This story was inspired by the beautiful paintings of Andreas Englund, shown throughout.

Stepping up to the podium, he sees that they've replaced the one he cracked a couple of weeks ago with one made of Absorbalite so that he can't break it again. He smiles as he looks at it, then chuckles nervously as he rubs it lightly with his weathered hands. Looking at the group before him, his face not nearly as stern as the white skull emblazoned on his chest, the old man in the blue and brown costume says, "Hi. My name is John Phantom."

"Hi, John," responds the room.

"I've been clean for thirty-five years, five months, and a day," he says evenly. The group applauds. "Some of you may remember that in the last month, my wife returned from the dead." The room murmurs a bit, but settles quickly. "When I first mentioned it, I said, 'sort of,' but..." he pauses as he brushes the podium hesitantly. Then he continues, "but memory is a funny thing. Especially as you get older. A lifetime of associations makes triggering a memory easier and easier until sometimes it's just the oddest little thing." He reaches into a fanny pack that he's added to his costume today, and pulls out an orange. Holding it up like Hamlet holding Yorick's skull, he says, "Nine days ago, it was this."

He turns the orange first one way, and then the other, then rolls it so he's holding it between his thumb and forefinger. "You see, thirteen days ago, when I told you all my story for like the seventh time that week, I also did an interview- you may have seen it on television if you didn't have anything better to do." He shrugs. The group chuckles good naturedly. "It got me brooding a little bit; thinking about my wife and daughter, and that went on for a few days. Until nine days ago, when I fell back on a familiar habit. I like to eat clementine oranges when I think of them, because, well, they were both named Clementine too."

The room kind of splits at that, and mostly along gender lines. The women mostly coo at the sweetness of it, and the men mostly groan at the bad pun of it.

John just laughs lightly, and starts picking at the orange's peel while he talks. "I know it's silly, guys, but there's a reason for it. Y'see, when I first lost my Clementines, and wasn't completely stoned out of my gourd to numb that pain, all I could do was think about them. I mean all I could do." He nods as he says that, clearly reflecting on some silent horror of that time as he pulls at the peel.

"After Wartime and the others got me into rehab, and I finally started to commit to it, I knew I had to do something besides just dwell on their deaths, and h-" he falters. "H-how I..." he takes a deep breath, and pries the orange in half with his fingernails. "How I caused it," he finally finishes. "So, whenever I was stuck on their memories, I'd peel one of these and eat it, a section at a time," he says as he holds up a section, and then pops it in his mouth. He smiles as he chews, and after several seconds, he swallows and says, "I used this as a timer. I'd think about my wife and daughter for as long as it took me to eat one of these oranges. Or two. Or three. Or a bag." The group laughs. "Depended on how hard the memories were. Then, I'd go and do something else. Anything else. Whether it was brush my teeth, put a puzzle together in the rec room, or work out in the gym. It got me through rehab, started me on the road to getting through my grief, and frankly it helped calm the oral fixation I had with pills and pipes at the time." He ate another section of the orange, and the room waited silently.

"So, nine days ago," he says, getting back to his story. "Nine days ago, I'd been brooding for a few days already, and so I got a basket of clementines, and sat down at my table to eat. I bit into my first one, and man, that thing was awful!" he says, making a sour face. "I said, 'Ugh! Bad clementine,' and spat it out. And that's what triggered the memory." Holding up another orange section, he said, "I'm glad this one isn't bad. I needed this today." He eats the slice, and then without looking tosses the other half into a trashcan across the room with uncanny accuracy. "That's enough of that though," he says, wiping his fingertips lightly on the sides of his shirt.

"It was the oddest thing. As soon as I said it, that memory- half a memory, really, maybe not even that- that memory whispered in the back of my mind, and I shouted, 'This is bad, Clementine!' And although I didn't know when or why, I knew it was something I had said to my wife at some point.

"I call it a 'phantom conversation.' No pun intended," he adds, but the room chuckles anyway. "A phantom conversation is any conversaiton you have aloud with yourself- whether repeating a conversation you had at a previous time, or rehearsing a conversation you plan to have, or wish you'd had. I call it that, because with no one else around, it's like you're talking to ghosts, and it's kind of a waste of time. Still, I have them from time-to-time."

"So now I'm sitting there talking to myself: 'This is bad, Clementine! This is bad, Clementine! What's bad? What were we talking about? I was never fool enough to criticize her cooking.'" The group laughs. "'So what in the world? What's bad?' Y'know? It was like that. I just kept wracking my brain, trying to remember when I said, 'This is bad, Clementine,' and it was just refusing to come up.

"Man, it just drove me bananas. I tried, and I tried, and I tried, but I just couldn't remember when I had said that to Clementine. I started to doubt myself, and wondered if maybe it was something I had said to my daughter instead. I thought about it for awhile, and I really couln't make a connection there either. Clementine had always been a pretty good child, so I never really had to get after her too much. So I went back to when I might have said it to my wife, and it just wasn't there for me. So finally, after a couple of days of this, I just threw up my hands." He mimics the motion for the group, and continues, "I said, 'Ah, well, it's not the end of the world.' And that's when I remembered the rest of it. And the shock of it threw me back across that universal divide, to the world with Sky Phantom and that other Clementine!

"Only, it wasn't 'that other Clementine.' It was her. My Clementine. And there she was again, in all of her glory. No older than the day I lost her. She was just... there... and she didn't even seem surprised to see me. She just looked over her shoulder like she was waiting on me to say something. My mouth had gone really dry, but I finally managed a weak, 'Clementine? It's really you, isn't it?'"

"She didn't answer. She just reached for a T-shirt on the bed, and pulled it on. Then she picked up a pair of sweatpants, and pulled them on as well, turning towards me as she slid them over her bare bottom. I hadn't seen my wife in a very long time, much less like this. I couldn't help it- I just stared for a long minute, both elated to see her, and horrified that she'd been in this other universe all this time. Finally, she walked to her nightstand for her watch, and said, 'What do you want, John?' She sounded tired when she said it."

"'Wha... what do I want?' I was dumbfounded. 'It's been... you've been... thirty-five years, Clementine! I saw you die, and you've been gone for thirty-five years! What do I want? An explanation would be a nice start!' I shouted at her. And then I realized I wasn't really so angry at her as I was just so damned happy to know she was still alive. So, I moved towards her to put my arms around her, and said, 'My God. It's been too long, Cle--' She cut me off by drawing a gun from the nightstand drawer and pointing it at me.

Story and characters owned by Chris Bishop, copyright 2020, 2021, 2022.