The ghost of neon lights illuminate the alleyway, dim echoes of the past that seep through as her wards fade.
At some point in her teens Kaylen had realized that when others talked about keeping the past at bay, they meant it metaphorically. But Kaylen didn’t have this luxury. If she slipped into longing or nostalgia, the past bled into the present and threatened the future. And right now, she was longing hard for a time when it was easier to not feel longing.
The alley she was standing in flickered. The modern office buildings on either side fading away to reveal the bright and flashing neon lights of a bustling red light district. Kaylen winced. Choking back a sob, she fumbled in her pocket for a small satchel. The tie at the top struggling against the bulging contents, “obliviscus debemus” stitched awkwardly in red around the edges of the fabric. She’d once asked a drunk scholar in a pub how to say “we must forget” in Latin, hoping the dead language flair would only add to the sanctity of the charms.
The wards were a new addition to Kaylen’s arsenal, added during the grief soaked days following her brother’s death. Lying on the floor in her bathroom that was slowly decaying first to a Midcentury modern mint green water closet, through to a Victorian cesspit and then to a medieval field, Kaylen knew she needed stronger defenses in place for the times that she wasn’t strong enough to beat back the past (and for the times in which she didn’t want the past to be gone).
The bags had required a lot of trial and error. They had proven, quite frustratingly, to not be one size fits all. Every place she had needed to guard required a bag filled with items uniquely fitted to that space. And, even more frustratingly, sometimes the items in the charm would just stop working if the items used lost meaning to Kaylen in the present day, which seemed to be the current issue she was having with the neon filled alley.
Scanning the debris along the edges of the path making sure to not let her eyes drift too close to the brick wall at the end of the alley. Kaylen was looking for her mark, a special bit of graffiti she had added to each location in the past in which she placed her charms. This mark didn’t seem strictly necessary, but if she was going to practice time based magic in a modern urban area, she thought she should at least get to engage in some witchy extravagance. Eyes turned down, she stumbled a few times on the uneven bricks in the aging street. Soon, panic was rising as she was sure she had gone too far and must have missed her hastily scrawled pentagram. She didn’t dare look up to see how far she was from the dead end because she knew that her brother’s bleeding body would be sitting half propped up, his blood soaking into the bricks underneath him, his eyes open and unseeing.
Her mark was gone. Her charm was gone. This wasn’t right. Kaylen turned and ran back towards the open end of the alley reaching the street and stopping to catch her breath. She knew she should just place the new charm, forget about the past and go back home, but a voice in the back of her head screamed something she couldn’t hear over the sound of blood pulsing through the knot in her stomach.
With loud gasping breaths, Kaylen steeled herself and began walking back down the alleyway. She counted her steps and when she got to an arbitrarily chosen 23 she stopped and knelt on the ground against the edge of the alley, next to a dumpster and a large pile of discarded clothes. She drew the charm out of her pocket, but before she could place it on the ground a hand grabbed her shoulder. She jumped to her feet prepared to bolt, running without looking behind her.
“Kaylen! Wait!” an impossible voice yelled out. Kaylen froze. Unable to turn around and unable to move forward. It wasn’t possible. Her brother was dead.
Prompt from 31 Days of Ghosts by Martha Bechtel