agitate your nightmares, but lacking flesh and blood
are powerless to hurt you-cannot hope to inflict the kind
of damage that real, live people do.
― Ellen Hopkins
Faye Lightbourne
I’m in a deserted Thirties ballroom on a moonlit pier in Florida talking to a ghost.
This is the anti-romantic climax of my Gulf trip.
“Oh!” The lovely wraith gasps, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you—I mistook you for someone else.”
“No problem,” I smile, “I was shut in with my thoughts—something that seems easy in a place like this.”
“Marvelous, isn’t it?” she gushes.
I look around at cobwebs draped from corners and eighty years of accumulated dust.
“I suppose it can be enchanting considering what it once was.”
Her eyes dance with mischievous fire. “Oh, I can see you’re a romantic Mr.— ” and she pauses, flustered. “Oh dear! I’m afraid I don’t know your name.”
I decide to play along with this improbable delusion.
“I’m Manse Hendricks—I’m here to check out this property for possible future development.”
“I see—a business man with a poet’s soul.” She stares wistfully at the waves.
"I’m Faye Lightbourne—one writ with you in sour misfortune’s book.”
I have to laugh. “That’s Romeo and Juliet, isn’t it? But why do you say we’re misfortunate?”
“Well, it’s obvious isn’t it? We are star-crossed lovers.”
I shake my head in disbelief. “I don’t know how you know about me, but it’s true, I had the misfortune to choose a woman who hasn’t a romantic bone in her body, and wouldn’t pull herself away from work to be with me here. All she cares about is herself and making money.”
The girl gives me a compassionate look. “Sounds like my Beau. I wasted so many dreams and so much time on him, and he sold me out in the end.”
“That’s brutal. If you don’t mind my asking, what did he do?”
“He betrayed me,” she whispered.
“You mean he cheated on you?”
She shook her head. “Worse than that—he sold me out for money.”
“Sounds familiar,” I sighed.
The girl stares off into the moonlit Gulf waters.
“You know that song that was playing earlier—Moonlight Serenade? I actually wrote the original lyrics to that. Yep, wrote the words for Beau as a poem while listening to Glenn Miller’s instrumental version. But Beau went behind my back and sold it to Glenn Miller’s recording company for $150.00. When I found out, I was so upset, I wrote Mr. Miller and told him what happened. He told me he’d be glad to pay much more than that if he could own the rights, but I refused. Told him the words had sentimental value—they were special only to me. Mr. Miller said he understood and sent me back my original manuscript.”
I felt my blood go cold. “But you’re only in your mid-twenties. Moonlight Serenade was written way back in 1939—that would make you over a hundred years old.”
She shrugged her shoulders. “I guess it does.”
I laughed out loud. “So you’re telling me you actually are a ghost?”
She simply smiled at me and faded into nothingness right before my eyes.