In the beginning there was a pool, not too cold or warm, with all the sand sunk to the bottom so that only silt and the nutrients therein glided around through the bluegreen water. 

There, the first magic was born: the first death, a necessary shadow cast by the first life when shone upon by the light of creation. 

In the water, in the cold-and-warmth, drifted bacteria, too small for color, merely a fuzz in the wetness. 

Two floated together in one direction. 

Then, one of them turned away.

It turned all by itself.

It was conscious—its little pixel body now a tight pulsing mind.

Then, a while later, it stopped turning. Its fibers and membranes dissolved into the silty sea. 

But with its death arose a new kind of life: a collective resurrection; a second life lived in memories and stories told. 

In the beginning—at the beginning of life and the beginning of death—the first posthumously puppeteered conglomerate of memory was born. The first god.

If it weren’t for this undeath then the gray granite of the arches of Silvercreek would be simply enjoying the burbling ricocheting of laughter; the rhythm of dress shoe heels as students bustled to and fro; the gentle greeting of song and the gleeful cheers of friends. It is not hard to imagine Silvercreek University as a happy place. It has, after all, been thought of by many as one: students arrive and, taken aback by how it stands knee-deep in its history, fall enamored. Alice, however, was overwhelmed when she arrived not with excitement but the sting of regret. She was determined to make her arrival a clean break from her past, to drown out those worries she longed to label as bygone with the firehose flow of a full schedule. To overload herself with so much joy that she would have no time for fear. But as she watched the last brown leaf drift to the ground, tracing its path with her eyes, death returned to mind. In the library, Alice opened a textbook and was struck cold with the remembrance of the absolute banality of the task at hand. At the dining hall, the french toast on her fork lost its flavor. All this busy-ness, all this distraction, and it still meant nothing; soon, she would be six feet under, the only thing to survive her a headstone like the ones in the campus cemetery that soon became her favorite hiding spot.

Distraction, she realized, would have to be her sole focus if she wished to outgrow her fear and be normal in the eyes of others. So Alice sat bleary in her philosophy class, dressed her nicest, ready for something new to come along. The professor asked the group a question but Alice was too foggy-eared to listen. Smith’s theory of spiritual values; something like that. A brown-haired boy sitting near her answered. “Central questions for humanity? There are two,” he said. “Do I matter? and Will I be loved?” 

Alice instantly raised her hand.

“I think there’s a third one,” she said. “What happens when I die?”

The boy leant over to talk to her quietly. “I don’t know if we all think about that all the time,” he said. “I think that’s mostly the domain of religion.”

“Wrong,” Alice said. “It’s all we ever think about. It’s why we have religion, of course, but it’s also why anyone deliberately builds a legacy. Or why we make art. We haven’t experienced death and so all we do is wonder.”

He looked at her then with an expression she could not read. She was ready to be struck with disdain, but his furrowed brows seemed strangely kind. He, too, saw some mystery in her: who was this girl in his philosophy class, he thought, who was elegant with her long scarves and long hair but whose words always punched like this?

“Don’t you think we make art because we want to be loved?” he asked.

Way down beneath the university lay something ancient. Down, down, as the stone foundation of Silvercreek slipped into spongy soil, the membranes of memory blurred. The skeleton itself was almost fully intact, but its spirit had long diffused into the ground, and the neural chambers of the Earth writhed with undead life. 

The spirit’s existence was a secret. But long ago, it had a human form; it was a human, and that human had a reputation, knowledge, a will never realized; that person’s dreams were calcified when life was cut short. Death has a way of deifying. And the sediments grew and grew. 

Thatcher would soon know its call, intimate and sharp. But not yet. As of now, he still went about his days with the peace and benign joy of a well-adjusted momma’s boy happy to be click-clacking his way through college. The wind howled at his back, but he was not frightened. He held the heat of his coffee tight in his palm.

It had been an impulse to follow Thatcher to the coffee shop, but something felt so right to Alice, the two of them chatting away about their philosophy class that she was suddenly very interested in. This was the new thing she needed. 

She did not fully smile, but her excitement was sincere when she asked, "What are you doing later?"

“Not much,” he said. This was honest. Life was not too bad at all. He had an essay due in a couple days for geopolitics, which he was actually looking forward to writing; he had the rest of the day off; and he was here getting coffee with that girl from philosophy. What a treat it would be to spend the evening with her.

If only poor Alice had ended up all right. Too bad she heard the ringing in her ears.

It started in class, when Thatcher asked her about love; it continued as they walked across the frigid granite to the café. Through her thick woolen scarf she could hear it—the ringing. Its voice.

She thought about Thatcher. He had all the features that would make him perfectly predisposed for stoicism—long-lashed eyes, brows that sloped with a confident severity, bones like a sculpture. But he was kind. He looked at her with a softness that knocked her guard away. Alice, standoffish and sure—what could she ever have done to pique his interest?

You want him to love you, the voice rang.

I will make him.

It was weeks later, and a dim lamp provided the only light in Alice’s bedroom. “You’re beautiful,” Thatcher said, touching her hair.

“You're beautiful,” said Alice. 

He chuckled. Thatcher took a few paces to stretch.

She felt a tug in her chest as if from a tight string. Was he going to leave?

“What is it?” he asked, turning to face her.

“No, nothing.”

But clearly there was something. Something in her eyes seemed to beg.

“You know, I really like you, Alice,” he said.

She smiled, still quivering.

“What? What is it?”

“Nothing,” she insisted, and embraced him.

He kissed her, but anxiety was breaking through in his heart. Why couldn’t this be simple and perfect? Why couldn’t she trust him? What did she know?

The air was cold and snowflakes raced like razors as Thatcher made his way to his political science lecture. This class was intense, but the challenge made him happy. Soon, he would be a leader—locally; nationally. Soon, he assured himself, he would have a project so indelible that when he died, he would not really be dead;  he and he alone would exert power over his legacy.

The path to glory is a challenge for even the bravest among us. But how much easier it would have been if it weren’t for the voice. He heard it too.

You want security. Affirmation. To know what she’s hiding.

Visit me.

How? Thatcher asked in his mind. He surprised himself—the desire for control, for perfection, was stronger than he’d realized. What would he do for Alice’s attention?

Dig, said the voice.

Thatcher understood.

❦

Above the gate, carved into the stone, sat the proud name Alden Smith. Many famous and hence forgotten names had echoed against the cold walls of the school over the centuries. But Alden Smith’s name still ricocheted in the deepest chambers.

When his name was called in life, it was often by Mare Sharpton, and seldom with anything softer than animosity. 

The year was 1912, and Miss Sharpton strode down the halls with as much bravado as she could manage with Mister Smith on her heels. Smith, chair of the Religious Studies department, like any reasonable man of his era, had not wanted to hire a woman, and his coldness toward Sharpton made that caustically clear. But she persevered, letting her research be a guiding light to distract her from her environment.

Today, he had chosen to bug her about her work.

“Had you listened—see, on Thursday, and also last week, when we discussed this first—you might know already, Mister Smith, that the paper is a new theory of desire and where it fits in the frame of morality. We speak so often about heaven and hell,” Sharpton explained. “But those whose souls remain on this mortal plane—it is desires and secrets which trap them here.”

“Ambitious, Miss Sharpton,” Smith said.

“Indeed.”

“Careful that you do not go seeking.”

Sharpton was careful with displays of emotion, but she began to burn with a kind of joyous spite. Seeking, as Smith put it, was the crux of her work, in fact. She let it pull her everywhere. One cave, in particular, not far from the University, was calling her; within the Earth, it seemed, where the dead resided, she might be able to observe with more clarity in her search for the truth about eternal life.

In future decades, this cave would be covered by buildings and serve as little more than an echo chamber for the footsteps of the great people of the college. Now, though, its big mouth yawned in the forest, among oaks and hunks of stone.

When the light was good, Sharpton hitched up her skirts and balanced the wood of her heel on one stone, then the next, climbing down into the stone hole in the Earth.

She had been something of an adventurer as a girl, left alone by absent parents on a large property with all too many trees to climb. Perhaps it was this questioning spirit—always looking for more—that led her to seek a professorship at a university, something so out of reach for most girls with big dreams. Maybe it led her to this line of research, as well: asking questions about the afterlife; seeking to change how humanity saw itself.

Her framework was threefold. Three questions, she posited—three questions, held in subconscious meditation—formed the basis for all human belief systems yet known.

First: Do I matter?

All remaining light was now swallowed by the garnet-studded schist. The cave grew tighter, and Sharpton crouched, making her three-legged way further down, her lamp in her one free hand. She dodged pools where traces of water were simmering, reflecting her lamplight and the jagged stalactites above. 

Did Mare Sharpton matter? 

Surely. She was making history. Mare Sharpton, who ground whimsy into something like fuel, who explored caves looking for answers. For secrets. Surely she would have her name carved in stone someday, whether or not she would live to see it; whether or not the likes of Department Chair Smith would be happy.

Did Alden Smith matter?

Not to Sharpton. She would not let him get to her—not him nor any of the leering men who followed her down the halls, who sat in her interview room and snickered, who shuddered to shake a woman's hand even knowing it had penned their favorite papers. Fame or no fame, Alden Smith did not matter. Sharpton put him out of her head.

Second: Will I be loved?

Love was a nothing thought to Sharpton. Certainly neither of her parents had loved her, leaving her alone all day to tell stories to herself or in the possession of governesses who saw her as little more than a daunting task. The university did not love her; even the swaying trees seemed to freeze to stone when she passed. Perhaps posterity could love her. For what she would achieve.

Sharpton reached a stalagmite hitch and the cave, till now a steep diagonal, opened up into a gaping cavern of glistening rock. Garnets, which jutted out from nailbeds of granite, reflected in the candlelight a rusted hue like sticky blood. Sharpton inhaled and exhaled, and the fumes of her breath cast a wispy shadow on the rock wall.

This was the realm of death. At least, this was as close as Sharpton would come to it in life. Watching the gemstones as they twinkled with the candle, adorning the walls like regalia, she thought of Pluto, the Roman father of the underworld; his mineral riches. 

This was as good a place as any for her ideas.

“Do I matter?” she said aloud, testing the waters of her prowess. Her words gently rippled off the far wall’s granite. Their sound joined the crackle of the candle. 

“Will I be loved?” she called proudly. The fire seemed to glow brighter.

There was silence.

Then, a sound. A crack, from behind her. Sharpton gasped and turned her head.

Misty clouds roamed freely across the dark sky, dancing an iridescent halo against the backdrop of the moon. Thatcher made his way past the main quadrangle, past the courtyards, out to where the woods encroached upon the campus. The grass beneath him was decorated with a lining of frost, but it broke with the pounding of his feet. Something almost like warmth hung in the air. 

His vision whirled, but Thatcher clung to consciousness. He could feel each ridge of the shovel’s wood with the microslips of his fingers.

With a hot jab he raised the shovel and rammed it into the soil. He heaved an exhale.

One hit. Two hits. Thatcher dug. The dirt went from dry brown, cast blue in the moonlight, to wet, black, and thick. His boots slipped incrementally more with each movement. Down he slid, pulled towards the hole like by some supernatural force.

What if he had never met Alice? Thatcher began to think as he dug, as the treetops and stars swam around him. What then? On those occasions when he looked out across the rooftops of this little college town, would he see the sun glazing its way beyond the trees, the purple clouds bearing witness to the pure orange of the sky? Would he see actual things like these, instead of the reflection of her face, glowing blue in the inside light, glaring from behind him through the windowpane?

“What is she hiding from me?” Thatcher whispered to himself.

His skin stung. Soreness rang in his arms as he hoisted himself into the hole.

How happy would he be if they’d never met? he thought. How sad? How much of a loss would it really be? he caught himself thinking—he pictured himself on a couch in a warm-lit room, the music of his scribbles as he hammered away an essay the only sound to accompany him in gleeful solitude.

No. He had made it this far. 

Another layer down, and Thatcher fought contractions in the muscles of his back. He held fast to the shovel and sliced it into the wet Earth.

She loved him. He loved her. But… “Why does she go quiet?” he murmured.

Thatcher felt the gape of grand windows in the spires of the buildings all around him, like eyes on his back. What if he had never come to this school? That destiny he knew waited for him, his dream of a career in politics that would change lives and cement his legacy—what if it had been denied? Who would he be without it?

What if he’d never been raised this way—to feel special; look for glory? As a boy, he’d always argued back when his toys were taken by roughhousing cousins. When asked who started it, he always had an explanation, pushing through the tears in his eyes for the pursuit of justice. Was it innate? If everything had gone differently, could he have still been the same?

What if Thatcher had never been born? 

The black Earth seemed to swallow him, soft and dank, his tunnel now diaphanous like a womb. Here, in the darkness, it could be any time in history. 

If he had never been born, the place where he was now would be an undulating morass of soil, the resting place of a spirit searching in vain for a target through which to suffuse its secrets. If Thatcher had never been born this Earth would remain untouched by living hand, left alone to writhe and pulse with tragic power.

But here he was.

The power approached.

It came to him.

You who disturb the neural network of my soil. You who dig.

Yes? He echoed.

She hides from you the ferocity of her desire. She hides from you her fear of mortality. 

She goes quiet because she is ashamed to admit the enormity of her feeling.

You are loved. Not unconditionally. Not forever. But here and now, you are.

❦

Sharpton could not register what befell her in the cave that day. She did not have time. 

Something came crashing into her and knocked the breath from her throat. Her footing slipped, breaking her heels. Her temple hit the granite. A man stood above her, silhouetted in the candlelight. Something metal bashed into Sharpton's head. Blood poured from her skull. The color of the garnets was made red afresh. 

The man discarded the shovel somewhere in the cave, the light now extinguished.

He washed his forearms clean, changed his shirt, robed himself anew. He went to sit at his desk, where a gilded placard glinted with his name. 

Alden Smith. 

Alden Smith kept his eyes low. He thumbed the leaf of paper in his typewriter.

Alden Smith wrote a letter to the students in the Religious Studies department, expressing his concern as their Chair and his hopes for their maintenance of comportment in the face of the loss of a dear faculty member.

Alden Smith published his theory of spiritual values two years later. Two central questions for humanity. Silvercreek University Press.

What happens after we die? 

No one living knows. The good news, or really, the very bad news, is that it takes a while for us to be fully gone. Until your memory is lost and all those who knew you are dead, some part of you remains here. Until everything you touched is obliterated and all the cells you left in corners around this Earth have returned to their atomic form and dust has become dust, you are still here. Until everything that reflects your image is gone, you are tethered.

Have your name—or your words—whispered enough times, and something new begins to coalesce around your ghost.

We do not know how life began. But we have made gods out of those first living organisms, those bacteria in that pool long ago. We have made gods of generals, heroes, kings. We've made gods out of fictions—figureheads for our nations built around kernels of people who really did live but would be horrified at what we have turned them into.

We make gods of our dead and render them unrecognizable.

All that posterity would learn of Mare Sharpton was that she was the first female instructor at Silvercreek and that her theoretical work never came to fruition.

❦

Alice sat down on a little bench next to someone’s grave and siphoned out a long exhale, closing her eyes as if to ask permission. The ground below her was brittle, carpeted with leaves; the sky above was cluttered with branches like cuts in ice.

Alice was alone again, in the cemetery again. The only place where she could freely breathe.

Thatcher had changed. First, he had become bolder. He spoke of dreams, grand speeches he would give, policies he would write, people who would be swayed because of him. He spoke of schoolwork, and after-college-work-work. She’d thought he’d want to play-fight, so she thought up some philosophical dilemmas to debate. But when she’d disagree with him he’d shut her down. He had a politician’s eyes.

First his tenderness had receded, then had he himself. And Alice sat alone in the graveyard, scarf up to her ears, eyes burning.

Was it her fault? That voice—it had promised to keep him close to her. It had kept that promise. Until something had changed. Could it be that she had ruined it for herself, cavorting with this voice until her distractedness pushed Thatcher away?

Alice had been brave with the voice. She had challenged it.

Are you some sort of ghost? she had asked it.

A ghost, it had mused. Or a spirit. A god. Deified in death. Ostracized and opalized. Call me what you will.

Well, how do you know what I want? 

Because it burns so plainly in you. Your love.

Alice, sweet child. You are a fool, like all the living. Only, you understand.

You understand, it had said. When she had corrected Thatcher's answer in class and bickered with him about the meaning of life, when her heart had skipped a beat for him for the first time—she had understood something. Something the voice understood too.

The afterlife is the final piece of the equation, the god said. The living cannot fathom it—death. They have never known what it is to be fully gone.

But you are not fully gone, Alice had said. 

No, it hummed. My body rots and is nearly dissolved, but I am here. As long as my secret lies with me, I am here.

And... are you glad to be here?

No, child. I want to go.

Not everybody can hear me, you know, it said. But you, sweet Alice—temperament of ice, temper of a hornet, tongue of a wolf. You have cracked my code.

Thatcher posed two questions in class, Alice murmured. Central questions for humanity. I posed the third. The one that everyone had forgotten about.

Yes. So I have chosen you.

And Alice, chosen, with whispers writhing around her head like harpy screeches, had made her way down. Down, down, down into the Earth, digging through that membrane of time. 

That was then—when she burned with love for this boy. Did she love him now?

Her hand felt the bench beneath her. Ice cold. 

Whose grave was this anyway, which always gave Alice shelter when she felt alone?

She twisted to look behind herself. The graveyard was still, but buzzing with the ambient light diffused by the snowclouds above. The bench Alice sat upon was accompanied by a headstone: taller than her, in still-shiny stone. She read the engraving.

MARYBETH “MARE” SUSAN SHARPTON

DAUGHTER OF 

LLOYD J. AND ELIZA ALLEN SHARPTON

PROFESSOR OF RELIGION 

FIRST FEMALE FACULTY MEMBER, 

SILVERCREEK UNIVERSITY