Revenge14 min read
My Afterlife Delivery: A Ghost, a Moth, and a Promise
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"I am dead," I said out loud to the lamp in my bedroom, and the lamp did not answer.
"Of course you're dead," Ramon Weber mumbled from his armchair as if he had read my mind. "You always say obvious things."
"Don't start," I told him, although he couldn't hear me. "But—"
"But what?" he asked anyway, because he always asked.
"The money keeps coming." I looked at the faint numbers on the bank ledger in my head. "Every day they burn for me and the balance climbs and climbs."
"That is because Andrea never forgets," Ramon said. "She lights more than candles."
"Enough with the buffet of grief," I muttered. "Listen, I used to hate funerals, but now our house smells like incense and honeyed bread every morning. I'm rich, Grandpa."
"Rich and lazy," Ramon said. "You spend it, you spoil the living. Don't go borrowing from the living's comfort."
"Don't be jealous." I drifted towards the window. The world above here is a faded yellow without sunrises, but it has its own small pleasures. "I have Wi‑Fi in my head—that's a miracle."
"Wi‑Fi doesn't feed you," he said.
"There’s another miracle." I leaned my forehead to the glass that wasn't glass. "They sent me a delivery."
The street below dragged by like an old film. Denver Ewing's little iron tricycle hummed past with its familiar "tut‑tut." He shouted his usual: "Daniela! Big one at the depot, pick up!"
"I'll go," I said. "What could be so large it won't fit on his cart? A chest? An idol? A chair for a ghost?"
"Maybe a husband," Ramon grinned. "People do that."
"Don't joke."
At Brynlee Richards' Bènniǎo Depot the air smelled of paper and fried dough. Brynlee herself, chewing sunflower seeds and managing her acolytes of trouble, waved a palm.
"Daniela! You're late. Your family don't play small. This morning there was a man in a box, I had to pry it open."
"A man?" I could not hide the tremor in my voice. "Seriously?"
"You look like you want to see," Brynlee said. "But maybe you should sign first. Once you sign, it's yours to keep."
"I can refuse, right? There's a return policy?"
"You can try to return a husband," Brynlee said, eyes glittering, "but returns aren't always accepted."
"Fine." I signed with a shaky wing.
The box unlatched and the ghost in it unfolded like someone pulling a fine shirt from tissue paper.
"Hi," he said. The word was soft, like a brush.
He was pretty. "Ridiculously," I thought. He looked like an illness made handsome: pale skin like candle wax, eyes too deep and too calm.
"Hello," I managed.
"You are Daniela?" He tilted his head once.
"Yes," I answered. "You… you must be my—"
"Calloway Bailey," he said simply. "My name is Calloway."
"Calloway," I repeated, tasting the foreign syllables. "Welcome to the inventory."
"Thank you." He smiled, and the room turned a little warmer.
"Don't be fooled," Brynlee whispered as we walked out. "Your parents—Andrea and Guillermo—didn't waste the funds. That boy's footprint at the Station came from a high burner."
"Andrea Camacho and Guillermo Andersen," I murmured, proud and guilty. "They always go all out."
"He looks like he just died," Denver said, "like a flower cut too soon."
"Or just tired," I said, and then led Calloway home.
The house filled in an evening. Ghosts came to gossip, to congratulate, to taste the sweet pastries people burn for us. They teased me about the bridal chamber. "Are you having the wedding tonight?" they jeered.
"Not tonight," I said, brushing a phantom pie off the table. "Give us privacy, please."
We retreated to the bedroom. Calloway lay on the bed like a cat, hand under his head. He was quiet but compliant, like a child who knows where to sit to be comforted.
"Are we going to wed?" he asked eventually.
"Do you… want to?" I asked, surprised by my own voice.
"Come on then," he said. "I'll prepare."
I walked to the bathroom, and returned to find the bed crawling with a dark stain I had not invited. My throat closed.
"Calloway!" I cried. "What did you—"
He was unconscious. Blood soaked the sheets like a landlord's bad accounting.
I carried him, light as a feather, to the Underworld Clinic. The doctor, Guillermo Andersen, checked his pulse and then spat an oath.
"You were given a death notice!" he said to me. "How did this happen? His lifespan isn't supposed to be finished!"
"I don't know," I told him. "He came as a delivery."
"They sometimes are mistakes," Guillermo said. "Or miracles." He looked at Calloway with a professional curiosity that beat like a pulse. "We will keep him. Rest, Daniela."
When Calloway opened his eyes again, I flooded him with questions. "What's your name? Where from? How did you die?"
"Calloway," he said. "Calloway Bailey."
"Yes, I know your name." My fingers tangled with the sheet. "Are you… dead?"
He looked at me for the longest time. "Not all the way," he said finally.
"Not all the way?"
He nodded. "I woke up here. Someone told me to wait for you."
"Someone?" I asked.
"Yes," he said. "Someone told me to wait."
We took him home to my family altar, where my picture sat beside his like two halves of a photograph. Red cloth, apples, eggs—my parents had arranged it all with an earnestness I had never seen on their faces.
"She's come with a husband," Andrea Camacho fretted. "What if this is wrong? What if he still breathes above?"
"Your mother should not worry," Ramon said. "The gods are not spiteful."
Yet Calloway did have a pulse. He coughed a little and the old bloodspot on my sheets seemed to laugh at me. I worried that if someone above noticed him here, he might be pulled back before decisions could be made.
"Tell me the truth," I said one night as we sat on the bed. "Do you want to go back?"
He looked down at his hands. "I wanted my end. I wanted peace," he said slowly. "But then I realized peace shouldn't be stolen from anyone else."
"Peace?" I repeated, cold. "What happened to you, Calloway?"
He did not answer for a while. "I thought I deserved it."
"You deserve nothing if you're hiding things," I said sharply. I felt like my insides had been rearranged into questions.
"Why are you angry?" he asked, faint and curious.
"Because—" I swallowed. "Because you don't tell me things. Because last night you left with a thousand gifts and then came back like a loaf of bread on a plate. Because—"
"Because?" He looked up, eyes quick and clear as a bell.
"Because I found a note," I said. "You left a card for me. 'You are beautiful,' it said. Calloway, that made me feel…"
"Happy?" he asked.
"Terrified," I said. "Because then I heard a rumor at the Depot."
"What rumor?" Calloway asked, rising a little.
"A girl told me you were someone's fiancé," I said. The air cooled as I spoke. "She said you had been engaged. That you had a life that you made promises in."
Calloway's face did not change much, but there was a slip, like a page turning unexpectedly. "Catalina," he said softly.
"What?" I leaned forward. "Who is Catalina?"
"She was the one who loved me to pieces and then loved me to poison," Calloway said.
"Catalina Figueroa?" I whispered. The name was a sharp rock. I knew it.
"Yes," he said. "She once kept me close and then tried to hide away the world I saw."
"She is cruel," I said, remembering the plant woman in the hospital and the fierce face that had walked away from me once. "She—"
"She did something terrible," Calloway said. "But I swore—"
"Swore what?" I demanded.
"That when it ended, I would make things right," he said. He looked at me like a man at the edge of a river. "But right now I am still… unfinished."
"This is ridiculous," I told him. "Heaping gifts and then vanishing. If you're engaged, why did you even come? Why the gifts?"
"Because I could not leave you empty," he said. "I wanted you to have comfort."
"The gifts came from above," I said. "The ledger shows huge offerings. Someone up there spends like a king on you."
"It was my guilt," Calloway murmured.
"Guilt?" I asked. "Guilt for what?"
"Because I killed someone," he said. "And because I allowed others to cover it."
The room went very quiet.
"Wait," I said. "You — you killed someone? Calloway!"
"No," he said immediately. "Not like that. I did not intend—"
"Then explain." My voice became a blade. "Explain from the beginning."
He told me the story like a confession and a plea: the adoption, the burden, the cruelty of a woman who would carve joy out of him and then stomp on anything soft. "I tried to leave," he said. "But then—then things happened."
"Did Catalina hurt someone?" I asked.
He looked at me with that soft look that had made me want to climb him like a ladder. "Yes," he said. "She took a girl's life."
I felt the world tilt. "What girl?"
"The one you saw in the hospital," he said. "The one you could not save."
I remembered the rain, the car, the pit. It came back like a filmburn. I could taste the mud.
"Then why are you with her?" I demanded. "Why would you be with someone who did that?"
"I planned to make her confess," he said almost painfully. "I set a trap. I recorded everything. I thought I could let justice work."
"And it failed?" I said.
"It succeeded," he said. "But it cost me my life."
"Cost you your life?" I whispered. "You died doing this?"
"I tried to release her to the authorities," Calloway said. "I was found drugged. They said I was dead. I woke up here, but the plan had already been set into motion."
"You wrote a note," I said. "You came to me."
"I had to," he said. "I wanted to be near the one who had been wronged."
I was trembling, not only because of anger but because of the thin thread of tenderness that knotted with every confession he made.
"Promise me one thing," I said. "If she is the woman who made me a corpse—if she is the one who hid my body—then when she stands before us, I will watch."
He didn't answer. He didn't need to. I had already set my mind.
The human world had consequences. A few days later, the living found a clue. My parents received a call: the police had a new lead, and they wanted them to come identify the remains at a field thirty kilometers out.
"Tomorrow," Andrea said, her voice like folding paper. "They say there will be a person there. Daniela, you should come."
"I will," I said. "I have to."
That night Calloway sat near me. "You don't have to go," he said. "You can stay."
"No," I told him. "I will go. If this is the moment we prove what happened, I will be there. I will make sure justice is not a rumor in the Depot."
"Do you think you can watch her?" he asked finally, an edge of fear in his voice.
"Yes," I said. "I have been a ghost for three years. I can watch more."
Rain came down the next morning and made the world smell like old coffee. They brought the bones out of the ground, the skirt, the evidence. I watched from the rafters as a group of people gathered—police, reporters, neighbors.
A man with a camera pointed and snapped. "Here's the point," the reporter said. "We can finally bring a closure to the family."
"Daniela," my mother whispered, and I heard grief in her little skeletal hand. "We found her."
I scuttled above the scene like a small thing, but I drew closer, drawn to the face that I knew. There she was: Catalina Figueroa, framed by a sea of umbrellas, makeup stiff as if time had carved her expressions in stone.
"That's her," someone said. "That's the woman who had relations with the family."
"I told you," a neighbor muttered.
I could see Catalina's eyes. They were not the soft color of someone who repented. She looked at me, and for half a second—only half—her expression cracked open with a look I knew too well: fear.
They called for a public identification. "Come forward," an officer said. "Please identify the remains."
Catalina stepped up. Her breathing—real or practiced—matched the rain. She looked at the bones, then looked up at my parents. "I… I was there," she said.
"You were there?" my father snarled, his voice hissing from a hollow chest. "What did you do?"
Catalina straightened as if pulling a veil tighter. "I did things for Calloway," she said. "But I didn't mean—"
"You didn't mean to hide the body?" my mother demanded.
"She didn't mean," someone snorted.
Then something happened. Calloway, who had come in disguised as a shadow, stepped into a cold shaft of light. He did not have a voice for the living to hear, but his presence felt like a press. The recordings played—hidden conversations, confessions in the voice of a woman who thought herself safe. The reporter flipped the small device between gloved fingers and, like a priest, set it on the table.
Someone pressed play.
"Catalina," came her own voice from the recording, bright and dangerously calm. "We can't let them see. We must move her. You have to help me."
The crowd went silent. Rain seemed to pause in air.
"Catalina," a policeman said. "Is this your voice?"
She opened her mouth. "I—" she began, and then the sound of her own recorded tone filled the clearing. There were insults, the clank of shovels, the voice of someone telling her to stop, then a whimper, then a laugh. The tape ended.
Catalina's face changed in three seconds: from denial to flush to rage to panic.
"No!" she shouted. "You have no right—"
"You're on tape," my father said, each word a stone. "You're on tape, and we have witnesses."
People around her began to murmur. Someone started filming on a phone. "Look at her," a woman cried. "She buried her friend."
"Shame!" a voice shouted.
Catalina's composure melted like wax. "I didn't mean it!" she cried. "It was an accident. He made me! He—"
"Who made you?" a reporter demanded.
"Calloway!" she shrieked. "He put the idea in me! He—"
Calloway's shadow in the crowd shuddered. He wanted to speak, but he had no voice in that place. Yet the evidence was there: the recordings, the witness statements, the bone, the skirt, the surveillance gaps.
"Turn her over," someone demanded. "We want justice."
Catalina staggered, hands fanning in front of her like a trapped bird. "You're lying!" she screamed. "I loved him!"
"Love doesn't bury a body," my mother's voice cracked. "Love doesn't silence a girl."
"Look at her!" a neighbor said, pointing at her wedding ring. "She has money; she thinks she can pay for silence."
Phones clicked and recorded. People who once had sat at family dinners where Catalina smiled and poured wine now stepped back and hissed. They took photographs. Someone pushed past the officers and shoved a microphone.
"Catalina Figueroa, do you have anything to say?"
She staggered forward, then fell to her knees in the rain. Her shoulders heaved. "Please!" she cried. "Please! I'm sorry! I'm sorry!"
Around her the crowd's reaction evolved: surprise, anger, disgust, triumph. Someone spat. Another crossed herself. A child began to cry.
"You will go to jail," an officer said. "You will answer for this."
Catalina's pleas turned from loud to small fast. Her voice lost its polish and turned into ragged breath. "Please," she begged, and then, when the cameras zoomed in, she tried to smile as she once did at parties—an attempt at grace that failed.
"Look at her," someone whispered near me. "She used to come to the garden club."
"People like her hide evil in pretty boxes," another said.
"This is vindication," my father said, wiping his face. "Three years, Andrea. We waited."
"I waited," Andrea whispered, her eyes on the bones.
Catalina raised her head as if to plead with the world itself. Her face cracked. The crowd saw the collapse: first a flushed defiance, then a pleading, then shame, then a final despair so sharp it stopped the rain.
"You broke a life," someone shouted. "You broke two!"
"I didn't mean—" she whimpered, but the words were hollow.
The police put her in cuffs. People came close to touch her with a finger and hissed as if she were a snake. Someone stepped forward and slapped her; others gasped. "Shame!" they chanted. "Shame on you!"
Her expression flickered—she went from fury to disbelief to denial, then pleading, then total breakdown. "I'm not like that," she moaned. "I didn't—"
"You're going to be charged," the detective said. "We have evidence. You will see the consequences."
The cameras recorded everything—the slap, the falling umbrella, the rain hitting the microphone, Catalina's face dissolving, her mascara carving black tracks like small rivers. Witness phones lifted in unison like a flock of birds taking flight. Someone shouted, "Record her!" and the crowd did.
I drifted above, watching as Catalina's social circle peeled away. Her friends' faces contorted with shock, some turning their backs and walking away. One woman who had once accepted unflattering compliments now spat and joined the chorus of condemnation.
"This is the end," a man said, voice raw. "No more hiding behind a silver spoon."
As they led Catalina away, her knees buckled. She looked back once—the look was not at my parents or at me but at Calloway's shadow, and something like recognition, like a sliver of final guilt, crossed her face.
"She deserves to pay," my mother said softly.
"And she did," Calloway's shadow whispered into the rain.
The arrest was not the end. In the weeks that followed there was a trial that did not need the slow machinery of law to decide the truth in the court of the public. Catalina's reputation collapsed like a cheap set of shelves. Her family withdrew their support. Sponsors severed ties. The social calendar that had once made space for her no longer did.
At the sentencing, the courtroom was packed. The judge read the counts while cameras lined the corridor. When Catalina arrived, her steps were small. She tried to smile, but it did not reach her eyes.
"I didn't mean—" she said through a thin voice.
"You did," a witness snapped.
The judge's hammer came down like an ominous bell. "Guilty," he said. "You planned to conceal a crime and participated in the disposal of a human being. Sentencing: long term."
Catalina's face crumpled. Her pleas turned into sobs that echoed in metal and stone.
Outside, the crowd did not run. They stayed to see the descent. People who once attended her parties now formed a ring of faces, cold and hard, watching her as if she were a spectacle of retribution. Calloway's voice—my husband's voice—was not there to hear, but he had already made his peace with the world.
"Good," someone said near me. "She will not hurt again."
While the law had taken its path, the social punishment was its own dreadful show. Catalina's friends avoided her; her job was terminated; her awards were revoked; photos of her were cropped out of group shots; and a small, persistent wave of public shaming followed her like wet footsteps in a hallway. Journalists dug through her past and found threads of cruelty; witnesses of little wrongs that led up to big sins lined up to tell their stories.
When the sentencing day ended and Catalina was taken away, the crowd's reaction had become a ritual: some clapped softly, some hissed, a few cried. The woman who had been a queen of small social circles had been dethroned in full view of the town.
I floated above the scene, holding Calloway — whose body lay now at peace — and feeling a complicated relief. Justice had come in messy human ways, not in ritual or ledger entries but in the unruly, public, shaming tide that revealed truth and left the guilty exposed.
After the fall of Catalina, life in the Underworld shifted. People spoke of the event for a long time. My name was whispered in sympathetic nods. Calloway and I had a strange, quiet closeness—he who had been trapped by guilt and scheme, and I who had been buried by secrecy.
"Why did you risk everything?" I asked him one misted morning as we sat on a worn couch and he traced circles on the armrest.
"Because if I let her win, I would live with her hands over my conscience forever," he said. "And if you never found out, I couldn't forgive myself."
I frowned. "Do you love me?" I asked bluntly.
He looked at me and the answer did not need more than a breath. "I love what I must atone for. With you I found a kind of forgiveness that isn't bought."
"Can you stay?" I asked. "Or will the living world pull you back?"
"Sometimes the living pull back with cords," he said. "But now that the truth is out, my ledger is lighter. I can exist without eating the world."
"Good," I said simply.
We were married in a modest ceremony—Ramon presiding, Brynlee serving sugared tarts, Denver humming an indecent song. It was not a lavish event but ours: a ritual with red cloth, an apple split between us, a whispered promise.
"Do you promise not to keep secrets?" I whispered.
"I promise," he said.
"Then why do I still sometimes see the woman in the corners?" I asked, brave but nervous.
"Because scars learn to remember," Calloway said. "Because people leave echoes."
We did not pretend our life was simple. There were mornings when I woke and could smell the machine oil of the car that had changed my fate and there were nights when Calloway's sleep was haunted. But the worst had been exposed and made small by light.
Months later, in a small act that felt like a canceling of debts, Calloway walked to the edge of a small field and scattered the ashes of the girl that had been buried and freed. He spoke into the wind, words I didn't hear, and when he came back his face was softer.
"I fulfilled you," he said.
"I was fulfilled by the idea that truth could swim out of darkness," I answered.
"And you?" he asked.
"I want to live," I said. "Even if living now is in a different kind of day."
We kept each other safe in that odd half-life. People came and went. My parents continued to burn for me, a ritual I never wanted to end because it kept them warm and I, at the same time, kept close to them. Ramon found small mischiefs. Brynlee set up a matchmaking table that no one could resist.
One evening, as dusk fell—an afterlife dusk, filtered like old tea—we sat on our small couch.
"Do you remember the first night?" Calloway asked.
"How could I forget?" I said. "You were pale enough to be a statue."
"And you," he said, the corner of his mouth tugging, "were more alive than the living."
"I am still more alive than the living," I said.
He laughed. "I mean it. You found me and you didn't run."
"I could not run," I told him. "You saved me once when I was still human. You carried me out of the road."
"I did," he said. "And you risked everything to come back."
"Is that what love looks like?" I asked.
"Maybe love looks like stubbornness," he said. "Maybe love looks like apology and also like a mattress where two shadows sleep."
We leaned into each other and the yellow dusk folded around us like a blanket. My life, which had been stolen, had given me back a strange new story: a marriage that began in a box, a man who had been both perpetrator and penitent, and a world that could punish publicly and maybe, sometimes, reform.
Outside the window, Denver's cart trundled past, Brynlee waved, Ramon snored. The ledger in my mind ticked, small numbers like the sound of tiny wings. I wrapped my arm around Calloway and whispered, "Stay."
"I will," he said, and in his voice was the quiet proof that promises can be kept, not because they are spoken, but because they are needed.
The End
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