Violet’s Premier Ghost Bottling by Eileen Kelly
You’re sitting at the dining room table when you hear the noise for the first time. At first, it sounds like mice in the wall, tiny scrabbling fingernails against the backside of drywall, but it’s not. Your daughter is asleep in the room at the top of the stairs—she is fifteen, a good girl, always wears her retainers. The clock above the stove in the kitchen is visible through the doorway, black hands behind glass reading eleven thirty-eight. It’s a Wednesday. For all that your mother warned you against moving out to the island, you’ve never felt unsafe here. Jagged rocks and sharp waves are nothing compared to an angry husband with a drinking habit. If you climb the metal stairs up to the top of the lighthouse tower on a clear day, you can see the lake stretching out for what must be miles in every direction. It feels like the real-life version of the games you used to play with your sister as a child: you would sit back to back on your twin bed and pretend that all of the carpet spreading out beneath you was water, every little brother that crossed it was a battleship that risked being shot at with a hair band launched from your fingers. You were telling your daughter this story just the other day, and it made you feel a bit guilty, isolating her out here on this rock with only you and the gulls for company. But still, it’s comforting, knowing that nobody can ever sneak up on you. The noise at the kitchen wall is just some scraggly branches in the wind brushing up against the siding, and you ignore it, shutting off the light above the table and standing at the window above the sink for a minute before going to bed, staring up at the beacon shining out forty feet above the lake’s surface. Ever since moving to the island, you’ve had more time to read than ever before. Twice a month you take the boat across the strait and into the harbor town for groceries, and usually you stop at the library, too. The librarian knows you by name now, and she also knows that, as a rule, you’ll read anything that isn’t a ghost story— they make you nervous.
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