Ghost Story

Being a ghost was nothing like Maria had expected. When she was a child she had explored old houses whenever she had the chance, opening closets and looking under staircases for evidence of stranded spirits left behind in the world of the living. She found plenty of rodents and insects, but never any ghosts.

When she was finally able to become a ghost herself, she searched for a long time to find just the right place, a perfect match for her childhood imagination. She finally settled on an ancient, crumbling mansion on Mason Street, a house that numerous people had lived in over time but that had been standing empty for many years when she first walked through the door. Once she decided that she had found her perfect house, she wasted no time in settling into life as a ghost. She picked up rusted pots and pans from the kitchen and dragged them across the rotted hardwood floors, making as much racket as she could. She put on her wedding dress, by then a torn and shredded rag, and stood in the window moaning and wailing. She spent long hours of the night carrying pieces of broken furniture out onto the front lawn, arranging them carefully in strange and elaborate patterns. When she went out to look at them the next morning, her work was always ruined, stolen by the vagrants who wandered through the neighborhood or overturned by wind and rain.

She slept for long hours in the abandoned house, forgetting the pieces of the living world. What it had been like to speak to another person, what it was to taste a warm meal, what it was to walk outside and blink her eyes in the sunlight. Maria began to wonder how long she would stay there, if anyone would ever come for her. She sometimes thought about leaving, but a paralyzing dread came over her every time she approached the edge of the dying lawn that surrounded the house. She stood next to the edge of what little grass was left, her toes almost touching the sidewalk, and wrapped her arms around herself as the cold wind beat against her body. The strands of the decaying dress stretched out around her, twisting as she extended her arms and let the air take them. She screamed until her lungs burned, announcing that the ghost had emerged from the house, but no one answered. She stood there for what seemed a long time, peering through the darkness that enveloped the deserted street, and then turned to go back inside and lie in wait under the staircase.