text: When I was 7, my whole life changed. My third move to a new school, I hated it every time. On the first day there I met a girl named Alicia. She was a quiet girl, like me, so she was easy to gravitate to. I felt drawn to her. I sat next to her at lunch, and as soon as I sat down the whole world quieted. It was eerie, like I was suddenly listening to the cafeteria activity at 20% volume. She looked up at me and her eyes held me frozen. They were sunken in heavily. And they were the color of twilight, almost purple when the light caught them. She smiled, in a way that made me think she'd rather be doing something else, perhaps more sinister, with her mouth. She introduced herself and then returned to eating. Startled, I said nothing, and poked at my lunch for the remainder of the period. When I got up from the table, sound returned to normal. The sudden intensity in volume scared me, and I dropped my tray. I bent down to pick it up, and when I stood up she was gone. I knew she couldn't have made it out of the cafeteria, but she was nowhere. I was confused and I felt a pit growing in my stomach. I left and returned to class, but I never saw her again. Since then, I've had many strange encounters with the creatures. I don't know what else you could call them. They definitely aren't human. The smile is wrong. Too forced, too plastic looking. The eyes give them away too. My second encounter with one of them happened 2 years later. I was walking home from a friend's house. The world went quiet again, and I looked around quickly. Across the street a young girl was standing on the corner. She had the same twilight sunken eyes, and was beckoning to me awkwardly. My skin crawled, and I ran the rest of the way home without stopping. After that night, whenever I was alone, I would start to hear muted whispering. And a low, mournful, far off wailing sound. The wailing made me scared I was going mad. I would periodically find a strange black handprint on things, with a swirled and jagged scar mark on the palm. No one I asked seemed to be able to see them, so eventually I stopped asking. When I was 15, I had my third encounter. It was another young girl. I was playing in my favorite woods, and when I came to the creek, she was sitting on the bank. She was humming a faintly familiar tune, and when I stepped in the clearing the hush returned. She stood up and motioned me towards the bank. Her viscous looking smile made me feel like jelly, but I found myself inching to where she was pointing. Her smile widened, now making it look like a horrible parody of a stroke victims mouth. I fought the urge to scream. I never took my eyes off her, as I inched to the edge. When I finally got close to her, her smile disappeared and she leaned in towards me. She again pointed eagerly at the water, and whispered in a gravely, echoing voice "you'll be one of us soon." I looked at the water, and my own reflection looked back at me with hollow sunken eyes. I screamed and fell backwards. As I hit the ground, I felt a sharp pain in my hand. Sound had returned to normal, and the girl had gone. I looked at my hand, as the blood ran down my wrist. A rock had pierced my hand, and created a jagged cut. My whole body felt stiff and unnatural. When the cut healed and left a scar, it was familiar looking. And I finally began to understand what was happening a little bit. The next time I saw one of them, A tall, thin woman, I wasn't afraid anymore. She beckoned me to follow her. I started to cross the street, and everything went silent. I knew it was time. I continued following the woman, almost blindly, and before I knew it we were somewhere dark and oppressive. The whispering and wailing that was all too familiar assaulted my ears. I stopped and the woman turned and smiled a toothy, lopsided smile. "Welcome to the quiet place. A place of echoes and regrets. You have been chosen. From the day I said hi to you, you've been marked. You'll remain here with me, acting as a guide for lost souls to the other side. When you have completed your task, eventually you will wither and fade. Until you become like them." She said. She gestured around her. In the distance I could see vague greyish/white figures, of what once might have been human. There were no features. They were almost like shadows. I could tell now that the faint wailing was coming from them. I shuddered and said "who is my first soul?" The woman smiled in a way that looked as if she were trying to sneer. She pointed back the way we had come and whispered "your own. All these echoes you see, are your own, including me. You must go back to the beginning, and mark yourself again. In between ferrying souls to the other side, you'll visit yourself. Until things play out exactly as they have now. And you're in my place, and I am one of them" That's how I became a wraith. I still don't know why I was chosen to live in this endless, echoing purgatory. Perhaps I'll never know. But I do go back and visit myself. And touch things that once were mine. I see the confusion on my own face, as the black handprints appear. I laugh inwardly, and my smile becomes more forced. I am now one of them.