The Trick of the Ghost This ghost, yours truly, has been ghosted. Abandoned. That girl, she’s managed to get away—was I the one who let her fade? The haunted has hidden, and now I, the poor haunter, have no place to stay. How does a shadow scamper away like that? That was her secret: she could let the past dissipate, in a moment, into midnight mist. But the fog was thick when we met. When I was seeking flesh and bones to build a semblance of myself, when the clouds around me obscured any image of my identity. The fog happened to fade when I saw her face, and it was just like I had wiped the mist from the bathroom mirror on a frigid morning. For a minute I was envious—she had my hair! My smile! My slightly pointed ears, my long legs, my awkward posture! She’d stolen it all, and I wanted it back. So, in a moment of madness, I stole her shadow. And the haunting began. **** Despite common belief, shadows are not bound to their human masters—rather, they are firstrate items for a ghost to purloin. The difficulty lies in finding the right shadow to occupy, which can take some time: all ghosts recognize who they were and who they should be, intuitively. That is what distinguishes them from others—not necessarily the lack of a physical form, but the perfect vision of one. The assurance in appearance that would take a human centuries to attain. So the trick of a lifetime presented itself when I saw her—strangely, the only treat in my ghostly existence. I had found my form to fit for eternity, and I only had one obstacle that hindered my mission. She had to be alone and statue-still. The only way I could secure the links between the shadow and myself, lock the bonds between darkness and disembodied soul was if the actual body was unmoving, unaffected by others. That girl, she had to stop glancing around, as if she were being followed! She was the only soul on this lonely rooftop, and both of us knew it. Nobody here. I was the only one lurking in the fog (and back then, I was nobody). She had to fix her eyes on something—stop the sheepish glances, the ever-turning head! An airplane soared above and she looked up to gaze at the stars, those lonely comforts in the unknown and gaping abyss of night. This was when the roles switched and I became the shadow; the shadow became her master. This was the moment I tied the knot. This was when we learned what it feels like to haunt, to be haunted. **** People had been looking at me funny for months. Maybe it was years—I can’t remember. The oddly sympathetic eyes of a teacher, my eight-year-old cousins turning their faces when I addressed them, the aunts and uncles who seemed to squint and scrunch their eyebrows. They had always looked at me funny, though—tilted their heads in a patronizing way when I asked questions, or subtly took steps closer as I spoke. But after the night I went to the roof, the whole world took a step back. And that was probably what shifted everyone’s vision. It was the first night I had ever been completely alone, the possibilities limitless.
10
