The Visitor by Marin James
2025 Winner
This was the wrong ghost.
She couldn’t see it, and it hadn’t spoken, but she knew. She could sense these things. Smell them, sometimes. Most spirits announced themselves with a scent. And this one smelled wrong. It was lilacs. Or maybe lavender. It smelled like a growing thing, when everything around it was dead and dying.
This place had been a farm once. What was left of the silo stood like a gasp, its half mouth begging for breath amidst blackened wood and graffitied brick. The house slumped in tattered beams. Rusted metal clawed through the dust. Even the soil had died, nature not bothering to reclaim anything. There was no moss slithering over floors, no mice burrowing for shelter. Only the wind and rain touched this place.
And Amber.
She knew, when she’d first arrived, that there would be ghosts. She could sense this, too.
A family had died here in the fire. A mother, father and two children, the youngest only three. She wondered what they remembered. What they knew. What they could tell her about their life and what happened after. If they could assure her that it’s not that bad, that the next life is better. She wondered if they were like her. If they too longed for things to go back to the way they were, if they too felt shut out, abandoned and left just out of reach of something they could see but not touch.
Most of the time, Amber felt like a ghost herself. Or like an angel, sent out of heaven and punished with a human body, cursed to have feasted on holiness and never taste it again.
Had this ghost seen heaven too?
She breathed in that floral scent. Took out her pendulum. And, once her nerves calmed and the weight stilled, asked her first question.
“Am I with someone who lived on this farm?”
Despite the slight breeze, the pendulum didn’t move.
“Did you know the family who lived here?”
Still no movement.
“Do you have any sort of connection to this place?”
No, the unmoving pendulum answered.
Maybe she was wrong. Maybe there was no spirit. But she could feel it. She felt that desolation, that longing – the same that was inside of her, echoed right back.
“Do you have any sort of connection to me?” she asked on a whim.
The breeze stilled. And the weight swayed to the right.
Yes.
“Grandma?”
I’m here, Amber. I’ve always been here.
She felt the words more than heard them. The pendulum thrummed in her grip. The string shook, as if held against a set of vocal chords.
Amber had so many questions, so much she wanted to say. But all she could manage was a breathless “How?”
In answer, the lavender scent swelled. Her surroundings distorted. The ruined farm rebuilt itself, flowers darted from the dirt. Walls appeared around her and she was in her grandparents’ flower shop. She was eight years old, helping her grandma make a bouquet of tulips and field greens. Another contortion and she was dropping a vase in the hospital room. She was at the doctor’s office. Her aunt’s garden. She was in the pew, wondering why there were chrysanthemums on the coffin when her grandma had always said they reminded her too much of death.
The church blurred and Amber was at the foot of the stairs, pinning the carnation to Maddie’s wrist. Her mom snapped photos, saying how cute it was they were going to the dance as friends, while her dad looked on in silence, his face unreadable as always. Days earlier, Amber had asked if he still had her grandma’s things in storage.
“Some of the boxes got damp,” he’d said. Then colder, voice lowered, “I got rid of the letters you sent her.”
Amber staggered from the memory, back to the farm. Back to her exile.
I’m sorry I couldn’t keep your secret, her grandma said. But I’ve always tried to look after you.
She remembered the cardinal that always perched on her windowsill on her birthday. Seeing her grandma’s name in the address of an apartment listing. The single tulip that sprouted from her lawn last spring.
A presence had always been with her. It wasn’t a sign for Amber to search for, a spirit she had to summon. It was a gift, waiting to be received.
She set the pendulum down. With a breath of wind, a layer of dust rose to bury it. Amber let the earth take it back, no longer needing it. She could see the ghosts now. She watched a father rake through hay in the barn. Children chased a cat on the porch. One of them somersaulted into the garden, which was at once dense with sunflowers and shrouded with ash. Amber had opened a new eye, and time’s veil had been lifted. What was dead was alive. What was taken still lingered. Amber was here and she was not. She was alone and she was with her grandma. With her family.
With Maddie.
You haven’t seen her since, have you? her grandma said.
As soon as they’d arrived at the dance, Amber had told Maddie that it was a mistake, that they shouldn’t have gone together. She’d told her not to see her anymore, not to call or message her. She’d deleted their texts, unfriended her on every platform.
Years passed. Boyfriends came and went. And eventually Maddie became just another ghost.
Her grandma had taken this secret – the greatest joy and most haunting shame Amber had ever felt – to her grave. And Amber had buried it even deeper.
She sent you a friend request the other day, didn’t she?
Amber could sense her grandma’s presence beside her, could almost hear that teasing laugh of hers. She’d always found amusement in knowing things she shouldn’t, in knowing Amber even better than Amber knew herself.
Have you accepted it yet?
Amber couldn’t bring herself to answer, couldn’t bear to continue being a disappointment to everyone around her. She couldn’t even look at her grandma. She watched a ghost on the porch, crouched over a washboard. She wrung a cloth into a pail of cloudy water then lifted her head, sighing. She gazed into the field and scanned her surroundings, staring longingly as if seeing the same devastation Amber saw, as if searching for a sign that she wasn’t dead and doomed to an endless echo of the same suffering she’d endured in life.
Her gaze lingered on Amber. The ghost frowned, perhaps out of jealousy, or perhaps accusing Amber of intruding on something she wasn’t meant to see, inviting herself somewhere she didn’t belong.
Amber pulled out her phone, scrolled to the notification she’d been avoiding for weeks.
She didn’t expect Maddie to forgive her. She didn’t think she’d ever talk to her again. But maybe, with the years between them and an explanation of what Amber had felt, Maddie would understand. And maybe they could start again.
“I wish you could have met her,” Amber said to her grandma. She turned to where she’d felt her presence. But if she’d been as visible as the other ghosts, Amber couldn’t see her. She couldn’t smell her either. That lavender scent had left.
“Grandma?”
A speck of gleaming red fluttered across the sullen sky. With a playful trill, the cardinal circled the farm, then perched on a post marking the path back into town.
It’s not too late, it sang.
Marin James is a writer and graphic designer. Currently working on her debut short story collection, Marin lives in Toronto with her dog and several dozen plants. You can find her on Instagram as @hailmarin.