Have You Seen This Woman
| Name: Laurel Hill | DOB: 7 April 1961 | Age: 61 | Race: White |
| Eyes: Blue | Hair: Gray | Height: 5'2" |
Wearing: A lavender house robe and slippers
Weight: About as much as all the sand in your car at the end of summer
Identifying Characteristics: Missing the pinkie nail on her left hand
PREVIOUS SIGHTINGS:
12 July 2022, Miracle Beach
Hugo Garcia went to Miracle Beach early in the morning. He wanted to beat the crowds. As he bent to examine a dead crab, he heard a splash. My mother was floating on her back, lazily kicking her feet. She wore a shredded house robe and slippers. Hugo swam out to her. Later, when I asked why, he said it was because he had thought my mother was his niece who had died in a car accident a few months earlier. My mother pressed a gold locket into his palm. The one I had lost when I was eighteen. “Give this to my daughter when she’s old enough to take care of it,” she said. I was thirty at the time of this incident. He said he would and fastened it around his neck for safe keeping. They floated the way otters do—on their backs, holding hands.
Hugo said he didn’t feel her slip away. He only noticed my mother was gone when he pointed out a cloud that looked like a pansy and my mother said nothing. “Even though it was the wrong ghost, it was still nice,” he told me as he returned my locket.
The day before, I had been at Miracle Beach combing for shells, and I came across a half-dead lion’s mane jellyfish. Its bell the color of fig jam. The tide wouldn’t come in for hours. There was nothing I could do but let it die.
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| Divalproex, 250 mg |
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| Twice a day, side effects |
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| may include dizziness, |
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| visions of open |
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| windows, hair loss, |
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| finding hidden gems in |
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| hollow walls, and the |
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| sudden comprehension |
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| of foreign languages. |
12 March 2018, Atlas Café
Jill Soliman was sitting at the bar drinking an espresso martini when a woman wearing a robe that was missing a sleeve sat next to her. No one else seemed to notice so Jill tried to mind her own business, but the woman took Jill’s drink and finished it in one gulp. Jill was about to ream this strange woman out, when the bartender’s hand passed through the woman’s arm as he wiped the counter. Jill ordered another round. She had just broken her own heart by treating someone she loved badly. As they clinked their glasses together, Jill saw my mother’s missing nail. “What happened?” she asked. My mother told a story I had heard hundreds of times about how as a child she had cartwheeled into a brick wall. “So mundane,” she said and laughed. When my mother stood to leave, she took Jill’s face in her hands and kissed her forehead. She told her, “You have to be as kind as you are determined,” and then disappeared.
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| A small number of |
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| people may experience |
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| the veil between |
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| the worlds |
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| thin. Occasionally, |
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| this medication |
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| may make it difficult |
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| for spirits to pass |
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| from this world to the |
12 January 2016, Thrifty Foods (the one on Cliffe Avenue)
Lucy Clarke was standing in front of a line of wilting bouquets, trying to find one with enough color to be considered cheerful but not desperate, when she saw a woman in a house robe wander toward the produce aisle. The woman looked confused—the same way Lucy’s mother had when she got older—so Lucy followed her and asked if she was alright. The woman called Lucy by her childhood nickname. It may have been loneliness, or it may have been grief, but whatever the reason, Lucy took my mother home. She stayed for a few weeks. Lucy told me that she was a pleasant guest except at night she could hear my mother knocking on the walls looking for hollow spots. One night, Lucy got out of bed to ask her why. My mother said that a good hiding spot can tell the truth of something and then turned back to the wall and continued knocking.
The next morning, Lucy woke up to find the front door wide open. She stood on the front step and watched the poppies that had bloomed early that year—due to an unseasonable heat—sway in the breeze. She wasn’t upset. She had always sensed that my mother would leave this way.
| next. Support groups |
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| family and friends |
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| whose loved ones |
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| linger. If haunted by |
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| an unfamiliar ghost, |
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| please assume it is |
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| looking for someone |
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| from your support |
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12 June 2015, 1262 5th Street, Courtenay B.C.
When my mother disappeared, she took her seizure medication, her birth certificate, and her car. There was a note written in German on her kitchen table. Ich komme wieder—I will be back. My mother did not speak German. Twenty-eight days after she disappeared, she paid for a two-night stay in a Motel 6 one hundred kilometers from her home. She left two pieces of rhodonite on the windowsill. These were mailed back to her house in Courtenay. Rhodonite is said to encourage acceptance and ease regret. After a person has been missing for seven years, they are considered dead. In June 2022, it will be seven years.
The last time I saw my mother, I was backing my car out of her driveway. She was standing at the door, left slightly ajar, waving to me. The setting sun reflected off the stained-glass faeries she had hung in the window. A song my mother loved came on the radio, and I stuck one hand out my window to wave goodbye.
| group. Just like the |
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| living, ghosts are |
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| prone to mistaking |
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| strangers for the people |
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| they loved most. |
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| Please be as patient |
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| with them as you |
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| would with someone |
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| you loved. The favor |
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| will be repaid. |
Clara Otto (@claraotto411) is a queer writer living on the ancestral and unceded lands of the hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ and Sḵwx̱wú7mesh speaking peoples. Her work has been published in CRAFT, The Ex-Puritan, Plenitude, and elsewhere. When not writing, you can find her scouring thrift stores for pottery and drinking bubble tea.