Reposted for Fandango’s Flashback Friday.

First Posted August 2020

Photographer Unknown

Sometimes she traveled by car, sometimes she traveled by bus a few times she even traveled by air because she liked the little snacks they used to give you  after you were settled in for your flight.

Verona’s  favorites were the salty almonds.

There were times when Verona had no choice but to walk to the house with the rats in the walls or the apartment with the dishwasher that would start on it’s own – in the middle of the night of course. Once she even had to walk to a house in the middle of the winter  where an even more weary traveler then herself took refuge in the upstairs closet to keep warm and died there- as far as I know that traveler is still there.

Verona isn’t there, she moved on after spending  a few nights in the kitchen where she sat on a chair with her feet up on the kitchen counter and watched the curtains in the window above the sink sprinkle dust into the sink below it.

If you looked through the window, you would have seen her sitting there eating her salty almonds, a pale figure with no place to rest her bones for longer then a moment or two.

To Verona those moments felt like a month, maybe a few weeks at the most, but the truth is Verona has been visiting  countless houses – the abonded ones and the freshly painted ones the ones that seem to have always been there as the world grew and fell around them- for  so many years that she has lost count and all of those houses and those roads and the fields have blended together in her mind’s eye to maybe one or two houses and a couple of roads.

She has always been partial to the kitchens and pressed, she could tell you what color they were and what they smelled like. But the rest of the houses and the sheds and the cabins were faceless in her mind’s eye.

One night she woke up and Verona was in a field, standing on the foundations of house that burned down to the ground  and took with it everyone inside of it when it  finally fell.

The house in the field was just as isolated in life as it was now in death and nobody was there when the fire raged and when the embers cooled and the crows and the  eagles and a few stray dogs took away all that was left of the occupants,.

In that quiet field in the middle of nowhere, Verona looked up into the sky and it was full of stars.They looked so bright and they seemed so close that she thought if she reached up she could touch them.

To travel there- over to that pale star,  maybe to that one high above her head, her hand reached up to one star after another and she could see, she could almost hear the places she could haunt- roads that slithered and snaked through fields under skies with dying Suns and to  small mangled moons slowly crashing into dead oceans on the planets they  spun around, to homes full of dust and bones on the sides of mountains buried under ice or bathed in poisonous clouds-.

Closing her eyes, Verona  filled her lungs with the night air and as she did she could see it. She would be a shade on the crumbling  wall, a face reflected on pools of water a figure drifting across fields of sand under skies engorged with raging storms and endless nights on world after world.

The cries and laments  on these worlds would sound different. The skies would  look different- even the air would smell different and the sorrow was bound to taste different

and Verona would have eternity to haunt these worlds.

An eternity.

” Mars ” Ray Miller

Made By Pernille Writing Challenge:

The Ghost That Traveled The Universe.