Sweet Romance18 min read
Married to a Ghost, Trading Coffin Boards for Jokes
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I remember the first night they closed the coffin lid and locked it from the outside. I remember the smell of lacquer and the heavy quiet, like a room holding its breath. I remember the old nursemaid's hand, rough and warm, squeezing mine until the knuckles whitened.
"You relax, little wife," Guadalupe Jorgensen said into my ear. "He was a good boy. He will like you."
"He will? He is a skeleton," I whispered back, and my voice shook in a way I hadn't planned. "He's a skull. Who likes a skull?"
Guadalupe laughed and then, quieter, she said, "He liked music once. He liked poems. You may make him smile."
They meant well. They meant to make a living out of a superstition: a living bride paired, in death, with a dead heir. The village had swallowed the story about the family's curse like hot soup. Families traded daughters for bread; who was I to refuse logic when it had a coin at the center? My mother had traded me with a trembling hand and a face that said both apology and necessity.
The three characters carved on the ancestral tablet looked like they were written by a steady hand: EZEKIEL ABE — his name on a dark, varnished plank.
I hated it. I hated that my new bed smelled of cedar and old breath. I hated that the pillow that awaited me had no warmth. I hated that my own hands would have to touch a shape and call it husband.
"At least he's handsome," Guadalupe added when she thought I could hear no more, and she nudged my elbow. "People said he was fair like a poem."
"Handsome," I muttered, "isn't the kind of thing that holds back bandits."
We rose in the middle of the night and carried me to the sedan. I climbed in pretending that I believed this was a festival of my choosing. The road smelled like the river after rain. There were lanterns, and there were men who talked too loudly in the dark, and there was a certain smugness to their speech that made my heart fold in on itself.
"A wedding?" one of them said. "She is actually beautiful. The little lamb will do."
"Drink first," another said. "We put it in her cup. Will be easier that way."
My fingers tightened around the wooden edge of the coffin when they placed it behind me. I heard their plans like a story told quickly, a cruel bedtime fable.
"Someone is going to make a fortune tonight," they said. "She'll be pleasant."
When they handed me the cup for the ritual, I did what any sensible woman would do. I tilted my face to the dark and poured the cup into my own sleeves.
"Are you sure that's wise?" Guadalupe hissed later when she saw the sleeve damp.
"Very," I said. "I cannot be drugged by men who think my life is a toy."
They locked the room. They thought the wood would hold me. They left pathetically confident men at the door to pestle and jostle each other's egos. Then they left entirely.
I opened the coffin for myself because I could not bear the thought of lying down in a room where silence had teeth. The plaque fell from the stand with a polite clatter when I touched it. I read his name out loud, because names anchor things to the world.
"Ezekiel Abe," I said. "Not a bad name for a skeleton."
The voice that answered came like a lazy bell.
"Because it's mine," he said.
I swear I sat up and laughed because terror and surprise and exhausted anger all meet at a place where you either scream or you grin. "I should have known you were a joker," I told the air.
"You should not have poured my wine down your sleeve," he said. "I was hoping for a better first impression."
"You have a mind for commentary, then," I said. "Good. You will need it."
Later, while the robbers outside debated the night and how well they would do, I heard men outside the door speak with the stupidity of certainty.
"She'll be soft in an hour," one said. "By morning, you'll have what you want."
"She's stubborn," another replied. "I salted her with a still potion. She'll sleep like a lullaby."
My blood ran quick. They believed they had already purchased me. The thought of it made my hands go to things within reach; I could feel the shape and plan behind every inch of my small body. I had trained for more than one lifetime, and if life taught me anything it was to hold your breath until the breath of your enemies left them.
I stole from the altar the ancestral board — his board — and I took it with me. I needed leverage. I needed proof that I belonged to the house and not to the hands that coveted my body.
"Sorry, brother," I whispered to the plank. "I need this."
Then something happened.
Wood lifted with a force I could feel in my ribs. The coffin lid slammned like a judgement.
"Have you dropped my tablet?" a voice mused with infuriating calm.
It was not a thing you expected to be irritated by in a coffin. It was infuriating because it was elegant and because it sounded amused. I trembled.
"Hello?" I demanded, and the bed's cold seemed to come closer.
"I'm in the middle, aren't I?" he answered. "You must be Imogen."
"Who else did you think I would be," I said, because laughter is the best weapon when you cannot punch.
He was as sarcastic as he was polite. It made me furious.
"Say something romantic," I said, absurdly.
"I am a ghost," he said. "I cannot be romantic by law."
"You could try," I said.
Later he touched the edge of my sleeve and the cold went to my bones in a way that felt honest. It was a deliberate, quiet chill. He moved with the odd grace of someone who had possessed the world once and no longer needed to hurry.
"Do not be afraid," he said, almost lazily.
"Afraid of you? Of being your 'bride'? Of being sold?" I said. "Yes."
"Then don't be," he answered. "You are the only one who did not pour the drink into the carpet."
"If I had poured it into the floor you would have been disappointed." My voice was small and loud at the same time. "What's your name? What if I called you... 'Ezek'?"
"My name is Ezekiel Abe," he said. "But if you must call me 'Ezek'—call me nothing at all. Titles are for the living."
We started a strange bargain then. He would not harm me, he said. He had no taste for harming the living — at least, not the living who smelled like food.
"You are one to judge," I told him.
"I judge what amuses me," he said.
The nights passed. There is a rhythm the dead adopt when the living are sleeping — a slow glide, a long patience. At night he hovered beside me and spoke. He made me tell a story out of a book I had read, and he paid attention. He asked me about things a dead person would not ask: the sound of my laugh, the way my hands folded around a bowl, what kind of jokes made me bite my lip.
"Why do you care?" I asked once. "If you are dead, why bother with my laugh?"
"Because you made the incense burn," he said. "Because no one else could."
I had not realized the incense would do more than make smoke. I had not expected the small, almost imperceptible thing that followed. The fire that I lit, the first honest bright flame I had let myself have since my mother's hands smoothed me into a marriageable shape, seemed to translate into something else for him. His fingers took a shape I could nearly see. A line of outline, a palm, a cheek. One morning I woke and thought I saw dim features, like a face painted in fog.
He told me that only something my hand had touched could anchor him in pieces. He said it like fact, like a man describing the weather. The slight warmth of the ash seemed to have given him permission to be. "You have fed me my body," he would say, and yet his voice was always amused.
We began to exist in a politeness of our own. He teased. I scolded. He saved me from men who smelled of spoons and coin. He told me about a hill where he had once read, where he had once argued with the sky about how the world would treat him. He liked to say, "I was alive once, which is a sentence too long to be wasted."
It was ridiculous, and it was tender.
There was a pattern, though, that made the house bitter to me. The second son, Ramon Cleveland, limped in and limped out. He had returned from a trip with a face like a negotiation. He wore charm like a cloak and cruelty like a ring. He noticed me sharpenedly.
"Who is she?" he asked one day, when he saw me cross-stitch a small cloth in the courtyard.
"That is Imogen," said Claudia Benson, with a small smile that would have been nicer if her eyes did not narrow a fraction. "She is to my son's bride in name."
Ramon's eyes slitted. He smiled.
"How very convenient," he said. "So, she is safe then?"
"She will be well-fed," the old woman said.
"Because we care," Ramon said, with a voice that had the shape of a promise you pay for later.
He sniffed at the life in the house — at the food, at the table talk, at the incense smoke that always seemed to pull itself toward where I sat. When he laughed it was like blades tapping.
From the beginning he seemed determined to undo the small kindnesses that were being offered to me. I'd catch him sometimes, looking where he should not have, or slipping hands into places that were not his. "You are pretty," he said once, confronting me near the market. "Pretty and strange."
"I am poor and hungry," I answered, which was the truer description.
He had an army of excuses and a surgeon's focus. When he wanted something, he planned it like a cartographer. He found a petty priest who owed him a single favor and convinced that man to help with a darker craft.
"You cannot let this stand," he said to that man. "If he rises and belongs to her, where is my advantage? If we break his chance, we keep ours."
They meddled with the rites. They broke into halls. They worked with smoke and threats. Someone punished my pocket of breaths with sleeplessness. They tried to steal the token I kept: a small jade pendant left in my palm by Elijah — no, by a kind old hand that believed in keeping the brave. That token had been given to me the night I refused to drink.
"Destroy it and you destroy their luck," Ramon told his cronies.
I almost lost that charm once. I had tucked it under my blouse the night the cipher of the plans unfolded: a man was meant to replace an altar, a vial was switched, a bowl had salt where sugar should be. They aimed at the ritual that would anchor Ezekiel in flesh.
I woke to noise and found Ramon in my room, grinning like a man who thinks his hands are clean. Before I could raise a sound he had duct-taped the jade to the ground and crushed it with a boot.
"Foul," I cried, and through the haze of my anger I hit him. Blood tried to rise in my mouth. He laughed and walked out.
"Next time you won't be so lucky," he said.
I swore a quiet oath that night. The kind of oath that is made of ice and will not melt. He would pay.
Months folded like a fan. The day they called the ceremony — a strange service to bring Ezekiel his body — arrived. Blas Stone, the messenger reputed to speak both ways, had prepared. "We only have seven days," he'd told Claudia with a look that said the debt was owed and the debt would be paid. "One mistake and the spirit scatters. One theft and ashes sail."
"We will not let thieves walk," Claudia said.
But Ramon has a kind of persistence a dog has in the face of fences.
The night before the life would be returned — or so we hoped — I was shoved into my bed and a cloud of sleep smoke hit my face like a hand. My last clear memory before the world dissolved was of Ramon smiling above me, and his voice saying, "Sleep well, widow."
I woke pinned to the floor with pain like a hammer and a sunlight that made my head tilt. I tasted metal. I rolled and found Ramon kneeling with the jade in his hand, breaking it. With his heel he crushed what little charm had been left. He watched me as if the sight was a performance.
"Your silly charm," he said. "Could not save your poor husband."
He meant to rip me from the world of chances.
But then the doors slammed open.
"Stop."
The voice belonged to Ezekiel.
It was a different voice than what I remembered — thinner, shifted, warmer. It moved like a candle in a draft. He hummed as the air threw shapes.
We all stopped, like birds hearing a hawk.
Ramon was only a man at that moment — cocky, guttering.
"Who are you to shout into my house?" he asked.
"Someone who does not appreciate traitors," Ezekiel said. "You could never be my brother."
Ramon sneered. "You are a ghost. Leave the living to me."
"Then you will have to explain to everyone why their money was stolen from beneath their cushions," Ezekiel said.
Blas Stone stepped forward, his eyes like a knife bright in the dark. "The ritual requires proof," he said. "One must lay open the truth. Whoever broke the charm — who plotted against the rites — must be submitted."
And in that dark hall, in the presence of the old woman, the maids, the temple man, and the neighbors who had been summoned by the unusual noise, I did what ghosts and brides might not be expected to do: I spat my shame and my memory into the room.
"You think you can destroy him and take what you like?" I said, not trusting my voice. "You think you can beat down a house by stealing a heart? You are wrong."
Ramon's face reddened. He laughed and tried a lie, and the lie sounded like wood breaking.
"I didn't—" he began, as if the words would rearrange the truth.
"Did you take the jade, Ramon Cleveland?" one voice asked. The crowd murmured.
"What do you mean? I—"
Blas walked past him with slow steps that smelled like thunder, and Claudia's face washed with rage.
"Ramon," Claudia said, calm at first, then she knifed the air with a finger. "Did you tell the temple man to curse the rites so Ezekiel couldn't be hosted?"
Ramon faltered. The old priest, who had accepted coin earlier and then been given a different coin after some bargaining, turned. His face was gray with the fear of someone who had been painted into a corner.
"Yes," the priest said. "He promised me lands if I delayed the incense."
The crowd broke into a hoarse sound that tasted like metal. Guadalupe put a hand to her mouth. Jana's eyes were wide as if two moons had appeared.
Ramon's smugness crumbled into a brittle thing. His jaw moved, and his expression travelled from surprise to anger to denial to frantic, hot fear.
"No," he said at first. "You cannot— you cannot drag me into this."
"Then tell the truth," Blas said. "Tell the people whose daughters you have endangered."
"They— they wanted the inheritance!" Ramon spat. "He took what was promised!"
"You took what you were not given," Claudia answered. Her voice was a blade. "You sewed lies into our child's last rites. For money? For spite?"
Ramon looked at the assembled faces — at the old cook, the gossipping neighbors with their heads together, at the temple man who suddenly looked like a man might look when a storm comes in. People had phones nowadays; a child's hand already reached for a small bright rectangle. "You can't—" he whispered.
He tried to lie. He tried to twist. He failed.
"Do you deny that tonight you broke the charm, that you bribed a priest to cast a curse, that you attempted to burn down the offerings?" I demanded. My voice, despite the bruises, was steady. The room leaned in.
"I— I thought it would be easier," Ramon said. "I would take the lands. I would—"
"You would steal from your family," Guadalupe said, and everyone gasped.
Ramon's face shifted from defensiveness to anger to a panicked pitch. "You don't understand—"
"You thought no one would notice," Blas said. "You thought a man could be bent like reed. You thought you would play the villain and no one would read the script."
At that, the crowd turned on him. They had been quietly murmuring and now their murmuring sharpened into voices like distant mallets.
"Shame!" someone cried.
"He ruined their rites!" another voice shouted.
"Get him out!" someone else demanded.
Ramon's eyes darted. He tried to pull himself together, to salvage a reputation, to play the son who had been driven to rashness by necessity. He stepped forward and lifted his hands like a man bargaining for grace.
"Please— I can explain—" he babbled. "I was desperate. My mother—"
"Your mother?" Claudia's face was stone. "Your mother whom you would sell for coin?"
"I— no, wait," Ramon said, and his words became small things trying to be big. He attempted to charm the crowd, to find the sympathy that he had planned to purchase long ago.
But in the center of the room, Ezekiel moved like a person clearing a table. He did not raise his voice. He did not need to. The cold he carried was heavier than the room could hold.
"Tell everyone what you did," Ezekiel said. "Tell them why a man would hush a prayer. Tell them why a woman almost lost her life tonight because of your greed."
"You're a ghost," Ramon hissed. "You have no right—"
"I have every right," Ezekiel said. "You threatened the house and you threatened her. You struck when she was most vulnerable."
At that, a maid in the back, struck by sacrilege or by the edge of someone who could not be lied to, stepped forward.
"He took my coin," she said. "He promised me land. He told me to look the other way."
"I—" Ramon tried to grasp at her words, at her self-exposure, and fail.
The crowd changed. It was no longer curiosity. It was retribution by many small hands. They had been quiet for too long, and the silence was fed up.
Ramon's face, which had been a painted mask, now cracked. First he denied. Then he pleaded. He went red with anger and pale with fear.
"I did not mean for the priest to—" he said. "I did not think—"
"You did," Blas Stone said. "You meant everything you did."
"Shut up!" Ramon screamed. He was no longer a man who could plan. He was a man who could only flail.
"Make him pay!" an old neighbor shouted, and a child began to boo. Phones were out. Peoples' fingers pressed record. A chorus of "shame" rose, and with it came something else: the heavy, public disgrace that only a small community could inflict.
"You will restore honor," Claudia said, and now her voice was the thing of law. "You will restore what you took. You will own what you broke."
"What will you do?" he asked, finally, his bravado drained.
"We will make you stand in the market and apologize to every family," Blas said. "We will hang your crimes where everyone can see them."
The idea of public display made Ramon stagger. "You can't— I'll be ruined!"
"Yes," Claudia said. "You will be ruined because you have ruined."
He went through the old cycle there: denial, anger, bargaining, collapse. He tried to scream. He tried to bargain. He tried to bargain with me, to make me kneel. He tried to take his mother into the fray. Everyone kept distance.
When the punishment was decided, it looked simple and hard. Ramon would stand in the market square at noon. He would announce his crimes. He would hand back the fortunes he had taken. He would kneel in front of the temple and confess.
But the worst part, for a man of pride, was the way people would record him. They would point, they would whisper. They would make jokes about how a second son thought family was a game. They would tell their daughters not to marry a man like him. He would be a cautionary tale.
Hours later, in the bright noon sun, he was led to the square. I watched from a doorway. Guadalupe stood beside me, holding my sleeve. Blas stood a short distance away, all business, calm and appointed.
Ramon's face was white. The street was full of people: neighbors, traveling vendors, faces baring the day. The priest who had been bribed had been made to stand behind him, his head bowed. A man in the crowd had brought a broken piece of jade and set it on a cloth like an offering.
"Tell us what you did," the town crier said, his voice clear.
Ramon breathed and then looked at us with the last of his masks. "I— I forced the priest to break the rites," he said, and the words came out like stones. "I thought if the rites failed, my position would be stronger."
The murmurs rose. People spat and someone threw a little pebble that clipped his boot. He stepped forward.
"I'm sorry," he tried.
"That's not enough," someone shouted. "You nearly killed our girl."
"She is alive because of them," the crier said. "Because of the one she calls her husband."
Ezekiel had not come to the square. Instead, the final insult came from another kind of proof. A small group of men produced papers, agreements, witnesses who had seen him with bribes, and the little priest confessed on the spot, voice trembling.
Ramon began to lose his mind. He alternated between accusing others and begging for mercy. "I have a mother, a title—" he pleaded. "I have obligations!"
"Not anymore," someone answered. "You sold your obligations."
Then he fell in pieces. He staggered, then knelt, then curled into himself like a child. People laughed — a cruel, public laughter that hangs in the air like a stone. He tried to swear he would make things right. He promised to pay back every coin. He promised to go to the temple and do penance. He promised again and again, but the sound of promises was a lighter thing now.
"Leave him to the law," Blas said quietly.
"No," Claudia said. "We will have him do what he broke."
He would spend weeks publicly performing the rites he had sabotaged while everyone looked on. He would be made to kneel at the altars where he had once plotted to break offerings. People came with notebooks and lists. They made him return the goods he had stolen, and they made him work off debts in front of the street. Girls told jokes about him for months.
Ramon's breakdown was complete: smugness, denial, attempt to bargain, and then a slow, ruinous collapse. He begged at the end, and his begging was recorded by many small devices, a choir of witnesses that would not let him become hero again.
Some men collapsed into tears when they realized what he had almost done. Some clapped. Others spat. The town, so small and protective of its own, had provided the most enduring punishment: they stripped him of the thing he had sought most — reputation — and they hung that ruin where everyone could read it.
It was, in its way, beautiful to watch. I did not dance on his ruin. I did not thrum with vengeance. I only watched and held my jade remaining in my hand: half-broken, like a promise.
Sometimes justice is a long, public unmasking. It was for Ramon. It was for those who had been conned by his charm. It was for me, the widow of a dead heir and the thief of a coffin's peace. It was brutal and it was fair.
After the square, when the market dampened into a regular day and people had moved on, I walked back to the house. Guadalupe's hand was in mine. Claudia watched, and then she hugged me with the sort of gratefulness that made me feel both proud and exhausted.
"You were brave," she said.
"I was stubborn," I said. "Half of bravery is simply stubbornness in pretty clothes."
Ezekiel had returned, as he always did, in small increments. Sometimes he would leave messages in the air and sometimes he would simply be there, leaning in a way that implied affection instead of ownership.
"Did you see?" I asked him one night, when we were alone and the moon was like a coin.
"I saw," he said. "You were terrible and wonderful."
"You didn't help?" I asked.
"I watched," he said, with his small, crooked smile. "Some things you have to do yourself."
After the public shame and small justice, the house settled into a different rhythm. Blas took care of the remnants of the ritual; we repaired the small things that a family must mend when one of its members tries to dismantle the world. Widow's jokes were told about the very good fate that had found us. People brought gifts: baskets, warm blankets, the small coin people keep for hard times. We took them with a stiff dignity.
Ezekiel's recovery, if it can be called recovery, was gradual. He took to reading again, with a stack of paper and ink. He learned to sit with me at the table longer and to permit himself tastes of soup and the smell of bread. He practiced being a man who could be touched more fully. Sometimes he would ask me to touch some small portion of him, and I would lay a hand on his cheek and whisper a nonsense line of a poem.
"You make me human," he told me once. "Not quite, but closer."
"You make me less afraid of staying," I answered.
There were tendernesses: he would wake me with a cold hand, and then warm my shoulder with a breath shaped like a promise. I would steal little pieces of his attention and he would let me, because he had found a habit he liked. He had found a home in a woman who had not wanted to be sold.
We argued over smaller things. He teased me for not being able to light a lamp, and I won the argument by getting the hotpot to boil faster. We had our scenes that were ordinary, and they tasted of living.
Sometimes I thought about the woman I had been before — the one who had been sold, who had been deceived by a lover that once called his love a promise and then traded my heart for an ember. That pain had been a certain exquisite stone lodged in me. It had taught me vigilance, or how to be cruel to cruelty. But then the new pains were gentler. They were the small stitches of a new life building themselves.
When everything had healed, we sat one evening on the roof, and he hummed a line and I fitted my palm to his jaw.
"Do you ever wonder," I asked, "what the world would look like if you had never been stolen from your life?"
He turned his head, the ghost-light in his eyes soft. "I would have been content," he said. "And we would not have had this ridiculous, stubborn, brilliant life."
"I hate when you call me brilliant," I said.
"You are," he said, simply. "You are who lit my incense."
I smiled and kissed the place where a mouth might be. The action felt like a bargain we had both agreed upon: warmth for warmth.
We lived like that for a time — in iron honesty and quiet revolt. He would hum, I would sigh, and the house would creak and make space for us. People still told the story of the night a coffin almost became a gravestone and then did not. They still muttered about how a man could be so evil as to try to break a rite. Ramon remained a cautionary tale until his name softened into the everyday.
On nights when I could not sleep, I would press the half-broken jade into my palm and listen to the wood of the coffin settle. He would breathe out cold that smelled faintly of the hill where he'd once read. He would whisper, "Good night, my wife," and the phrase was a small, steady thing that warmed better than any hearth.
In the end, the most ridiculous and the most grateful detail of our days was that a coffin lid had once been too hard for a body and became, for us, a table where jokes were left. We had started with a tablet and a name and a dare. We had finished with more: a story to tell and a life to keep.
"Do you regret being dead?" I asked him, once, beneath a sky full of reckless stars.
He thought, and then he said, "No. Being dead gave me the weirdest education. It taught me patience and the art of being ridiculous. It taught me that if you survive something, the world owes you nothing and asks everything."
"Do you regret me?" I asked.
"I regret nothing that lets me have you," he replied.
I laughed then, without pretense. "Good answer," I said.
"Now, kiss me properly," he said with the terrible arrogance of a man who had died and knew exactly the shape of tenderness.
I kissed him. The air was cold, but warmth was a strange thing. It had nothing to do with temperature. It had everything to do with being seen, being chosen, being badly and perfectly wanted.
And when the town's market gossiped about the day they forced a coward to apologize, they also gossiped about the little widow who had married a ghost and taught him to laugh again. They told the story like a fair. They included the part where Ramon fell in pieces in public because the spectacle delighted them, and they included the part where I had the courage to push back. They included, always, the small, odd fact that the incense only ever lit when I touched it.
There was nothing universal in our final line: a half-broken jade in my palm, his cold hand in mine, the coffin lid that had been too hard now used for leaning and scribbling and for resting its weight with a laugh.
"Do you still love me?" I asked him in the dark.
"Always," he said.
And there is no other ending to that sentence, except that our life kept the sound of a coffin lid that once slammed and then, for us, became the place where we put our cups.
The End
— Thank you for reading —