Page 3 of Ghost Ribbon

“Yes.”

I stared at him. Most children looked away when I stared too long. Adults did too, eventually, sometimes within seconds. There was something in my stillness that made people uncomfortable, something they could sense even if they couldn’t articulate it. They felt the absence behind my eyes, the emptiness where warmth should have been.

This boy only blinked at me, unperturbed, curious, utterly unafraid. Then he patted the grass beside him.

“You can sit. If you want. Or stand like a ghost. Ghost is also fine.”

“I’m not a ghost.”

“You look like one.”

“I look alive.”

He studied me with grave concentration, his head tilting again, eyes narrowing slightly as though conducting a thorough assessment.

“No,” he said with absolute certainty. “You look like someone forgot to put the alive part in.”

That was closer to the truth than he could have known. I should have walked away. I should have returned to the villa.

Instead, I sat a few feet away, on the edge of the gravel path where the moonlight touched the tips of my shoes and no further.

The boy seemed pleased by this compromise. “My name is Marco.”

“Alexei.”

He tried the name once under his breath, rolling it around his mouth like a new flavor.

“Al-ex-ei.”

Then again, better, with more confidence. “Alexei.”

He smiled like he had accomplished something important. “You are from the big house.”

“Yes.”

“My papa works there sometimes.” He picked at a loose thread on his trousers, winding it around his finger. “My mama too. They scrape the floors.”

I looked at him. “Scrape?”

He nodded and made a small motion with his hand, dragging invisible dirt from invisible stone, miming the motion of labor.

“When the parties finish. When the rich people spill wine or throw food or walk mud inside. Papa says the floors in houses like that are never really clean because too many bad men stand on them.”

That time my mouth did move. Not enough to be a smile. Barely a twitch at the corner of my lips. But enough for him to gasp, his whole face lighting up with triumph.

“I saw it!”

“You saw nothing.”

“I saw your mouth do this.” He pinched his own lips into a tiny crooked line, demonstrating. His eyes sparkled with mischief.

I looked away, up at the stars scattered across the black velvet sky.

Marco laughed. The sound was strange.

I found it very irritating when other people laughed, but the sound he made moved something in me that had no name, something I hadn’t known existed, buried so deep beneath the void that I had never encountered it before.

“What are you doing out here?” I asked.