He was in heaven again, umpiring a school cricket match, when something interrupted his appreciation of an exquisite cover drive.
“Dunc,” Heather whispered, jostling his shoulder under the duvet.
He tried to return to the cricket, but it had gone.
“Duncan…”
Why was she lying behind him? Oh. Holiday. France. First night. The farmhouse only had double beds.
I
Mildred wants to borrow a button again, she pleads with Charlotte — says come on, we haven’t played in so very long. Agatha chides them — we’re packing them away children, soon we’ll all be gone. The men with clipboards stand outside, saying this roof is crooked, something’s wrong.
This button was a porthole once, it was a Catherine wheel. These shoelaces were conger-eels, this matchbox was a bomb.
Agatha remembers this house so full of little feet and little laughs. Summer evenings yawned like dozing cats; we listened to faeries singing at the bottom of the garden, eavesdropped on wood nymphs chattering beneath the slow-crackle of bonfire leaves.
The boy calls me The Lady. Bed-ridden, surrounded by mountains of comic books and tissues of blood and snot, he looks for me in the cracks in the wall, the grotesque stains on the ceiling, smudged window glass. He should be looking outside where there is grey light upon the lake, where leaves turn yellow and red on the branches. He saw me once in the corner of a broken mirror in the old apartment in the city. He thought me very beautiful. I say this not out of vanity, but to note he saw me as the unblemished peasant girl I once was.
“Aw, c’mon, dude, let’s go look at the old cabin.” This from Mike, annoying at worst, goofy at best.
“Seriously, man, we shouldn’t go up there.” Amos, the goody two shoes of the three, always anxious not to get into trouble.
“What?” jeered Billy, “you’re scared you might pee ya pants?”
When grandma died they took her eyes, they pulled her eyes out for science.
Right out of her damn head. I wonder, if they popped or plopped or squelched or squeaked. But, in that moment, I know
three ghosts came to be.
There was a place, it was said, where if you held still, stopped your breath, waited, waited … you could see the ghostly funeral processions pass. Down the long road from the old mansion house, now a nursing home. The family, long since gone, had had the privilege, when one of them died, of having the coffin carried down the long road at midnight. Down through the fields, now housing estates, across the streams and becks, now paved over, past the stores and warehouses, now coffee houses and apartment complexes. If anyone were about, doing god knows what, out with cause, or not, they would turn aside, or step back into the shadows, eyes down, letting the procession step slowly by. Down towards the river, down through the town to the parish church. There to pause, to request admittance, a soft glove against the door, the slow creak as it opened and the priest stepping to one side. The service, brief with few hymns, a short summary of a life, sometimes long, more often not. The crypt opened, the smell of old bones released into the air.
They don’t know I’m a ghost. Even I forget sometimes. After years of hiding it, I’ve become quite good at obfuscating the signs. So good that I fool myself. Occasionally I let my guard down, and a hint drops free, but no one has managed to piece them together. Yet.
It felt funny wearing my brother’s cologne. The fragrances wafted through the moist, trapped air of our old bedroom, the soft smell of the sage coming through the dimly lit room with a small hint of cedarwood and mint. I could tell that the air hadn’t been used in a long time. Years, maybe. I put on my brother’s black suit, the pinstriped jacket with the real-looking white rose lapel, the leather shoes, top hat, everything. It finally fit after years of hanging off my body every time I tried it on. I remember standing on homemade stilts and stuffing the suit with paper towels to try to get into it, much to mother’s consternation. Unable to look at myself in the mirror for too long, I pulled it off and hung each article of clothing with great care, making sure there was not a wrinkle to be found.
The grand piano lays discarded by the mossy path.
She sits on the frayed velvet of the wooden stool long rooted into the ground.
She slowly runs her finger up and down the black and white ivory.