A ghost story

 Waking up too early lately, the dark still cushioning me against rising and shining (not to mention getting to work on the house and garden), this morning I lay there waiting for light.  I have been reading The Ghost Variations, 100 very short stories about the way spirits inhabit our world and we theirs.  It's been fun, but at the moment I wasn't in the mood to read, even to pass the time.

There is a quirkiness about the way the author, Kevin Brockmeier, turns the tables on the stereotypical ideas we have of ghost.  No mediums (so far), no white sheets with big Halloween cut-outs for eyes, no knocking on the floor to drive you mad.  Instead, he invents a normalcy that puts spirits and the living in almost interchangeable situations, giving thoughts and feelings and sometimes hilarious perplexities to the non-living (though really, these stories often defy that nomen).  My favorite is the spirit with a terrible sense of direction, lost at every turning and unable to find a single person willing to set her on the right path.

This too-early morning, thinking of the story I had read before sleep last night, I picked up a pen and a few scraps of paper I keep on the night table to jot notes for the next day, and began a ghost story of my own.  I thought I'd share what I've got so far...

It's called...

Time, Gentleman, Time

As if he were a stranger entering a house he's not sure he recognizes, Peter shifts his way from room to room, hugging the wall, mostly.  He's looking for something he can't remember, but knows is there.  That's the way he was his last year...walking around a corner, deliberate and purposeful, his object a sure thing, then suddenly the point of his destination vanished.

When he was finally gone himself, he wondered whether all the things he had forgotten were not entirely erased, but still existed, waiting on some plane he hadn't reached yet.  Finding himself at this place he thought he remembered (even if it was the wrong address), perhaps he could make peace with the insubstantiation of his existence.  The irony of that conundrum wasn't lost on him.

Nothing about the rooms struck him as significant.  There must have been furniture, or pictures on the wall...photographs, even...but such images escaped him.  Toward the back of the house there were voices, so he shifted toward them, though for an instant...he didn't know why...he was tempted to turn down the darkened hall toward the bedroom.

In the dining room now...he seems to know it by instinct...he stops for a moment, then moves into the kitchen.  Here he feels both comfortable and anxious.  His lower extremities begin to ache, but as if from far away, as if he were feeling someone else's. 

The voices are louder from here...he can hear laughter and a small child splashing and giggling.  A man he once might have known, he thinks, is shouting, cheering her on.

Some sharp edge of a memory cuts him...there is a woman with them, her voice...he knows it.  A smell of barbecue on a grill is brought to him by a shift of wind, and close behind it the scent of the cream his mother slathered over him before they walked through the sand down to the water, her hand pulling him little by little toward the low fringe of waves.  She, too, laughs.

Is this where he is, then, way back there again?  No. Not her.  But someone closer.

Closer than he wants to be.  He is too close, he feels, to something he is not ready for.  He stays where he is, in the shadows, watching without really seeing how all this is happening.  

He's new at this state of being, anyone else could tell him; it's confusing, seeing life go on without him.

***********************************************

By the time I wrote this, it was nearly seven, and the day could get on.  Meanwhile, you can have some fun and see what you can make of it, see where the story can go from here.  I've got to go plant some arum lilies.