Some Other Town by Elizabeth Collison

a night I got caught in overtime—something I don’t make a practice of—but we were behind on our annual report. Steinem had dragged with the executive letter, so I had to stay late doing paste-up in hope of making our deadline by dawn.
    I was in fact just burnishing the last of the letter and beginning to size Steinem’s photo when a shadow moved over my light table.
    â€œEarnest?” I say. “Is that you, Earnest?”
    â€œThe girl in the nightie who jumped,” he says. “She was one of the screamers here.”
    I look up. “Thought you would want to know,” he says.
    And I realize then I am caught. So I put down my burnisher and “Jumped?” I say. “She jumped?”
    Earnest leans on his mop. “Jumped. Yes,” he says. Then halting in places as though to recall, he continues. “Young girl, very pale. I remember her now. Small, quiet, kept to herself. You wouldn’t take her for a screamer. But one day she came back from the treatment wing wrapped up in a bloody sheet, and it was never the same with her after.”
    Earnest sighs loudly. “Jumped,” he says. Then he walks to my balcony to show me.
    He points to the ground below. “Right there,” he says. “There, where they’ve paved over for parking. She landed right there with her neck twisted around and they took her away in a basket.”
    Earnest turns from the balcony, he looks old. I nod and return to my paste-up. The night is late, and I think Earnest has finished his story.
    â€œBut there’s something else you should know,” he says. And I can hear him shambling his way back to my table. He leans in then over my shoulder and his voice drops to a raspy whisper. What he has to tell me, he says, is something for only my ears. He never knows when it might be close and it is better it doesn’t hear.
    â€œâ€˜It,’ Earnest?” I say, still burnishing.
    â€œThe ghost. That girl in the nightgown. She’s still here, you know.”
    I lift my head and find Earnest has taken a step back. He stands now, staring, waiting.
    â€œThere are no such things as ghosts, Earnest,” I say. Which I feel obliged to point out, although something about Earnest lurking there in the dark makes me less confident of the fact than by day. “You are now just making things up.”
    â€œBelieve what you like,” Earnest tells me, shrugs, and continues. “Me, I seen her. Little thing, drifty, long silvery hair. She stays mostly just on the fourth floor, there by that balcony where she jumped. I tell you I don’t much like mopping up here alone.”
    And then he pulls up a chair, sits down, and tells me more of the story.
    The night that it happened, he says, they had made up her bed on the balcony. Back then, they thought air was the answer, freshair, so everyone, even screamers, slept out of doors. In winter with furs on their beds and their feet stuffed in boxes of straw.
    Earnest continues. The nurse attending that night said the girl just wasn’t right. Her fever was back, she didn’t know where she was. She lay restless and writhing for hours. Then well past midnight, without any warning, she got up out of her bed like she was sleepwalking. The night nurse stood too, but before she could stop her, the girl was up on the balcony ledge, holding her arms out wide.
    Just like an angel, the nurse later said, dressed as the girl was in her nightclothes. And then just like an angel, the girl lifted up to her toes and smiling, tipped out into the night. The nurse couldn’t reach her in time. The girl fell face first all those four floors and landed with a sickening sound.
    I wince here a little. I do not like to think of that sound. But I believe this time Earnest is finished, so “It is a sad story, all right,” I tell him. And I start to go back to my board.
    Earnest holds up his hand to stop me. “But it wasn’t the way