Sapphic Voices General Fiction

Leah And Spirits And Ghosts

Leah and Spirits and Ghosts

Leah believed in ghosts and spirits. She believed that every living being had a spirit, that every living being was born with such a spirit, and that that spirit moved on even after its time on earth.

She wasn't sure when she decided that spirits were real. It was more of an evolution than a revelation.

She saw auras, colorful auras, around everyone she met. Violet, red, periwinkle. Sometimes a jaundiced yellow. Those were the ones that made her the saddest. People walking around all day, surrounded by a sick yellow spirit. A suffocating spirit.

She stopped eating meat because of spirits. Because she didn't want to be responsible for killing them. Or harming them. She was nice to children and animals. She nurtured. She nurtured bodies and she nurtured spirits. And sometimes she remembered to nurture her own.

Leah rarely remembered to see her own colorful spirit surrounding her. It was lavender. Royal and soft. Giving and inquisitive. She decided purple was her favorite color even before she realized that her spirit was lavender.

Indigo's spirit was a shade of purple as well, or so Leah thought. Swirls of indigo and red, but with an inner core of peach and periwinkle tranquility. An inner core hiding from the tough reality of Indigo's life.

One year later, Leah realized this was cause for a spiritual crisis. That really, when it was all over, Indigo had no spirit. Nothing but jaundiced emptiness surrounded her. Nothing surrounding her. Nothing inside. An empty jaundiced shell.

And as much as Leah tried to focus on herself and her own spirit, on finding the pieces of her own missing spirit, on searching for the chunks of lavender that had been ripped out of her being, she couldn't help but dwell on the emptiness of Indigo and her missing spirit. Missing? Lost? Had she ever had one? If not, what was the point? What was the point of an empty shell of jaundiced nothingness, of evil and sickness, wandering the earth? Was it even possible?

A spiritual crisis indeed.

It was because of Indigo that Leah realized that spirits and ghosts were not the same thing. Spirits were colorful and loved and lived and surrounded their carrier with auras of protection and peace and nurturing, if only some of the time. Ghosts, on the other hand, lived outside of life. Spirits nurture life. Ghosts take life away. Ghosts do not understand the realm of worldly emotions. Ghosts thrive off of sucking the spirits out of others. By replacing the vast emptiness inside of them with the prismatic spectrum of colors of the spirits. But because their bodies cannot nurture spirits, the colors get lost, never making it to the carrier ghost.

Indigo was such a ghost. Sucking colors from every woman she could find. Sucking the spirit right out of her.

Leah knew better. She knew better than to release her spirit to a ghost. But she didn't know until one year later that Indigo was a ghost. That the indigo and red facade was a carefully devised costume to mask the invisibility and emptiness and black hole underneath.

A spiritual crisis. One year later. One year later when she pops up twice in one week. After no one has seen her for months. A ghost.

And even as Leah pieced her lavender spirit back together, she mourned for Indigo's missing spirit. For the peach and periwinkle and red and indigo that left, fleeing a poisonous carrier. The spirit that was sucked into the black hole underneath. The colorful and gentle orb of light and healing that was beaten into fearful submission, hiding somewhere in the shadows of her belly. A phantom spirit of those shadows. Or worse, for the spirit that never was. For a body born on earth with no spirit. A living ghost.

If you have enjoyed Lani Radack's "Leah And Spirits And Ghosts", then please be certain to e-mail her at  radacklani[at]hotmail.com  and thank her for posting this Story.

Click here for a list of all of Lani Radack's  Stories and Poetry at  Sapphic Voices Authoresses.

Copyright © 1997-2005 Sapphic Voices.  All rights reserved.
Unless otherwise noted, all site content is entirely owned and is solely maintained by  Sapphic Voices.
Absolutely no portion of this page may be reproduced either electronically or otherwise without the express
and written permission of the copyright holder, except as occurs in normal browser caching and page indexing.