My throat is full of moths.

Please, don’t make me start again. I don’t want to open my mouth, to repeat myself. If I do, I fear I’ll choke their little bodies into the sink. I fear their wings will continue to flutter, flicking bloodied spittle into my open mouth.

I don’t want to start again, but I can see you drifting. You always used to drift, like when you snuck behind that cardboard box on the farm where the warmth of the sun couldn’t find you. Instead of covering your ears to block out the noise, you closed your eyes. You built a raft out of partial thoughts and you drifted away. A few times, your feet slipped into the water. Salt powdered your nostrils, clumping like cotton in your ears. You managed to haul yourself back onto that raft, drowning out their voices, voices which will claim a few hours later that they were only joking, that everything is fine.

It’s almost amazing what we can force ourselves to believe.

I can see you. In the smallest corner, curling into your own shadow. You face peeks out in a crescent moon. You can’t hide from me. And, as it turns out, I can’t hide from you either.

I’ve never heard of two ghosts haunting each other. But here we are.

I’ve been sitting in the same position for hours, forgetting to stretch. My spine concertinas. Scoliosis. The genes diluted over the decades, yet my Father still walks with a limp and my natural position is hunched over a book, neck jaggedly protruding from my shoulders like a disused church bell. I wonder if we’re simply dilutions of our ancestors. If the last Briton is a mere echo of the first. In a way, I almost hope we are. I hope that the family curse is merely a single drop of blood in my veins. Then again, neither one of us believes in curses, or family for that matter. I’m only telling you this to prepare you. To remind you. To drag you back through sheets of the countless minutes we spent writing in that notebook, the dog-eared pages like wrinkled bandages as we brought pen to paper. The paper which I’m using now, coiled like an Ammonite in front of the fire. You say nothing as I crumple poems to ash, lighting match after match to keep the hearth burning. I won’t be the first Hamilton to set fire to the voices of others.

You’re wincing. I can see that you’re starting to remember. Or perhaps I’m starting to forget. Perhaps we’re locked in a paradox. After all, the two of us shouldn’t be sitting in the same room. We’re not breaking the rules by a simple technicality: you’re standing and I’m crouching. Curling over, hoping I can disappear into your shadow. Tiny fingers clenching into tinier fists and yet you stand tall.

I can almost taste the memory in your eyes. The static of Crewe, the smell of the Nantwich chippy. Both stripped away by the smog of Manchester. Invisible and yet it dances on our lungs. We cough every five minutes, suddenly missing the stasis of the village air. I can see your smoky eyes reflected in a puddle. I can’t tell if it’s urine, petrol, or rainwater. Perhaps it is a mocktail, a concoction of all three. You remember this, don’t you? You’re twelve and gasping at the Psychics department, which is shaped like a tin-can, pretending to listen to Mum as she talks up a storm. Her eyes are shooting stars, but they will soon dull and you will sit atop the stairs, listening to her sobbing, tearing tissues from a box you can’t bring yourself to give to her.

You look up, staring at where Mum is pointing. A rolling pin is pressed over your lungs. Manchester Museum. A fallen monolith of sandstone. Cream plasterwork with windows which appear as spiderwebs in your eyes. I watch as you run across the road, a motorbike missing you by a hair’s breadth. Mum is already on the other side; she has the road safety of a blind movie star, strutting over the tarmac with a too-wide smile. You wonder if she does this on purpose. To give you a heart attack at first, imagining that you’ll be the first pre-teen to die of cardiac arrest. Then perhaps because she’s hoping that one day, the cars won’t stop.

I smile as you search for the entrance to the Museum. There’s an archway, a great wide mouth of stone; it presses a kiss to your forehead as you step over the flagstones. I follow you through the glass doors, up the steps. Free entry. You take off at a run, ignoring the way a Mother pushing a pram shakes her head. Your Mum, little Emma, is not the type of woman who bleats, saying,

“Don’t run off. It’s easy to get lost in here.” No, you become your own navigator. I am your ghostly companion as you tear across the sun-bleached stones. You gasp as you spot the Liger, an organic crossover, lying in its case. Its eyes brim with glass but you keep staring anyway, as if expecting it to yawn and stretch contentedly. Mum catches up with you, not breathless despite the stairs.

“What did I tell you? Look at that. They bred a lion with a tiger. Isn’t that amazing? Beautifully preserved too, not like those amateurs down in Chester.” She crosses her arms, smiling proudly. When she walks away, towards the tropics exhibit, you watch the Liger in its case. You meet its gaze. Black, bottomless eyes, and you’re falling. Glass shatters, cutting your skin. You step away, wondering that just because the creature had been alive once upon a time, did that mean it had lived?

Someone once said that to be alive is power. That’s a lie, you realise, as you wander the halls of the dead. Here, each taxidermist’s treasure becomes a landmark. Each stare – from a dead peacock or raven – holds its audience captive, ready to perform. The easiest performance of their lives: they stand or lie or sit in static as people gawp and stare and snap pictures for an Album. Immortalised just like that. Did you know that taxidermy comes from the Greek ‘taxis’ and ‘derma’? It means arrangement of the skin. Their final expressions, their final positions pre-determined by a person with a license. They’ve achieved fame with the power of glass eyes and galvanised wire. A stuffed fox with eyes aflame, a field mouse which scuttles with the prowess of a Danseur Noble.

You look around. Toddlers are traipsing behind their parents, a man is taking pictures on his phone. A young girl goes to stick chewing gum on the glass case containing a horse, right over its brown muzzle, until her Mother intervenes.

And you turn back to the Liger. It refuses to meet your eyes.

And I sit here now, watching the world as it slowly inches along without me. Without anyone. Snow wraps its arms around the trees, the tarmac, the neighbour’s sports car. There is a Santa standing lop-sided on the drive, silently battling the wind. You remember the Liger, don’t you? Locked in a glass case, watching the world go by.

You never knew how it felt. But you will. And I do.

2020: the year we too became Museum Exhibits.

Yvette Naden was born in Mayenne, France, but moved to the UK in 2006 to pursue a writing career. Having written strange short stories and poems since she was three, Yvette writes every spare second when she's not working as an English Tutor or composing songs and musicals. Her poems have received acclaim, for example, one of her poems won Bronze in the International Never Such Innocence Competition and her work was Highly Commended and subsequently published in the Elmbridge Literary Magazine.