When ghosts are silent

The leaves are freckling red and I want to write a ghost story; something with the talking dead. I imagine two skeletons sitting in a bar. They own the bar—got it so they could dump beer straight through their jaws without being kicked out once it piddled on the floor. I decide to like these skeletons. I pop a quarter into the karaoke machine and ask what they want to sing to, dance to, live to, but the dead don’t stir. Instead, they sit on their cracked barstools, elbows pressed into dust thick as velvet. They tell me not even ghosts haunt their halls anymore.

I leave the skeletons in their dusty bar. False start. New paper. I’m going to write a ghost story, a real ghost story this time. See this with me: a small cottage nestled by corn fields. A farmer’s wife has gone missing. Up and vanished. She had been fading in and out for a while now, would drift off and up in the middle of conversation, her hair circling her face like snakes underwater. She’d scatter feed to the chickens without opening her hands—the kernels would seep straight through. She’d stop conjuring circles with her dishrag partway through drying a dinner plate and stare through the kitchen window beyond the farm, the feathered wheat fields next door, beyond the quilted valleys, and her eyes would reflect vacuums and voids far from where she stood. This all happened to her, until nothing happened to her.

            But it’s alright, the visiting doctor would say. It’s not unusual for people to disappear, not at all, not right now. Just last week, the Miller boy slipped through the cracks in his room’s floorboards and right before Sunday dinner, Old Thompson floated off into the corner of his dining room. Not unusual at all.

            The farmer would perk up. Common meant curable. Well, how do we fix it? He would ask.

            The doctor would smile. Fresh air. Bed rest. Less screen time. Have you tried a bit of yoga? Great for the glutes.

            But... the farmer would say, as he’d think of his wife phasing through walls, how’s that supposed to help? I don’t even know how to reach her anymore.

            Then the doctor would frown and scrunch up his eyes and he would look like he cared up, down, and apple pie for the farmer and his wife. He would say unfortunately, I'm just a doctor. I can’t plug up the holes in our dimension. That’s what our tax dollars are for. The doctor would tip his hat and leave the farmer in his cottage with no one but the walls to hear him sob.

            I press my hands together like a prayer and squint at what I’ve made. That was a ghost story, but it’s not spooky enough. Scary, yes, but not in the naughty sort of way that makes Halloween so stompy. I want a particular brand of scary like tucking your toes under the covers, pretending to sleep, or sprinting up dark staircases to escape invisible monsters. But what I've written is more like hearing your parents argue from the quiet dark of your bedroom where the nightlight doesn’t reach, like watching two shadows sway under the door’s gap, watching one shadow leave, hearing the front door slam and the family car sputter to life.

            I don’t want to write something awful right now. I don’t want to live in that space one more second when all my insides are spaghetti knots: soggy, slippery, and impossible to separate without ruining. And my God, I don’t want to make someone else feel awful reading what I've written.

            I cover my face with my hands, and I see owl’s eyes and black cats, dancing skeletons and drunken moons, pumpkins, bats, brains, and boogeymen—but when I cup these fragments in my palms and fold them gently into my pages, they roll off the margins like rain on an oilskin. I am left with words I can’t rake into piles.

            How do I write a ghost story in a haunted world? I am too close to see the end of the page.

I’ve been thinking of this Neil Gaiman story tucked away in a book I haven’t touched for months. It was about this boy who saw a Romani woman standing under a slice of yellow streetlight. He was sure she was a ghost, but he couldn’t find one tragedy anywhere in the suburb’s records. Life is not story shaped, was the conclusion the boy came to.

I’m thinking of children now. I see a girl living in the shadows and a ghost boy on a swing set. Isolation. Crossed paths. Laughter. There’s something about friendship hidden here, but I'm too thread-bare to sift for gold dust. I can’t remember anymore what children do in parks. I can’t believe parks ever existed at all. I abandon the children on the playground and close my eyes once more waiting, wishing, fingers-crossed praying to the page for a haunting.

And when I open my eyes, I realize I can’t see ghosts because I’m inside one. My breath conjures rain clouds within our shared sheet. Everything is framed by oval eye cutouts—the skeletons, the farm, the shadow children—separate little words, separate little worlds. I see them for what they are, not what I want them to be. I let them live apart. I say to myself, perhaps it’s not about putting together fragments, but the desire to make sense of anything at all; that’s what matters. And in this haunted world, that we still get up and dress up, carve pumpkins, and tell ghost stories, whispers how maybe we can survive this hazmat possession. Outside my office window, the leaves are freckling red and I have to believe fall will come even if I don’t see the world turning.