Taking this job was the best decision that Clint had ever made. It had sort of been on a dare back when he’d been job-seeking. His roommate James had returned from shopping one day and dumped a newspaper on his lap with an advertisement circled in red marker pen several times.

“That ad’s been in the papers for weeks now,” James had said. “The pay is incredible, but there’s a good reason for that. Maybe you could give it a try. If you’re not a wuss, that is.”

And of course Clint had taken that as a challenge.

As it turned out, the job was a night shift guarding and maintaining a cemetery – and, when Clint saw just how much he’d get paid, he all but jumped at the chance to apply. The only catch, it seemed, was that the cemetery was ‘haunted’. At the time, Clint had laughed. He didn’t believe in ghosts.

⁕ ⁕ ⁕

The first few days on the job were mostly spent getting used to it; he must have drank about three times his body’s weight in caffeine, and one night, when he felt like he felt like he was about to pass out, he’d turned on some cheesy pop music and had his own little dance party inside the community mausoleum.

Once he felt more acclimatized to his new sleep schedule, he spent some time clearing up the place – litter picking, weed plucking, power washing the older gravestones. It ended up being quite a nice job, actually. Soothing. Working with his hands helped him get out of his own head. He didn’t know why it had taken so long for anyone else to apply for the job.

It wouldn’t be long until he found out why.

A while into the job, he’d started noticing something that upset him a little. There was a line of graves – all people who died and were buried in the nineties – that were still diligently attended by friends and family, with flowers and photos placed neatly around the stones... But there was one grave that never had any visitors.

It looked a little odd, all empty and by itself in the crowd of well-loved strangers. What made it worse was that the woman buried there was around the same age as him. And, though Clint didn’t know the woman – for all he was aware, there could be a very good reason no one was visiting – he still didn’t want to ignore it. It wasn’t fair.

So, he started buying bouquets. There was a sweet little flower shop on the way to the cemetery, so he took to buying a new arrangement of varying bright colours and sweet scents each time it looked like the old one would need to be replaced. He also took to having a little conversation with her every time he placed the new bouquet.

“Hey, Natasha,” he’d greet. “How have you been? I’ve not been too bad myself... Had to take Lucky to the vets the other day – found out he was feeling so bad because he ate my socks. Two of ’em – a whole pair! The big dope. I love dogs. Are you a dog person, Natasha...? You know what, you strike me more as a cat person. Yeah, I can see that. Yeah, you’re definitely more of a cat person.”

It was nice, he found, to have someone to chat to – even though there was no chat back – on such a lonesome job.

⁕ ⁕ ⁕

It was a cold night when it happened. The fog low on the ground made the cemetery look delightfully spooky, and Clint was sort of hoping that bunch of drunk highschoolers would try to break in again. Last time, he had scared them off by leaping out from behind a gravestone, pretending to be a zombie, and it was hilarious. But he thought he could get a little more creative than that next time.

He arrived to his shift bearing gifts: roses this time, in red, pink, and yellow. He almost dropped them however, upon the sight that greeted him when he approached Natasha’s grave.

The vaporous visage of a woman, pale grey and smoky like the mist surrounding her, stood in front of him. She was... beautiful. There was no better way to put it; however strange and terrifying she was, she truly was beautiful, alarmingly so. In her arms, she was somehow cradling the dying bouquet of white lilies and gypsophila that Clint had brought last time – Clint wasn’t sure how she was doing so, as her translucency made her look a little incorporeal too.

She was a ghost, Clint realized belatedly. An actual, real-life ghost. Huh. Maybe the warnings were right after all.

Clint felt his stomach flip as she looked in his direction, her long hair swaying in the air as if she were floating underwater. In an odd moment of panic, Clint hid the roses behind his back. He didn’t know why, but he’d come over all shy all of a sudden.
A small smile spread across the ghost’s delicate features.

“Are you the person who’s been leaving flowers at my grave?” She asked. Her voice was strange, echoing and ethereal.

“Uh... are you Natasha?”

“That’s the name on my headstone, yes.”

Clint gulped. “Well then... yes.”

The ghost – Natasha – looked him up and down slowly, then placed the old and dying bouquet back down by her gravestone. Clint felt his heart running a million miles an hour as she moved closer, her legs seeming to merge with the fog she waded through, making it look like she was floating through the air. Once face to face, Natasha glanced curiously over Clint’s shoulder.

“Oh!” Clint realized, taking the roses back out from behind his back. “Th-these are for you.”

Her smile brightened into a grin as she reached out and took them from his hands. Clint was a little cautious letting them go, worried she might drop them and then get angry and attack him or vow to haunt him forever or something else that wouldn’t be out of place in a horror movie. Instead, she lifted them to her nose and breathed them in, letting out a happy sigh at the scent. That was weird. Could ghosts even smell?

Natasha leaned up then, as if standing on her tip-toes, and Clint felt as though someone had gently pressed a block of ice against his face when she laid a soft kiss against his cheek. The sensation didn’t last long, however, as Clint found his cheeks heating up soon after.

“They’re beautiful,” Natasha said sincerely. “Thank you.”

Huh. This was an odd turn of events.