One square, just a little ways from the line of carts selling freshly squeezed orange juice, remains deserted. No locals venture there. If they have to pass by, they will go around it, keeping a solid distance between it and them. Tourists who stumble into the space leave hurriedly, often with ashen faces. Local middle worlders won’t cross it. They have learned not to.

To understand what makes the little piece of the square so vile to both middle worlders and humans alike, you have to understand the history of the Jemaa el-Fna. Particularly the part where it was used as execution grounds. The blood spilled in the square not only gives the magic here an incarnadine flavor, but it also makes the place thick with ghosts.

Ghosts are not common, but neither are they the impossibilities human science labels them as. Any place where emotions are spent in excess becomes fertile ground for ghosts. If the magic in the place is enough to sustain them, they will exist. Usually the magic isn’t, but here, it is.

Most of the ghosts lingering in the square are benign, barely held together by some unfulfilled wish or unspoken desire. They are wisps who only require one strong gust of will to dissipate. They have no anchors, so they grow no roots. That is not the case with Farah.

To call her a ghost seems like an insult to the strength of her being, but in the end, that is what she is. I met her, if one can meet ghosts, one afternoon when the storm inside of me was raging harder than the storm outside in the square. The pain, which constructs her, which binds her to this world long after everything she was, has decayed away, seems like a distant echo of mine. She lost her heart and then her life with scarcely a pause between the two. She was betrayed first by her father and then by her husband. Two things remain of her: her name, which she holds on to tightly, and her anger, which she grasps even tighter. She haunts the little piece of the square on which she was executed and exacts a payment from anyone who is unlucky enough to step into the space. She causes humans pain and rips the magic from middle worlders. She doesn’t kill them, but without magic, they might as well be dead. She is not searching for absolution; she has no wish to move on to anywhere.

What she and I have is not friendship, not exactly. You cannot be friends with a ghost. What we have is an understanding, a common language that we both speak. A language that anyone who has been violated and known fear speaks.