The Jig Is Up
The sun crested the bleached sky and dove downward, a yellow-white splotch that threw shadows beside the trailers and blinded anyone driving due west. It was one of the last days of August. The air stood still. Nothing moved, even the lizards if they could help it.

Hannah missed how those dry days felt when she rubbed moisturizers that smelled of coconut into her elbows and knees, drank water that dribbled off her chin, and let the sun turn her hair blonder piece by piece. Even when she formed a solid self, nothing was uncomfortable anymore. She thought it was funny how pain, left behind, made her nostalgic.

She waited in Mallory’s empty driveway for two hours. To pass the time, she kicked at rocks with intermittent success and entertained memories. She thought about taking cokes from Mallory and drilling her about whether or not she cut up her plastic soda rings. She thought about drunk-dialing Byron and listening to Mallory talk about her crushes.

Hannah didn’t lack for company in death. Her new station had her escorting dead people from the limbo-place into the ‘great beyond’. Soon, the Powers said, when she could perform with consistency, she’d get to do much more. Like take the dead to Earth with her, so they could settle up and make peace with life and eventually leave it behind.

But it was lonely. Strangers called her name. Just as soon as they were friends instead, they were gone. So Hannah sneaked away to spy on her Earth friends as often as possible. You know, to stay abreast of events. Hannah was the nosy sort. Just because her pulse was gone didn’t change anything. Today it was Mallory’s turn.

The only reason Mallory hadn't put up a clothesline was because of the sand. Yeah, air-dried clothes smelled better than machine-dried ones, but you never knew when the wind was going to kick up and blow little grainy particles all over everything you were trying to dry. So she was still making trips to the laundry mat once a week, hauling the heavy plastic basket back and forth, because it was easier than having to wash everything all over again.

Yard chores this weekend, definitely. She had to take to the trailer with some paint, see if it would cover up the last of the bloodstains. And the mailbox could use a new coat of safety orange, to keep it from getting clipped when Mr. Dandridge exited the park in his boat of a Cadillac. Honestly, the man was, what, seventy and blind as a bat? What did he need all of that vehicle for?

The redhead pulled her truck into her driveway, pondering dinner. There were still some leftovers, unless Sonya had eaten them already. But the day had been so hot that she didn't feel like cooking. Maybe they could just have some cold cuts and sandwiches. Meatloaf was always good on bread.

Tires crunched over gravel, and Mallory put the brakes on before clicking the radio off. She'd check the fridge and see what was good and what needed throwing out. Ugh, the basket felt heavier than usual. Well, this could be her lame attempt at getting some exercise.

Hannah walked up beside her. Watching her struggle with a clothes hamper, she longed for the friend only inches away. She wondered what Mallory’s hair felt like. It was prettiest in the summer. All kinds of colors mixed in and shined like gold around sunset.

When the truck door shut, Hannah backed up automatically to let Mallory past. She still did that. To be walked through was a curiosity at first but now it just felt terrible. She only resorted to touching people once in while and then it was a marvel, watching their hands overlap, but on different planes. Hannah wondered if their atoms mixed at all, or if she was like a hologram.

“Wish I could give you a hand,” she offered.

The clothes stacked high and unruly. A sock started to fall. On autopilot, Hannah put out her hand to right it.

The late afternoon was very still, so still that Mallory could hear the ticking noise of the truck's engine cooling down and the sound of Mrs. Abernathy's television coming through her open living room window. The Young and the Restless was probably still on.

Things were so still and quiet that when the redhead moved past the front fender of her vehicle she swore she felt a breeze where there was no breeze. She paused, the laundry basket filling her arms, and there was the faintest shimmer just to her left. She looked at the Ford's windshield, imagining that it was simply glare from the sun, and then she looked in the other direction, where the apparent swash of air had come from.

Great, she was getting heatstroke or something. She'd been trying to keep up with her consumption of water, but maybe she'd been a little more lax with it than she'd thought. She'd fill a bottle from the tap once she was inside. If she could ever wrestle this unwieldy thing through the damned door, that was.

The sock hit the dirt. Hannah was dismayed. She stamped her foot hard, but there were no satisfactory puffs of dust.

“Why is this so friggin’ hard?!” She watched Mallory almost-notice her and keep going. “C’mon, see me. You’ve made out with vampires… you can’t believe in a ghost?!” She paraded after her, and when the shadow of the trailer loomed dark over Mallory’s face, it didn’t darken hers. If anything, Hannah was more visible away from the sun and lights. Like a lightning bug, flickering in and out.

On the porch, Mallory set the basket down and fumbled around for her keys, and it was there that she saw another weird little shimmer. Too far from the truck this time for it to be the windshield, and she stopped and stared around her, the keys dangling by their ring from her index finger. The hell?

Okay, the sun was still up, which ruled out a vampire sneak-attack. The redhead focused more closely on the shimmer, just barely picking out the hint of an outline. And she had lived in Searchlight, had been exposed to the weird of the place, for long enough to believe.

"Hannah?" She almost reached out, seeing the familiar pixie face kind of flickering in and out of reality like a TV screen filled with static. Visits from the Great Beyond, with your host Mallory Quinn. "Hannah, why can I see you?"

Hannah's breath caught. She moved forward and answered in earnest, "Because I'm here." The voice climbed to the redhead's ears from someplace far. It crescendoed and decrescendoed, echoed and fell flat, depending on the syllable. "Mallory, can you hear me?" If her heart still beat, it would thump wildly. She's looking me in the eyes! She's looking right at my eyes!

"Hannah." It wasn't a question this time, and the keys to the trailer jangled as Mallory tried to make real sense out of the words she could just barely hear. Her other hand reached out, but all she touched was air. That voice, though...

"You sound really far away," she said inanely, the laundry nearly forgotten. "Are you... are you in heaven?"

“Pssh... I wish,” Hannah laughed, speaking up as if Mallory were deaf or an elderly person. The former might as well have been true. “I’m here. Right beside you. I swear it. Reach for me.” Hannah extended an arm and waggled her fingers. Her skin glowed.

Hannah’s confidence built. She just knew that if she could make Mallory see her and hear her, she ought to be able to feel her, too. Even if it was just a little bit, she wouldn’t mind. She could have the consistency of pudding and it’d be alright.

“C’mon, make me the happiest girl alive... or dead.” A smile to soften the words. She wet her lips and hoped for the best. Hoped oh please, don’t let me down. “It won’t hurt.”

And then the redhead's had were shaking, the keys jingling in the most annoying fashion, and Mallory bit her lower lip as she reached out again, half-closing her eyes against the possibility of making contact. But Hannah had said it wouldn't hurt, and Hannah had never told her a lie as far as she could remember.

Was her friend an angel now?

There. Was that where she was? Maybe she was only kidding herself that she could feel something. Mallory closed her fingers a fraction at the time, keeping her eyes on the shimmering, flickering face opposite from hers. She looked like a lunatic and she knew it, standing there trying to shake hands with the air. But this was Searchlight, and a ghost was the least of the things that went bump in the night in Searchlight.

"Hannah? I'm... I'm sorry. I never got to say good-bye."

“I heard you anyway. Don’t worry.”

The light touch went into Hannah’s extremity and it seemed not to make contact with her. But while all Mallory felt was a strange disturbance in the air, Hannah felt all that was alive about her redheaded friend. She sensed Mallory’s body heat and her pulse’s gentle vibration and the warm flush of blood through her capillaries. It woke her up. For just an instant, she knew again what it felt like to be alive; she remembered all those physical signals that went unnoticed when you’d never gone without them.

Hannah suddenly realized that she didn’t have to imitate those things while here on Earth. The body she inhabited for over twenty years never rotted away. Whistler took it to the Conduit when she died. It had to exist somewhere. That was an old physics lesson, right? She could call on it... Bring it with her... Right?

“But you don’t have to say goodbye, ‘cause I‘m not leaving,” Hannah told her. She cocked an eyebrow at the sky, as if the Powers That Be were up there.

Alright guys, I figured it out. Now lend me a hand, would ya?

Hannah laced her fingers through Mallory’s and squeezed. “That’s better.”

"Where are you?"  Mallory's voice was very small, and she was concentrating so hard on being able to feel Hannah's fingers interlocking with hers that a bomb could have gone off next door and she wouldn't have noticed it. "If you aren't in heaven, where did you go? Where did you... where did they take you?"

She didn't know why she was asking about heaven. She'd been lapsed for so long religiously that she had forgotten almost everything except what it felt like to kneel at the railing for what felt like a very long time while praying. But her friend was here, and that meant she had come from somewhere. Was there an afterlife, like her Gramma Iris had always insisted there was?

"How did you get back here?"

“You know, you’d be a really good lawyer,” Hannah joked, still squeezing onto her friend. It was a little ridiculous standing in the driveway, hanging onto one another and a basket of laundry, but it was also the kind of everyday situation that made the moment more significant. The simple stuff going on meant that some things never changed.

“It turns out there’s places other than Heaven and Hell and Earth, Quinn. Places in between the three. Think of the middle place like... like a train station. Grand Central for souls! And they‘re holding one-way tickets. But I can ride the train either way I like. It’s a job, see? Or like a calling. I’m dead. But I’m not gone, just different.”

Hannah wrinkled her nose. “That didn’t make any sense, did it?” As the seconds wore on, her voice came through more clearly and the flickers went away.

"No, no, it does, I think, it's just..." Mallory swallowed, realizing that she was really close to tears. "I dunno, it's just kind of unexpected, y'know?" She looked at where her hand was still joined with Hannah's, watching the blonde's hand become a little more solid, a little more there.

“I wanted to write to Devon," she continued, making eye contact again. "But then I remembered that I didn't know where he went when he left. 'Ireland' is a little non-specific. Sorry. He probably would have wanted to know."

Her chin quivered, and she bit her lower lip. "I miss you, you know?" she said, giving a harder squeeze of her hand, wanting the other girl to feel it. "I left a lot of stuff unsaid. Too much stuff. Hindsight's always perfect, I guess. I wish...I wish I had said everything I should have said while you were...alive."

Hannah shook her head. “No, but see, it doesn’t matter! It doesn‘t!” She smiled to let her friend know everything would be okay. Where Mallory looked regretful, Hannah lit up from the inside. She even got up the nerve to let go of Mallory and try to grab the laundry basket from her. Its weight took her off guard because she wasn‘t used to it anymore. The basket fell on its side and spilled sleeves and pant legs everywhere.

“Sorry--” Hannah grabbed onto both of Mallory's hands this time. “Please don’t be sad. Dead people can see you, Mallory! Remember when you went on that walk by yourself at night? It was right after I died. I heard you talking to me and I saw you crying. I knew you loved me.

“And... don’t worry about Devon. It’s better he doesn’t know, it’d just upset him. I saw him, too. He’s up to his elbows in werewolf stuff, it’d just distract him.”

"You saw me?" It was almost enough to make her blush, the notion that Hannah had seen her when she'd thought she was alone, because if she had seen Mallory then, who knew what else she might have seen?

"They're still talking about you down at the diner," she added, her head tilting in the general direction of the Nugget. "I think they're still waiting for Elvis to bring you back so you can pour them some more lousy coffee." The redhead offered a shaky smile, looked down at where her hands were being clasped.

"Do they all see us?" Mallory questioned. "Not just you, but your... the others? Why don't they pass on?"

Hannah shrugged. "Well most of 'em do pass on within a couple of Earth days. The funeral freaks 'em out," she revealed. "But it's tougher than you think, especially if you go real sudden and you've got a bunch of business to finish up. And some are in denial. They just don't believe they're dead. So they get stuck in that Grand Central place, just listening to the noise from Earth. The Powers That Be picked me to lead them across. Apparently I was supposed to die."

Her face fell a little. "I didn't want to, but sometimes things are just... bigger than us. It totally sucks. Plus, I feel kinda robbed. I always wanted to be a crotchety old lady. Or a mom."

Hannah's voice trailed off, and then at complete random, "Hey, did you know there's leprechauns?!"

Mallory's smile grew a little more genuine, and she was imagining Hannah as a crotchety old grandmother, waving her cane around in the air in a cantankerous fashion, but somehow still with the big eyes and the elfin face of a girl much younger. You should have been, she thought. You shlould have been everything you wanted to be and then some.

"You mean an awful lot to an awful lot of people, Hannah Flynn," she said, using the present tense deliberately. "And I'm not surprised that there's leprechauns. I'm sure there's been more than one around here lately."

There were so many things she wanted to ask. What's it like there? Can you be in more than one place at the time? Is my weird uncle Milo still hanging around? But she didn't want to waste her time with questions. She just wanted to stand here with her friend for however many minutes she could, however many they had left, to just be with her.

"If I hug you, will you be able to feel it?"

“I think so,” she said and nodded. “But then I gotta leave. I’m way AWOL today. But I promise I’ll come back, if you do me a favor and tell Julie I‘m okay. And Connor, if you know him. Especially Connor.”

Hannah knew her time ran short, so she threw herself at Mallory head-on. “Squeeze me tight, okay?”

Connor. Right. She could remember that. Mallory opened her arms, and she could have sworn she felt a weight against her, the actual presence of a flesh-and-blood body. She locked her hands together where the small of Hannah's back would have been, as if that would keep the blonde with her, and she squuezed tight.

"I love you, Hannah. You were... are... my sister. Be happy, okay? If you can. I'm glad you came to see me."

"Okay." Hannah tucked her face into Mallory's neck. She smelled her scent and nodded really fast. "Okay, I'll be happy, don't you worry." When she started to cry, it felt wonderful. There was a salty taste and her throat hurt, too. Then she started worrying about snotting on Mallory by accident, so she let herself slip back just a little.

That slip cost her the tenuous grip on her own body and she fizzled away.