Ghostlove. Dennis Mahoney
them under my shoe heel. The sound was like bubble wrap popping underwater.
I took no pleasure in their extermination but they couldn’t be allowed to further infest my home.
A single curler defied the smoke and I was forced to shave a portion of my hair with a straight razor. It left me with a bald patch, the size of a large postage stamp, to the left of my cowlick.
I admired this lone survivor’s tenacity to live and kept the hair cocoon in a Mason jar, which I placed next to the jar of luminous snow water in the curiosities closet.
According to Philo, metamorphosis would take anywhere from one to seven months. Damage to the subsequent page prevented me from learning about its future winged form, but my anticipation was a hopeful end to a hideous ordeal.
After mopping the crushed Hungarian curlers off the floor, I decided to contact a lawyer about Addendum 7c of the Affidavit of Title. I thought the incident might allow me to evict Mr. Gormly, and yet a deeper part of me wanted him to stay and negotiate his tenancy. I had the satisfying blood-rush of someone with an enemy and wanted to compel him to engage face to face.
June remained mercurial and oftentimes aloof.
Whenever I sensed she was near, I talked in the seemingly empty room and somehow, despite her lack of ears, she registered the soundwaves moving through the air. She saw me, too, and seemed to grow adept at interpreting my postures and expressions, whereas I never perceived so much as a vaporous silhouette of her form.
Her unpredictable comings and goings kept me off-guard. Every time I undressed, slept, talked to myself, or blew my nose, I knew she might silently appear without my noticing. My lack of privacy led to openness. As my physical exposure grew more and more familiar, I became more comfortable telling her about my life, just as being naked in the house had made me feel at home.
I told her about the things I’d experienced since moving in: the three-winged pigeon, Other William, my nightmare about an indescribable cat. I told her about my mother’s trauma and my father’s fatal crash. One night I sobbed in her presence, lonely and unmoored, unaware that she was there until I suddenly sensed her leaving.
She came and went without reason, appearing when I didn’t expect her and disappearing—to where, and how?—as soon as I believed the two of us were bonding. I worried that my neediness would frighten her away and worried that my false nonchalance would do the same, and so I began to refrain from summoning her by writing on the window, and when she visited my room, I never asked where she’d been or why she’d come back.
I was essentially blind and deaf whenever we conversed, able to speak, emote, and gesture in fully-fleshed monologues while June remained invisible and mute. I couldn’t decide which of us had it worse with my voice never answered and her answers never voiced.
Our only means of communication remained my bedroom’s foggy window. She couldn’t move objects, let alone grasp a pen, but somehow her fingertip could slowly streak the glass. Her energy—maybe a fundamental electrical charge she’d retained after death—had just enough force to move molecules of water.
But even that required extraordinary effort on her part and I devised a simpler method by drawing two columns on the window—Y and N, divided by a line—and asking her yes-or-no questions. All she had to do was dot the appropriate column.
She was taciturn and sometimes stubbornly withdrawn, but I phrased my questions carefully and slowly came to know certain details about her.
She was twenty-one years old, and yet I suspected death had made her something of an old soul.
She could be warm and even playful, as willing to share the room in silence as to tease me with enigmas. One night, she spent ten minutes drawing what I believed to be an occult symbol on the window. At the height of my suspense, she squeaked the first X in a game of tic-tac-toe.
She was sorrowful and scared and wouldn’t tell why.
I knew nothing significant about her life before her death. She declined to answer questions on the subject and withdrew if I pressed too far, however subtle my attempt. Now and then I felt resentful, needing better than she offered. Other times, I blamed myself for needing more than giving.
One night I asked if she’d encountered other spirits, hoping she’d caught a glimpse of my mother, Mr. Stick, or anyone who had haunted the house long enough to know its secrets.
“No,” June answered.
“Maybe you have and didn’t realize. Do you ever feel as if you’re not alone?”
“No.”
“Have you experienced any subtle changes of atmosphere you can’t explain?”
“No.”
“How about a change you can explain?”
“No.”
“Have you seen anything remarkable I haven’t already mentioned?”
“No.”
We both grew impatient with our mode of conversation. Every small exchange was a game of twenty questions, riddled with mysterious abstractions and confusion.
I plunged into reading, hoping to learn more about the physics and abilities of disembodied spirits, of which there seem to be as many varieties as common living people, and we began to experiment with alternate means of communication.
She couldn’t move a Ouija board planchette. She was unable to write in a layer of superfine ash, which I had delicately poofed across a white lacquered table. I attempted a spell on myself called the Katten Oren, which briefly allowed me to hear every mouse and insect scuttling in my brownstone but not a trace of June’s voice or any of her movements.
Late one night, after a grueling day of study, I was sitting with June at the end of the bed, exhausted from my work and lapsing into sleep. My hand fell open. June twirled her finger in the center of my palm. I smiled, half-sleeping, at the feeling of her touch, which was not exactly physical and not exactly psychic. It was more as if the spirit in my hand was made of water and the spirit in her fingertip had delicately swirled it.
I jolted up and faced her, staring mid-distance at the spot I thought her face would be.
“Tell me if you just drew a circle. Y or N.”
I held my upturned palm toward her on the bed. She wrote a thick “Y”, clear and perfect, in my hand.
“What color are the walls?” I asked.
She wrote the word, “BROWN.”
I laughed and spun, dizzy from the inside out, and thought I felt her staring very hard in my direction. Then her presence seemed to flicker and I worried she had vanished.
“Are you here?” I asked.
She wrote the word “YES” inside my palm.
“We did it! We can talk now!”
June didn’t answer. I wondered if the breakthrough had frightened her somehow and thought about a thing my mother once said—that ghosts were only people, after all, same as me, and were as hesitant to show themselves as anybody else.
“June,” I said.
Nothing.
“Please don’t disappear again. Tell me about yourself. Why are you here?”
“I DON’T KNOW.”
“Is there anything you need?”
She wrote the word, “DEATH,” in the middle of my forehead.
4. ALONE TOGETHER
Communicating by psychokinetic touch took some getting used to.
June’s ease in tracing letters on my skin contrasted with my struggle to identify the shapes. Depending on her position in relation to my hand, her letters would appear in various directions. Sitting beside