The Haunting
By Anna Shomsky
The ghost knocks the butter dish onto the ground.
I pick it up and put it back on the table. I throw away the butter. It’s dirty now from landing on the floor.
“Why do you always do this?” I ask.
She doesn’t answer.
She never answers.
I’m convinced she can’t hear me. That the years between us are an acoustic barrier, blocking off communication.
Just a faint light connects us. She’s transparent, and through her body, I see the clock ticking on the wall of my apartment.
She looks intently at the righted butter dish and shakes her head. Her hair is long and messy. There’s a leaf stuck in it. I always try to remove the leaf and comb my fingers through the hair, but my hand just passes through her. She twitches a bit when that happens and swats at her neck.
Usually, after knocking over the butter dish, she rifles through the papers on the table, as if looking for something particular that she lost track of, then opens the cabinets and stares at the food she cannot eat.
Is she hungry?
I was always hungry at her age.
But today, she glares at the butter dish, turns her small hand into a fist, and smashes it. It clatters to the floor and shatters.
I flinch at the sound and hold my breath. That sound. Last time I heard it, it was followed by pain. My neck being grabbed. My mouth held shut.
My body is rigid, but I remind myself to breathe. Notice the sights and sounds around me. The brown cupboards, the red-tiled floor, the white ghost.
I get the broom, sweep up the pieces and throw them in the garbage can.
She opens the garbage, picks out the pieces and throws them on the floor.
“Why?” I ask.
But I know why.
I have scars on my knees from the broken butter dish, the one from long ago, the only physical proof I have left that it was real, that it happened to me, that the body I had then is still connected to the one I have now.
***
A part of me left that night, popped out of my body through the top of my head and floated above, watching as my chin hit the table, as my hands grasped at his hand around my mouth, trying to get air.
This must be where she went, the me who left that night.
Perhaps since then, a new me came to fill the void. That would explain why there's a veil between me and my childhood.
The memories of my youth are like the marbles in the rusty tin that I once found in the woods - round and smooth, with the colors and shapes of childhood, but belonging to someone else.
I pick up the pieces of the butter dish again and throw them out the window. She watches as they land in the grass. Then she turns her eyes to the table. She runs her hands along the edge. She touches her chin.
She grabs the table and knocks it over. All the papers scatter on the floor.
“You can live in a world without butter dishes, but you can’t escape tables,” I tell her. “You’ll learn to sit at tables again. I promise.”
She doesn’t hear.
“Go back. There’s something beyond this. You make it through.”
She kicks the felled table.
“It lasts three more months. He gets arrested for burglary and disappears. You never see him again.”
She kicks the table again. Knocks it into the wall.
“Go back! Go away!” I yell at her. “I don’t want you here.”
But I do want her here. I want her safe. I want her to have a life that’s continuous from childhood to adulthood, that doesn’t snap in half when she is fifteen, like a tree struck by lightning, growing forever sideways out of its wound.
She opens the narrow drawer beside the stove and pulls out the marble tin. She runs her fingers over the marbles and digs them in. I used to do that, too.
“When you go back, just think about the marbles. Imagine them in your hands. Concentrate on the feeling of holding a marble, of squeezing two marbles together. Block out the rest of the word and just imagine the feeling in the palm of your hands.”
She sits on the ground and curls up in a ball. I try to put my arm around her, but it passes through. So I just sit next to her.
“Take all the time you need,” I say. “Before you go back.”
She eventually fades away, and I’m left sitting there, beside the fallen table.
I stand up and right the table. I pick up the papers that spilled and pile them up, lining up the edges neatly.
I put my hand in the tin of marbles. I find my favorite one, the lavender one, and roll it between my palms.
THE END
Author Bio: Anna Shomsky’s writing has appeared in Women on Writing and on the Post-Culture Podcast. She wrote and produced the radio show, Whispers of Vashon for 101.9 KVSH. She’s had short stories published in the anthologies, Island Stories and Chicken Scratchings, as well as through the Open Space Literary Project. She writes the weekly column, “Only on Vashon.”