Ghost Stories

There is a child in my house.
He is small with gap teeth and pale colt legs that stick out from his too-large wool shorts—stuck in that golden rough and tumble age of youth where smiling still comes easily. But this is only when he is tangible, the shimmering air distorted and made flesh. Often, his presence is only known from the echoing smell of grass stains that fill the house. I can hear his laughter from my sitting room, the one with the crane wallpaper in indigo that Phil hated. He thought it was too dark, sapping the light from the room, but as I watch the speckled afternoon sun play across the printed bamboo shoots, I can’t agree. 
“Luck. Longevity. Fidelity,” I had whispered to him as I traced my finger along a crane’s sloped neck, happy for the supposed blessing of our new marriage while Phil probably imagined splitting open its feathered breast with a scraping blade. It was those thoughts of him slicing, ripping, and tearing until my cranes were nothing but curled ribbons on hardwood that almost paralyzed me with grief; sweaty palms gripping the steering wheel as I rushed back to stop him in the act of my imagined crime. I suppose it’s always been like this. I loved our home for its idiosyncratic charms, and Phil loved its shell.
The child's presence was just another charm like a cool breeze that clears the stagnant air from your lungs.  He was the fruit my womb could not bear. He was the best of us in miniature. But Phil hadn’t thought so. No, he feared him, feared the implications of a spirit’s existence.
I’ve always known the cool whispers against my skin, the choking heaviness of an antique store’s air. It can be hard for spirits to let go, my grandmother explained to me, cradling her drowned sister’s locket in her palm as I eyed the distorted, syrupy thickness of space around the object with new understanding. Sometimes they’re waiting for the right person.
Sisters that live in lockets, boys that come with houses, and husbands that vanish. There is nothing left of Phil’s in the house now, nothing left that he’d cling after to stop the veil from closing. I doubt he’d even want to. He never seemed to know how to hold on to anything that mattered.
“Luck. Longevity. Fidelity,” I hear the boy’s soft lilt in the quiet of the sitting room, intangible today.

***

Isabelle “Is” Curtis (@is_curtis9) is a nonfiction MFA candidate at the University of New Hampshire, where they recently graduated with a degree in journalism. Their journalistic work has received several awards, including recognition from both the New Hampshire and Maine Press Associations.