The world is different than she remembers.

She used to listen to music from a radio she kept on the table in the living room right next to the fine china and the books. But the women play their music from a plastic pink mushroom controlled by a little box they left on the kitchen table.

It’s different from how she remembers.

The house, she means, is very different from how she had kept it in her life. 

There isn’t a cabinet full of china but there is still a book shelf.

It had different books than what she and Elspeth used to keep around.

But it isn’t bad.

None of this is bad, not really.

She likes how the women celebrate Halloween for instance.

They bake cookies in the shapes of ghosts and faintly she could hear them discuss what horror movies they would watch that night.

She thinks Elspeth would like horror movies.

She tries to remember her, remember their last Halloween with the love of her life.

When you’re dead, you only have the living and your memories to keep you company. It makes sense that she tries so hard to hold onto the smallest most inconsequential details in every memory. 

So she thinks long and hard about every detail from that night.

From the sound of laughing children in the streets to the costumes they wore when they came knocking at her door. 

For a moment, she thinks, she has the memory in her hands, a pink dress that fell to her knees with flowers on the skirt. She carried a bowl of freshly refilled candy in her arms, an orange bowl with white polka dots that clashed horribly with their decorations. 

Elspeth loved that stupid bowl.

She remembers that much, standing in the grocery store and wrinkling her nose at the sight of the horrid little bowl. But Elspeth had insisted they buy it so they could give out Halloween candy with proper Halloween colors. It was a stupid argument. She let her win it because it made her happy.

She wonders if the women that live here now would like that stupid bowl as much as Elspeth had. The short woman would, she likes to collect odd things. The tall woman indulges her because that’s what love is.

Compromise and indulgence.

But that isn’t what she wants to remember.

She wants to remember that night.

She wants to remember if they had forgotten to lock the door.

That the one time they forgot to lock the door had been the thing that damned them.

But her mind wanders to a future she doesn’t belong to.

To the women who live here now, the lovers who have a much kinder life than she ever had. Not a perfect one, they never will live a perfect life. The cynic in her refuses to believe that things can ever be perfect so long as people keep calling them different.

But kinder.

That doesn’t matter right now.

She doesn’t want to think about a life she never had.

She wants to think about what happened.

They were usually meticulous when locking the house, even closing the shutters and drawing the curtains. Only allowing themselves to let their touches linger until they were sure they couldn’t be seen.

She remembers doing that just the same as she remembers standing in the kitchen. Their kitchen was filled with failed recipes because Elspeth was insistent that they could combine their food and still have something palatable. They had gotten close a few times, but they never were strong cooks.

Still, she remembers trying to come up with Hispanic and Scottish fusion food.

It made Elspeth happy when she tried.

Just like how the tall woman looks so excited that her cookies didn’t come out burnt.

Their music changes, a language she doesn’t know and it reminds her of a Spanish love song that she had listened to endlessly. Elspeth had gone to the other side of town to buy the record for her.

The women that live in her home now don’t have to travel across town to get their music, it doesn’t matter what language it’s in. They simply have it all at their fingertips

But she didn’t get to have that.

So it doesn’t matter to her.

What matters to her is that she remembers dancing to the love song.

They liked to dance a lot.

Dances that her parents had taught her in their kitchen when she was a little girl. Back when she still believed the world was good. The world always seemed much kinder when she stood in a kitchen surrounded by people who loved her.

When she was young, it was her family.

When she grew older, it was Elspeth.

Now that she is dead, she simply watches the two women. Their dances are uncoordinated and silly. But they do it with the biggest grins on their faces and she wishes she had had that free happiness they have in abundance.

She didn’t.

They were afraid, so very afraid of being found.

Still in the darkness of their kitchen, filled with Spanish and Scottish fusion foods they tried to make, they danced. They held onto one another, just a little drunk, while they danced and said their vows just the same as they had done every year before. Their vows were renewed with a kiss because even though they couldn’t marry in the eyes of God or the law, they were happy. 

She’s happy that the women who live here now get to marry.

Silently, she hopes they’ll choose to have a Halloween wedding. It would be nice to celebrate love with someone else for once. Maybe, just maybe, this damned house would let her leave to watch their wedding.

She could never get married in front of her friends or family but these two could…

She wants that for them, a long and happy life.

One that isn’t brought to a cruel end by one curtain and a nosy neighbor.

In her life, they didn’t see two people in love.

They saw filth that needed cleaning.

On November first, they dragged her and Eslpeth out of their homes screaming and fighting. The two of them were against the many who deemed them worthy of a horrible punishment.

She doesn’t want to remember how asphalt felt on her skin when they dragged her out of her home. Nor does she want to remember the feeling of a bat colliding with her skull or how warm the puddle of her blood was.

She doesn’t want to remember crying out to Elspeth.

Or waking up alone in this house.

A cold and broken shell of the once warm haven…

She’s glad people like them found what had once been their haven. Overjoyed that they have turned it into a house of love just like it had once been decades before. A soft love like the one she used to have.

She had known it the moment the realtor had shown them her home.

The only couple she didn’t scare away.

Two sapphics that loved Halloween almost as much as they loved each other.

“Florence, the cookies are burning!”

“Crap! Sorry, I was getting the Halloween candy. Could you wash the candy bowl?”

“Babe… this is the ugliest candy bowl I’ve ever seen.”

“What? It’s orange and got polka dots that’s like super cute!”