A Spirit in the Attic

By Sabrina Rucker

Webegan outside and in the living room, where there were always people around to help out, where we were encouraged to run and play and imagine. Sunlight streamed through windows that seemed enormous, and warm food was always being made in the kitchen.

Up the stairs were hallways filled with doors and secrets and whispers. Some doors were locked tightly, some doors were wide open, but most were cracked just slightly, so that, in the right position, you could see beyond the clumsy barrier. Everyone was separated, together.

As we got older, we moved to the third floor. It’s not used too often, so it has been stacked with piles of things to be looked at later. There isn’t time to sort through it all, and so everyone goes to the piles that interest them most. We’re not connected anymore, except by location. People sometimes find items they like together, and sometimes they draw inspiration from the new piles that others have been building. But mostly, we’re quietly trying to figure out if the heaps of items in our jumble are unique to each of us, or just rearranged versions of the exact same things.

It is now my final year in this house, but I am not where I thought I would be. I’m in the attic that no one realized we had, the one haunted by an old ghost who’s not so much unnerving as deeply sorrowful. The ghost is not elegant, nor particularly special looking. It could be any one of us, which seems to make the spirit all the lonelier. Above the attic is sky – sculptures of water and light, fresh sunlight - so unfamiliar after years of living inside, sunsets of the most brilliant colors, and - even more special - the sunsets disregarded as drab, which are all the more breathtaking for their subtlety.

But I see none of that in the attic, where the sunlight is filtered through ages of dust and the moon rarely shows its face.

The spirit always sits with me, comfortable in its misery, and will not heed my requests to leave. It doesn’t seem to hear me. And at times I wonder, wonder with the gloom of that same apparition, if I will ever ascend any further than this poor soul has gone. I wonder if the antique shadows will swallow me – if I will merge myself with this pale shadow of a person who begins to look more like me the longer I stay. I wonder where everyone else has gone – if they are in their own attics, with their own ghosts, or if perhaps they’ve remained on the brighter third floor, thinking big things about a lot of things and focusing on their piles. Maybe we’re all in the attic together, but we cannot see anything except the melancholy ghost. A ghost so consumed by its despondency that it does not realize that, being intangible, it can leave the attic whenever it chooses.