D6 // Esther Hartmyre

No matter
Which way you go
No matter
Which way you
Stay

( N A M E ) Esther Leontine Hartmyre
( A G E ) Forever Five Fifteen
( G E N D E R ) Female
( D I S T R I C T / A R E A ) District Six Feet Under

You're out of my mind
Out of my mind
Out of mind
And out of my
Mind

( H I S T O R Y )

Esther Hartmyre rests in peace. Six feet beneath the cold, packed soil of the earth lays her tiny body — the remnants of her singed hair tied in pigtails and blackened toes tucked away in ruffled socks and too-shiny patent leather shoes. It has been ten years since the flames of The Tragic Hartmyre Fire kissed the five-year-old a last goodnight, smoke curling fatefully into her lungs as she gasped for a final breath while reaching, reaching, reaching desperately for the comfort of her mother. Neither of them were fated to survive. The young girl's fearful, pattering footsteps still echo in my ears, the last sound she would ever make before collapsing to the floorboards with a fragile thunk, her body never to rise again as her soul slipped out from between her lips like a final exhalation of smoke.

I am the ghost of Esther Hartmyre, unable to cross over into the afterlife and destined to haunt the shadows of District Six. My family has moved on with their lives in ways I'll never be able to, taking up residence in the church situated on the hallowed grounds of the graveyard where the bodies of my mother and I were laid down to eternal rest all those years ago. I keep as close to them as the divided planes of our differing existences allow — walking the halls side-by-side with my father and five siblings, although we are an ever-widening lifetime apart. There are days when I swear I have managed to reach out to them, my whispers shimmering in their ears with solidarity or our eyes connecting across the infinite distance of their lives and my afterlife. Those moments turn my chest into a wild beast, my dead heart caught up in a rush of memory, pretending itself back into the beat beat beat of my distant past.

Memories are addictive, a sort of afterlife adrenaline. That rush of life wells up in me, infects me, takes me over. The first time I felt it I thought I was going absolutely crazy, caught up in the newfound dementia of my own spirit, cursed to become a twitching wraith flickering through the air like static, haywire and reasonless. Madness and nothing else. I bounced through walls and hung from my hair, restless with confusion over the palpitations within me. I grew sick with it, because I felt too much. It wasn't right for a ghost to feel so much life coursing through them or at least that's what I thought back then, before I understood how to turn the remnants of myself into a true afterlife. There is still something in the realm of human existence for me, pinning my soul to the earth. It dresses me in dreams and stretches me so wide I could burst and some days... I do.

I was walking with a ghost
And I said please, please don't insist
I was walking with a ghost
And I said please
Please don't insist

( P E R S O N A L I T Y )

My body may be gone, but I still possess a presence. Sometimes it's difficult to see the evidence of me and I become just another ghost swallowed up in the cemetery moonlight, but I've busied myself for quite some time now in finding tricks and cheats to help in making myself known. The Grim Reaper himself taught me how a dusting of flour can capture my footsteps, as if the pale powder were transformed into a kind of magical fairy dust when tossed aloft by my hands, leaving a sordid trail of proof in my wake. The fragile footprints murmur: "Esther Hartmyre is still here." Other times I'll watch over my siblings as they work, sneaking secret messages to them — making shadow puppets for Beatrice as she works the flames of the furnace or laying myself down in one of Teddy's coffins as he toils away, humming a medley of heartache-lullabies for him that I've learned from the generations of lonely ghosts wailing outside our windows, night after night, into the whispered winds.

Death is serious in its finality, I know this well. Still, there is something that flutters within me, defiant and impish. I may not be alive, but there is still liveliness within my hollow veins. It's a finding sort of feeling, like playing a game of connect the dots and the magic of turning scattered nothingness into nonsensical pictures you couldn't have predicted at the start. This deep push inside me, it was surely the trigger for my haunting instincts. Because of it, I discover myself prowling between the headstones of the cemetery like a zombie, the theatrical tang of ketchup dripping from my lips as I leap out to snap and cackle at anyone unfortunate enough to encounter me. All of this comes naturally to me, you see. I can't help it. These impulses are beyond fickle denial, they're what remains of me now.

The spirits of the other dead who share these haunting grounds, they encourage me, dolling out tidbits of knowledge and lending ideas in exchange for any help I can offer to aid their last wishes. They're jealous of how, if I focus very carefully, I can sometimes throw my voice across the divide, passing their demands along to mortal ears and hands. We are friends and enemies, another kind of childish schoolyard filled with endless tussles and unexpected acts of kindness or cruelty. After you've died, there's nothing left to fear except for the end of time and so we spirits of fallen souls revel in what we can, finding fun in frivolity, even and especially if we're making a nuisance of ourselves.

This is the last of what I have inside me — this entitlement to wander our hallways dressed in the borrowed wedding gown of another ghost, a haunting moan echoing up my throat and into the rafters of the church. If a mortal soul were to simply bend their ear in my direction, I could tell the tale of how I stole the dress from the virgin bride, who died tragically on her wedding day. So obsessed with searching for her long lost groom, she has yet to realize that she's been unclothed, left waiting at the alter wearing nothing more than the memory of her faded skin, as translucent as her time-persistent tears. There is pride to be found in this kind of accomplishment, where something that should seem silly only feels satisfying. It's an itch that guides my hand to steal and pilfer and rearrange.

"Notice this," I find myself whispering as I sneak into the funeral morgue my eldest sister runs out of our home, tampering with Florence's perfect styling of the corpses in waiting for burial. She dresses them so carefully, arranging their hair before artfully applying make-up and I just can't seem to stop myself from turning it all topsy-turvey. A swipe of bright blue eyeshadow here and a man wearing a woman's dress there. The occasional snip of scissors through a mane of precious locks — technically nothing irreversible, their hair still growing even as their bodies lay cold on her tables. Pocketing a tube of lipstick on my way out the door, later that night blood red warnings of doom are left scrawled across the bedroom mirror of my youngest sister Clara, little secrets for her to add to her collection. My mischievous gifts to my beloveds.

No matter which way you go
No matter which way you stay
You're out of my mind
Out of my mind
Out of mind and out of my mind

( A P P E A R A N C E )

Trailing Orion when he trudges out to dig a new grave and expand the cemetery for one body more, a shovel wrapped up in his fist as my tattered white dress whips through the empty air in his wake, my worries seem to find me. Perched on the precipice of the six foot deep voids he carves into the earth, I look down as my brother swings one scoop of soil into the air after another in dull brown arcs, wondering if he'll have enough determination left in him once the job is done to be able to get himself out of the pit he's dug him way into. "Don't work so hard," I lecture, my breathless voice little more to him than a bird lost on the wind, "there's plenty of time left for you." Scooping up a handful of dirt and tossing it back down at him, the corners of my wide mouth turn heavy as it sprinkles around his feet, a fragment of his effort undone by my devilry. "You should take your time." While you're able.

When my thoughts turn so serious, a morbid stillness floods me cold enough to remind me what I am. For all my hi-jinks, I am unable to crack a smile — another part of me that was lost to the fire all those years ago. Even when I laugh, it's released as a deadly serious slip of sound, as deep as the secrets of the dead and laced with the boom of an apocalypse. It may resonate with a maniacal lilt or occasionally crescendo into a high-pitched cackle if I'm caught up in a particularly amusing fit, but my expression is forever deadpan, no matter how my voice may attempt to betray a girlish crack in my macabre persona. It's just as important to remember what I am as it is for me to remember who I was. I am a dark presence, a daughter of death, and harbinger of endings.

My fingers sticky with cosmetic powders and creams stolen from Florence, I find myself attempting to accentuate the dark circles beneath my eyes and the gauntness of my cheekbones. Whitewash pale and wraith-thin with eyes as lifelessly gray as a headstone and hair so blonde it was already borderline translucent before I had even earned my ghostly status, it doesn't take much. However, there are days when my dead flesh lies to me that I could be more, a stubborn memory of pink flushing in my lips like a sickness. Painting the fragile features of my face up like a sugar skull and veiling myself in layers of gauze, I hide the awful untruths away before they can seduce me into such falsehoods.

Spirits, we have been given the opportunity to wander the world, watching over our loved ones and traversing the imaginary futures of everything we might have been had our lives not been cut short. This is why I follow my siblings to school, walking with measured footsteps from class to class, although my drifting movements are completely unnoticed by those around me. There is a dangerous sweetness lingering around ideas of what could have been. One would think that classmates and teachers would have surely forgotten the young Hartmyre girl who disappeared from their ranks ten long years ago, but it seems I still linger in their thoughts in the most surprising of moments, my name escaping their mouths now and again as though vaguely aware that I have yet to truly leave them. Shock never ceases to course through me when they acknowledge the memory of my presence. Perhaps I become a little more tangible in these instances, something solid enough for them to glimpse, if only as a flickering reflection off the shine of their eyes.

However, there is a permanent distance between myself and those around me, despite the seconds when our separation seems to grow just a little thinner. In the end, I am already gone, my crumbling bones tucked away in a perpetually fog-laden corner of the graveyard back at home. My small life is remembered only by the simplest of markers, a flawlessly blank piece of stone to watch over my remains, no name or date or decoration etched into its surface, just the faint warmth of my own knowing. I searched for ages before finding it, busying myself with bits of old paper and crayons as I collected rubbings of the cherubs, crosses, and winged skulls adorning the grander headstones of the sprawling cemetery, tucking them away in scrapbooks like pictures of old friends and wondering when I might find my place among them.

I knew the familiar blankness as soon as I saw it, like an undeniable affinity, and that this was why I could never find my name before. Now I'll sit and keep myself company, telling my buried corpse all the marvelous stories of my afterlife adventures, seeking to comfort my vacant body in a way I can't seem to replicate for my restless soul. In a strange way, it keeps me me from thinking about the sorrow that tinges my life and the way I can still feel smoke swirling in my lungs, a relentless demon prowling within me. When my mother's name sneaks unexpectedly into the air, the smoke attempts to leap out in cruel response, snapping at me as I try to cough it away. However, it seems that the soul of Esther Hartmyre is not the only thing in this world which persists.

I was walking with a ghost
And I said please, please don't insist
I was walking with a ghost
And I said please
Please don't insist

( CO D E W O R D ) Odair
( F A C E C L A I M ) Sasha Pivovarova

I was walking with a ghost
I was walking with a ghost
Out of my mind
Out of my mind
You're out of my mind

( C O M M E N T S / O T H E R )

Walking With A Ghost by Tegan And Sara

House Of Hartmyre Plot

I was walking with a ghost
I was walking with a ghost
I was walking with a ghost
I was walking with a ghost
I was walking with a ghost

( O T H E R S P E A K I N G ) D7E4B0
( O T H E R ) C5C9B9
( T E X T ) B8A79E
( T H I N K I N G ) AD7C82
( S P E A K I N G ) A8596F