Flash Fiction

A short story.

This was a story I wrote for my writing course. Our prompt was a picture of older gentleman smoking a cigar, in a place where he looks ready to smile, but somber. It’s flash fiction. It’s a ghost story. I’m sharing it you all.

Charlie is the only ghost I’ve ever seen at the abandoned school. He hangs out in the staff room, blissfully smoking a cigarillo. Contrary to appearances, his fine black suit and patterned tie, he worked as a janitor here, and not a teacher or principal. The watch on his wrist was borrowed for the night he died. Charlie looked sharp because it was a night of festivity. That rarely happened within these walls, especially given the school.

Charlie spent his days sweeping, mopping and repairing; his back is hunched from repetitive tasks. If he could perceive the mouldering halls of today’s school—the peeling laminate floors, broken light fixtures, and cracked porcelain toilets—he would be dissatisfied with their cleanliness, but I don’t know if he’d be sad.

He worked at St. Joseph’s, an ‘Indian’ residential school in Northern British Columbia. You can judge him for that. I know I do. I’m also aware he was a cog in a cruel machine.

If you look at his ghost closely, his eyes are sunken and his face sags like a wet bag.

After finding Charlie, I asked survivors about him, and stories surfaced. My village elders, their skin now wrinkled like un-ironed sheets, spoke warmly of him. One of them said, “Charlie was the only nedoh that smiled. Them others didn’t smile none.”

Another said that Charlie secreted him hard candies. You know the ones: lemon, orange, cherry and grape flavours wrapped in cellophane.

I repaid the favour and brought him some. They remain untouched, but the ants have been enjoying them.

Charlie died of a stroke the day the school closed. It was sudden. His family in Manitoba communicated that the priests bury him in the school’s ‘graveyard’ with former students. They gave him a small granite gravestone. It’s the only gravestone in a field full of bones, and it reads: Charlie McConnor. 1932-1981.

There are days when I sit with Charlie’s ghost, and he smiles his infectious smile, all upturned wrinkles and crooked teeth. He’s trapped eternally in his last five minutes, celebrating the end of this place, smoking that last cigar, clothed in secondhand and borrowed items, talking about ‘how no kids deserved what happened here’. My guess is that with the school closing, he no longer had to hide his opinions.

Those words echoing eternally through the halls of this crumbling school feels poetic. It feels just.

I come here sometimes when I’m having difficulty, when the days feel heavy and I want to feel that heaviness. Sometimes, I stand in the field where the bodies are buried, and I weep. And sometimes I sit with Charlie.