By Bethany Browning

After the second Water War was won, and the men filed home and the safety of the hilltop neighborhood was secured with booby traps and barbed wire, Miranda noticed something strange about her husband, Johan.

Miranda had been warned. The older wives, ones who remembered the first Water War, showed their teeth when telling the younger ones about the reactions they could expect from men whose psyches had been wounded in battle.

“He’ll be mid-sentence and–poof–he’ll slam your head into the wall.”

“Strikes are swift. Your cheeks will bloom violet.”

“He survived the war. Good luck surviving him.”

Scaremongering didn’t concern Miranda. Her father had experienced similar enervations after he was discharged from the first Water War, and she was prepared.

What bothered Miranda was specific. A few weeks after Johan’s return, when his superficial wounds healed over and his guts finally righted themselves, Johan began to leave the bedroom in the middle of the night.

Miranda would feel the mattress exhale as he sat up, and she’d listen to the slow padding of his footsteps across the floor. A bathroom visit, she figured. A late-night snack. When nothing more happened, she’d sink back into sleep.

She planned to ask Johan about his nighttime wanders during the day. But before she had a chance to bring up her concerns, Miranda realized that Johan’s physical form never moved.

The mattress breathed. The footsteps padded. Johan continued to snooze beside her, his breathy snore the vibration of a hummingbird’s wings. 

To confirm, she reached over and placed her palm on his back.

She gasped.

Johan wasn’t leaving the room. It was his ghost.

The next time Johan’s disembodied spirit peeled away, Miranda followed it out of the bedroom.

Their house in the safe neighborhood on the hill was small and spare and tidy. Johan and Miranda had adorned the surfaces and walls with trinkets meaningful to them: smooth, gray rocks from their trip to the blustery Northern beaches, drawings they’d made of each other before Johan left for the war, their marriage certificate in a tasteful frame. Miranda surveyed her home in the darkness, satisfied with the silhouettes of their shared lives. 

But she found no ghost.

No ghost under the kitchen table. No ghost behind the sofa. No ghost in the fridge. (Did ghosts hunger? Miranda didn’t know).

Johan’s ghost had left the house. Miranda opened the front door and stepped through it without stopping to put on her shoes.

Outside in the heavy summer night air, Miranda looked up. Johan’s ghost was a dark shadow, a black filament, a puff of charcoal smoke like the ones belched out of the water trucks that terrorized the highways now, beasts of metal and heat. 

And so were the others. A confederacy of phantoms floating out of the windows and twirling through the front doors, congregated in the sky. Together, the spirit comrades drifted silently over the twinkling lights in town, toward the battlefields beyond the mountain range.

Miranda dared not mention Johan’s specter to the other wives, who could be less than generous when presented with new and confusing information. Miranda shuddered at the memory of a former prisoner of war named Ranier, exiled by a mob of furious wives after the first Water Wars because he was frightened of walls and refused to leave the shade park, the only spot in town where trees still grew. 

Johan continued to behave as though he was unaware of his overnight exploits. Miranda didn’t press him about it. Most nights she followed Johan’s ghost and stood sentinel as it joined the others for their silent journey toward the battlefields. 

But not every night.

“Wake up.” It was Sukohu, one of the older wives, shaking Miranda in her bed.

“Why are you in my house?”

“Come with me.”

Miranda reached toward Johan. Sukohu slapped her hand.

“No need.”

Miranda’s stomach lurched. The wives had convened under the swirling mass of the men’s ghosts. Husbands, yes. But also sons, uncles, brothers…any shattered soul who left a piece of himself somewhere else.

The spirits oriented themselves and breezed away.

The wives screeched and wailed and pulled their hair.

“They’re meeting their war mistresses!”

“They’re being punished for the deaths they caused!”

“It’s a curse! They won the war but sold their souls!”

“We must wake them!” Sukohu cried, and the wives dispersed to their homes. Miranda could hear them accusing their sleeping husbands of cheating, lying, stealing, and every other manner of sin. They banged pots and pans, blared radios, pounded on the walls, and screamed their throats raw.

The men did not awaken.

Miranda was alone in the street. She gazed toward the city and the battlefields beyond. Why had Johan’s ghost left the neighborhood to fly so far away? What did he seek?

Fellowship?

Forgiveness? 

Even if Johan was meeting up with his war mistress, which Miranda doubted, what did it matter now? Didn’t his return after the horrors of war and bloodshed mean something? In the bedroom, she gazed at Johan’s body and was unable to fault him for breaking in two.

Miranda didn’t need to know. Not yet.

She stayed awake that night and every night after to hold Johan’s corporal body close. She whispered tales of happier times before the war. The day they were accepted into this safe neighborhood on the hill. Their wedding feast of suckling pig and fine wine. The hundreds of kindnesses they offered each other throughout the years—tiny notes tucked in pockets, crimson poppies plucked from green meadows. No story was too small to tell; no memory was too forgettable to share. They’d built a life of tenderness toward each other, and Miranda believed they could again.

 “You’re safe,” she repeated to Johan, a prayer, an enchantment. “Do what you need to do, and when you’re ready, we’ll start again. As long as we live. As many times as it takes.”