Where I End and You Begin by Andra Brynn

“There was this guy, who tried to commit suicide with a gun to the head. But the caliber was too small or something, and even though he had a bullet in the brain, he was still breathing. So he was rushed to the hospital and put on life support, but the doctors knew that as soon as he was off life support the brain would swell up and he would die. So they had his family come through so they could say goodbye to him. Only his daughter, she was a little girl... she refused to go. She didn’t want to see him like that.
    “So after the family comes and says goodbye, they take him off life support and let him pass. Except later that night the call button in the room is pushed, and a nurse goes in to see him. And he’s sitting up, wide awake, and he says, ‘Where’s Annie? Where’s my little girl?’ The nurse doesn’t know what to say, so she tells him Annie will be there soon before rushing out to get the doctor, but when they get back the man is dead.
    “After he’s gone, they clear out the room, but the next night the call button comes on again, even though the room is empty, and the nurse goes to turn it off, but she sees the man standing there in his hospital gown, at the window, and he says, ‘Where’s Annie? Where’s Annie?’ Over and over again like that.
    “This was a different nurse, so she goes to tell someone that there’s a patient in the room, but of course when they come back he’s gone. And he stays in that room, and every once in a while he’ll reappear, asking for his daughter. But she never comes because no one wants to tell a little girl the ghost of her father is lingering in the hospital waiting for one last glimpse of her... so he stays there and waits.”
    Silence fills up the ward. Daniel isn’t looking at me. He’s studying the dry leaves skittering across the floor and gathering in the corners. There’s a heavy, musty smell in the air, and when he reaches out to touch one of the old beds, trying to lift the sheet away, the linens break, so stiff and fragile from years of disuse and the elements that they have decayed into dead plant matter. They fold, disintegrate, their molecules rising into the air, flying out into the world, disorganized and meaningless.
    “That was horrible,” he says, watching the dust rise.
    “You asked for it,” I say. “There are plenty of things that are real that are way more horrible than that.”
    He doesn’t answer, just stares at the sheet falling to pieces in his hand.
    “Hey.”
    We both turn to see Jibril in the doorway. He gives the ward an appreciative look. “Nice. We should have stayed down here. The floor upstairs is so rotten we didn’t want to trust it.”
    I heard your footsteps, I want to say, but it was probably just the building settling as night comes on.
    “Anyway,” Jibril continues, “we should get going. It’s starting to get dark.” He sighs. “It’s better to do this in the early afternoon on Sundays, but I’m out of here tomorrow morning until Sunday night.”
    “Going home?” I ask him.
    He nods. “Just a weekend. Good to get away, get some home-cooked food, do all that midterm shit.”
    “Right,” I say. It sounds nice. I wonder if I could borrow Jibril’s family for a while.
    Daniel turns to me. “Shall we?” he says, gesturing to the door, and the spell of my ghost story is broken.
    “Sure.” I step toward him. “So you’re coming over tomorrow to help me study, right?”
    He nods. “A promise is a promise,” he tells me.
    “You’d be surprised how often that isn’t true,” I tell him. Then I walk past and follow Jibril down the hall.

.0.
    I dream of the hospital that night. Dreams are a bardo. You can get caught in them, suspended between one life and the next, unable to move on. Dreams are full of danger.
    In my dream, it is many years ago, but the hospital is the same as I saw it only the day before. Patients shuffle from tattered bed to tattered bed. Doctors and nurses bend over an