Ghosts
She cared nothing for the useless, material things that others seemed to live for.
She could not understand the way they thought the brand of shampoo, jeans, sneakers mattered so much that a mockery would be made of anyone who purchased an unknown, a "Kmart blue light special" as they would mercilessly chant.
She cared more about how many toes a tree frog possessed as it climbed the smooth, flawless glass without slipping once.
She cared, very much, about ghosts that she read about which inhabited the house, between the walls, and spoke to people living there.
This fascinated her.
Her ghosts were not as vocal. Her ghosts were images of blackened forms coming towards her like an army of locusts.
The ghosts she shared her life with were not the haunting kind.
They did not rattle chains or move soup cans across counters.
They did not leave cold spots on floors or rise like mist over mossy glens.
Her ghosts chased her, in her dreams, out of her dreams, right out of the house in the middle of the night.
Chased her, half awake, over fences and through neighbors' yards.
Chased her up a splintered, enormous, wooden cross where her Messiah hung, bloodied and bruised, waiting for her.
To save her.
Sometimes her ghost was her father, whom cancer stole two days before her fourth birthday.
This date etched in her conscious and unconscious brain by her mother, who did nothing but grieve and mourn from then on.
Her dreams brought her to dark places where she would walk barefoot along tall, thin ledges and jagged cliffs barely wide enough to hold her feet.
Surrounded by an inferno of churning lava below and bottomless pits of thick, black tar. She was searching for him there. They had him there and mocked her with each painful step she took. Taunted her that he was with them now.
In his life he was a Freemason.
He was a mechanic.
He was a working man in a white, short sleeved shirt, full of greasy fingerprints and holes in his pants.
He smoked pipes.
He had an enormous collection of them, hanging in racks on the parlor walls.
Some were rare and well crafted. Others were worth next to nothing.
To her, they were priceless, every last one.
They were her Father.
Wondrous, almost mystical, objects that his breath passed through as he puffed on them. Every last one.
His hands cradled them as the match struck and the flame entered the bowl, turning ordinary tobacco into beautiful, smoldering embers, producing emissions that floated through the paneled livingroom in trails and swirls.
She could barely, in her mind's eye, remember him smoking, yet the smell of those pipes brought her to him years after his death. Sitting nestled in his lap, in the big brown recliner with duct tape patches over holes and burns.
The boxes which contained his things when opened would emit such odors that her eyes would close and she would see him sitting at the end of the bed, taking something from a drawer and sharing it with her.
Talking to her,
although she could no longer recall his voice,
what it sounded like. Her memory failed her there.
His tie, a black tie, hung over the corner of her mother's mirror, covered in dust, until she too had passed away.
This was many years later, but linked together by destiny or fate as her mother went into the hospital on the anniversary of her father's death, and died two days later,
on her birthday.
Her ghost was never her mother, though.
Dreaming only of surreal instances of cross-grained opinion and senseless disagreement. Criticism.
Haunting, intense grief,
but not ghostly.
On occasion would float through her memory a flashback of being pushed down the high school stairs or spit upon in math class.
Earlier still, middle school, her hair heavy with grease for fear that the early morning shower would reveal an entity waiting for her to close her eyes, enabling him to overwhelm her there and take her, perhaps to the dark places of her dreams.
Sitting up, late into the night, cross-legged, in pain, avoiding comfort like the plague so as not to be taken by sleep,
where he would be waiting like a sinister dragon, smoldering in his realm of evil and emptiness.
She had pills for her troubles,
prescribed by doctors who knew little about her real troubles.
One in the morning and one at night.
One for the endless head pain which would cause her to collapse into a state of immobility,
and purge of everything in her stomach for days on end.
She was convinced that she had taken on the tumor, which had killed her father.
In the midst of the excruciating pain, she wished it,
begged for it to be true.
She was in early grade school then.
The ghosts she shared her life with were not the haunting kind.
No, they did not rattle chains or move soup cans across counters.
They did not leave cold spots on floors or rise like mist over mossy glens.
Her ghosts followed her inside of her mind and brought her sleepless nights and tortured days
where distractions like tree frogs climbing effortlessly up glass panels were barely enough to protect her from the real people of the world who would see her fear and her pain and contribute, gladly, to it.
They would, these ghosts, mock her in her sleep,
and if she did not sleep they would mock her on the streets,
on the buses,
in the classrooms,
in the mirror.
Collapsing, shutting down, succumbing.
Joining forces with, medicating, hospitalizing.
Seeking a higher power to combat the enemy.
Even though He watched her as she writhed in pain, begging to be taken.
Pleading with Him, in desperate tears, to end the torture, the agony.
Not understanding why and what she did to deserve such punishment.
Seeking a higher power to exterminate the ghosts.
The ghosts that did not rattle chains, move soup cans across counters, leave cold spots on floors or rise like mist over mossy glens.
