Juho Raiha

It'd been a terrible tragedy. Six months ago Paolo's girlfriend of four years, Bebe, had died in a hot air ballooning accident. She was incinerated in the sky at fifteen thousand feet. Well, at least she had gone out doing something sort of cool. But obviously it was a terrible blow to her family, Paolo, and her many friends. It'd been half a year since the incident and they were just beginning to get their lives back on track again.

Bebe had been an artist all her life. She loved to sketch and paint, and was a big fan of everything from the old European masters to modern manga. She could sit down with a pad and pencil and draw anyone's portrait in a matter of minutes. Her career however, had been in social work, mostly with teens and children.

She never got the chance to get it off the ground because of her passing, but she'd been working for about a year on a manga graphic fantasy/sci-fi novel that she was writing about a group of teenagers and the adventures they'd have. Paolo had carefully kept all her sketches, paintings, files and notes with the idea that someday he might tie them all together and get her work published. He was going to make sure the insurance money left to him from her death would go towards realizing this.

Paolo was well underway completing Bebe's graphic novel. He'd enlisted the help of Kayla, one of Bebe's design college classmate-friends, and had done a lot of work on it himself. It'd be ready for publication in a matter of weeks.

Paolo sat alone in his once shared apartment in the dim light of a single bedside lamp nursing a glass of brandy and water. He held a framed picture of Bebe in his left hand. How he missed her! The grief was still so fresh. Yet he never let himself fall into the pit of hopeless depression; she wouldn't have wanted that, he knew. So he fought hard to keep his head above water and carry on. Everything would be ok in the end. The brandy helped.

He sighed, downed the rest of his glass squeezing a tear from each eye and stood up. He headed resolutely into the kitchen for one last cup of booze before bed when he saw something which nearly made him jump out of his skin.

It was Bebe, standing there in the doorway... Paolo dropped the glass onto the carpeted floor and stumbled backwards, his heart suddenly racing in his chest.