The Forgetting Kind

There was the ghost of an old Viking in the garden when I was a child. He'd stared down at me with large, unseeing eyes, and I'd simply stared back. Only my eyes saw much.

He'd lingered for a while, back when a couple of hours cast the illusion of eternity, but when I grew up, time moved all too swiftly. Yet for the time, when I was a child, there was a Viking in the garden.

An axe hung almost limply from a bloodied hand when he didn't seem to be bleeding. But he must have done, he was dead, after all. Whispy and willowed strands matted about braids, plastered to a forehead that shone like the sword. Dragon smoke plumed before his lips, kissing the crisp autumn air. Which was odd because he didn't breathe either.

I tilted my head. "Is it a costume?" A brave comment for a child who asked the dead man.

Yet nothing was said. The silence whispered between us instead, parting its way through the dew and the grasses. He just stared, and I stared back.

"Is it real?" I tried again, only I gestured at the sword. "I always wanted a sword; father has one."

No response.

His face was pale, but something in his cheeks sang of life. Which was strange also because life had left him some time ago.

"Would you like to see it?"

I'd asked my father for a sword once.

A foolish, childish thing of a request, spun upon a dreamer’s spindle and caught forever in my web. The idea clinging to me like the dead do old houses.

My father had laughed. “A sword?” He echoed. “My dear, what need you have of a sword?”

“For battle,” I had replied as if it were obvious. It was entirely his fault; he had been reading me the tales of the Knights of the Round Table. And a knight needed her sword.

He had been younger then, but I had been younger too.

“Only knights need swords,” my father said.

I’d held my fists at my sides in frustration. “I can be a knight.”

“Do you have a horse? Knights need a mount.”

“Then I’ll get both - a sword and a horse!”

Something I would grow to know was adult amusement moved across his features as he gazed down upon me then. “Ah, but do you have a quest?” Tilting his head to one side. “You see, every knight needs their quest.”

I glanced at the old Viking then and glimpsed something. Maybe a quest, maybe a story. Maybe something else entirely.

But at the time, I’d paused and pondered a moment. “How do I get one of those?”

I remembered the ghost. I don't remember my father's answer.

I suppose I'd have to guess.

I approached the ghost man, licking droplets against dress, the creeping fringes of winter against my neck. Caution caught me, but I dared to reach for his hand, half expecting my little limb to pass through like a dove in fog. It didn't. He was solid, material, real.

He was so cold, so as a child, I told him as such.

I tugged him towards the house and towards the window and didn't prepare myself for him to move either. But he did. He stumbled some ways forward as though he had not moved in a long time. As though he had not played at being alive, even if he was not.

He halted beside me as I tipped forward, leaning on tiptoes; he tipped closer, too. There were some who may have deemed him a mindless wraith of a man, one who wouldn't have followed the gaze of a child to look at a sword. Even when he had a proper one.

But he did.

I loomed a single finger before us and made it out through the misted pane. "There!" I chimed.

A sword hung upon the wall of a dining room just past the glass, an ornate yet rusted thing. Framed by a world of stone and reflections. Outside, I'd found my own, the strings of a quest playing at my heart. I even thought I caught the ghost of a smile flicker across the Viking man. Just for a second. Like the last glow of a candle before the wax grew cold once again.

He stayed beyond that, and I visited him more over those coming days. Each day growing brighter than the last for an autumn of cloud and drizzle. I pointed him out the birds and attempted to sing their song, I picked him a dying flower and parted its petals, I chased the few bees around in dances. He listened, he peered, he watched me go.

He never spoke, only dragged the blade along, a drag path traced behind his boots in the earth. He watched the world as though he was seeing it for the first time. As though he had forgotten.

One day, I watched him pluck a rose, perhaps the most he ever moved. And with its scarlet skirts, it was hard to tell where the flower ended and the blood on his hands began. He outstretched a palid, expired limb and passed the rose my way. I paused before I took it, but then I smiled and accepted the gift, a little girl's giggle spilling from my tongue. A thorn bit into my palm and blood spilt across my hands too.

It had sprung forth such a brilliant idea I'd ran inside without another word, climbed upon the dining room table and yanked the sword free from the wall. Grinning madly with red, slick hands. The queen of Camelot.

When I returned, I'd dragged my weapon alongside my Viking friend, matted hair and bloodied limbs side by side.

"Look, I have one too!"

My father had shouted till I swore his throat would bleed too. But he couldn't bar me from a friend he couldn't see, that was too admit the madness.

Another day, a bird fell from the tree in a tumble of feathers, Icarus style, and broke its neck. My friend had placed down his sword to scoop the creature up in his dead hands, encasing it in cold palms and with a blow of his bygone breath, opened them again to watch the bird fly away. It wasn't until it had vanished in a flurry of browned leaf and cloud that I realised it was a white dove when before it had been a sparrow. Which was odd because that was impossible. Wasn't it?

But it must have been for the next morning, he too was gone.

I'd wandered around the tree and about the grasses, peaking into the corners and the rose bed. I asked the bees and even another bird where he had gone.

"Have you seen my friend?"

None of them knew.

"He has a sword, have you seen him?"

None of them answered.

I'd glanced up at the roof and spied a pale white dove perched there. But there was a sword in the houses and stories to be had, perhaps even a quest. So it would be odd to stay outside any longer.

Maybe he hadn't been real, maybe he'd been a ghost, after all.

And although I remembered for a time, remembered when I forgot what my father had said about quests, by the time I grew up?

I tend to forget.

I suppose I'd have to guess about that too.