L E A V E

A tall wave rises up and crests about ten feet out. It crashes over the letters. The surprise wave washes over the word and rushes all the way to my feet, splashing over my shoes and soaking me up to my ankles. When it pulls back the message is gone. The cold settles into my flesh and, all at once, the whole word shudders. The trees shake so hard they blur and the water rises into tidal waves.
“No, I don’t want to wake up… I don’t want to leave her. I don’t want to leave this life…”
“Are you coming to work?”
I stood in my living room, the phone in one hand and a filthy, worn out running shoe in the other. It was heavy with lake water, like it’d been drenched.
“Of course I am – on Monday.”
A foul, locker-room odor had filled the room.
“It’s Wednesday,” Larry said.
“What?”
“It’s Wednesday afternoon,” he said. “Look, if you miss four days in a row it’s considered job abandonment.”
“I’m sick,” I said. “I got really sick.”
“Will you be in tomorrow?”
“Yes,” I said. “I will definitely be in tomorrow.”
After a long silence he said, “Okay.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, but he’d already hung up.
I held the shoe for a long time. The odor, I realized, was my own. It was days and nights of boiling sleep. I went to the bathroom, turned on the tap water, and popped the lid off the pill bottle. I shook three capsules into my palm and gulped them down with lukewarm water. The pills took hold with a deadening sensation, an anesthetic against my soul. Everything went heavy. Still, I trembled myself to sleep.
Ghost fact:
The modern Ouija Board got its name by asking the board what it should be called. When the board was asked what Ouija meant, it spelled out "Good Luck"