, what shapes the clouds would remind him of. Jimmy made a comment about anything and everything just to pass the time and ease his own spiritual sanity.

One day, Brynn had told Jimmy to be quiet.

And for the first time in a long time, Jimmy felt alive.