Asylum by Colleen Fullin

Do you remember the night we went out to the old asylum? We were sixteen; it was September. The leaves crunched with the gravel under our Keds as we used Maglites to chase shadows off the gray windowpanes of the dormitories. The asylum had been shut down years ago and left abandoned. Everyone said it was haunted. Skitting between the white buildings that crumbled asbestos, trampling through overwrought weeds, we were ghost hunting. When you see one, you told me, just say, “Boogey, be gone,” as if these really were the ghosts of our sad childhoods, harmless spirits that could be dispelled with a bit of courage and disbelief.

That was the same year you swallowed pills, though they weren’t enough to get you to the other side. You always looked like you didn’t quite believe in it: yourself, the world, me. You put two fingers to your jugular when you thought no one was looking, testing the pulses. It was few years later that you finally did make it over, having choked down the bitter capsules of your sadness.

But before that, at the asylum we shone our flashlights into the dark night and watched our breaths take shape in the brisk air. You told me you had lived eight years with a father and now eight years without. It was seeming to you like a long time. It was seeming to you like an emptiness that wouldn’t be filled. I asked if you had ever seen one, a ghost. “No,” you said. Then through gritted teeth: “Not once.”

I was away when you finally did it. I didn’t hear until later. My mother told me over breakfast, the day after Thanksgiving when I was home. I just nodded and poked at my eggs with the edge of my knife. What else was there? We’d grown apart. It had been a long time.

But what I remember most about the night at the old asylum was that you wandered off. Probably, you just wanted to have a cigarette where my condescending eyes couldn’t find you. Our friendship was already fading. But that’s when I saw one, a ghost. Walking steadily toward me, looking sallow and pale and so hollow.

And I stood there, helpless, alone, whispering your stupid magic words and trembling because, deep down, I knew they wouldn’t work.

Colleen Fullin is a student in the MFA program at Emerson College. Her work has appeared in Northwind, 10,000 Tons of Black Ink, Mouse Tales Press, and Bellow Literary Journal. She lives in Boston, where she teaches in Emerson’s First-Year Writing Program.