Sims Life Musings

Here’s my final story for the contest. For this round I decided to try something slightly different (at least, different for me). Voting hasn’t started yet, but as the closing date has passed I’ve decided to post the story.

Midnight’s Kiss

How do you tell someone that you’re in love with them? With flowers, notes slipped into their pocket as they leave for work, or a romantic weekend in the country? All of those have been trusted methods over the years, together with the boy winning the big prize for the girl at the local fair and candlelit dinners in quiet little restaurants. Yes, it’s clear that often the best way to say “I love you” involves something that excludes other people. Two’s company, three’s a crowd, and more is definitely not merry (unless the boy wants to be the butt of his friends’ jokes).

Unfortunately there are some cases of “boy meets girl” that are not traditional. That’s where the relationship that Joseph Baker yearned for ran into problems. Elizabeth Gearing was everything that Joseph had been searching for - kind, intelligent, astonishingly beautiful. So what’s the problem? Joseph wasn’t an axe-wielding maniac and didn’t have three girlfriends. He was perfect, and was the kind of man that every parent wanted their daughter to settle down with, except for one very difficult technicality. Joseph was a ghost.

Yes, that’s right – Joseph was a ghost, and the girl he was in love with was very much alive. He breathed his last agonising breath on 22nd August 1882 at the age of 23, one of many to die from consumption. Joseph had been a shoemaker, apprenticed at the age of 13 and in regular work since the age of 16. His father had died when Joseph was five years old, and his mother had worked herself to exhaustion in an effort to keep her four children out of the workhouse. At the age of 35 she had the features and ailments of a woman more than twice her age, and when her body finally gave in at the age of 42 it was left to Joseph and his sister Daisy to keep the family together.

Against the odds they carried out their mother’s dying wishes, and none of the children were ever forced to endure the separation and backbreaking duties that the majority of the workhouse inmates had to face. When the two youngest children were old enough to work, Daisy married her childhood sweetheart and started her own family. She continued to take care of her siblings, regularly cooking their dinner at weekends and dealing with their laundry and clothing repairs. Many a time she would ask Joseph when he was going to find himself a wife, but he just shrugged. There were plenty of girls in the village, but he could always find some flaws in their characters that others couldn’t see. Right up to the day he died, in the cottage where he was born, Joseph had never found his soul mate.