Day of the Dead

 

It was a few weeks before the first exam. There had been a month or two of the usual round of revision classes and hitting the books.

I woke at the witching hour. Fully, completely awake. I sat up in bed. My bedroom was in a silvered version of daylight from a full moon on a clear night.

Sitting in the middle of the room, half turned toward the window was a man, probably in his 50s. He was smartly dressed in a three piece suit, gold fob watch chain hanging across the front of his waistcoat. He was reading a broadsheet newspaper, held wide open. I continued to study him, noting the neatly trimmed full beard and moustache.

Eventually, he glanced up from his paper and gave me a side glance with a slight smile curling the corners of his mouth. Lines briefly crinkled at the corners of his eyes in affection. He then went back to his reading. 

I continued to watch this most unlikely of apparitions. The faint sense of tension and anxiety I’d been carrying for weeks ebbed away.

He slowly faded leaving me staring at my bedroom floor.

I was strangely calm and relaxed during the remaining weeks to my first exam. Choosing to sit outside my prefab classroom in the sunshine to revising. I was certain that if I didn’t know the subject by now, no more revision would help.

Many decades later, my father told me he knew the women in our family home were aware of strange happenings but not precisely what. When I got to this story, he stayed silent for many minutes before saying I could have been describing his grand father. Did my ancestor visit me that night? I choose to believe he did. Maybe to ease my exam fears. I’ll never be sure.