NONFICTION
A GHOST STORY
Lauren Foley
I had this dream once that felt like it had been stripped from an indie Halloween movie: exposed brick walls, threadbare fear scattered across the floor like breadcrumbs, a ghostly presence unfolding in rattling noises and too-cold indoor breezes. I often vividly remember dreams, but most of this one fell away when I woke up. Most of the dream, that is, aside from my mother taking me by the upper arms, gazing lovingly but sternly into my eyes, and declaring, “They’ll be nice to you if you’re nice to them.” She was, naturally, talking about the ghosts. I am not afraid of ghosts. Or, more accurately, I don’t believe in them. This belief and I . . . we have a complicated relationship. I deliberately don’t answer its texts. It never returns my calls. Yet, all too often, we find ourselves lying side-by-side in my room at night, talking until our voices scratch into silence. My grandfather died in August during a two-year period of my life that swarms behind my vision now—a period filled with births and deaths and shuffled homes, but still out of sight, as they say. In hindsight, his passing was probably the beginning of that period: a reckoning spelled out in church bells ringing in the distance and yellow butterflies landing on the hood of my mother’s gold 4Runner and a swath of that famous big, blue sky. By the time my mother found out about his death, it was too late to try to peel back the years and amend the cracks we pretended weren’t in the woodwork. She told us instead to remember what we could of the good—the soft sweetness of the buttermints he always kept in a crystal dish by his chair, the smoked syrup warmth in his laugh, the wayward questions that only he knew how to piece together and offer the world.
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