The Ghost in This Story
There is a ghost in this story. You will find it spiderweb-strung in the spaces between the words you can see. You will find it in the unspoken, soft things.
Remember the first time you kissed someone, or the last.
Remember waking in the night, twitch of shadow on the wall, your voice a ragged whisper, mom, mom, mom, how small your hands were then, how you slept in piles of stuffed animals so the killers, when they came, would never be able to find you.
Remember how the sound of the ringing telephone has changed since that sunny day in July, how you heard its song through the open house windows, how your mother found you hiding under the back yard slide, remember how your mother told you your uncle was dead. Remember how still she kept her face.
Remember how the telephone, now, sounds like someone crying.
Remember how your uncle didn’t see it coming, how they covered the pucker mark of bullet in his forehead, so he could be buried whole, buried complete. Remember how your uncle didn’t see it coming, but his secretary did. Remember. Remember how your mother told you she tried to run.
Think of that every time you hear the chiming of the door at work and rise to greet a customer.
Think: She tried to run.
Remember when you were mowing your grandmother’s lawn and there was a dead bird in the hedge shadows, remember how you, unseeing, rolled the mower over it, the cut and crackle of bone, the puff of feather into the air, floating like cotton fairies. Remember the shaking of your hands, the twist of your mouth.
Remember how soft your lover’s mouth was, flutter the pit of your stomach thinking of that kiss, the first or last one, thinking of the drag of their hands over your skin, the bite of their teeth beneath their soft lips.
And these are the things that are with you, always, always with you, and you have found it now, you see it now, the ghost in this story, and what is it, after all, but a reflection of you?
Cathy Ulrich works about a block away from where her uncle and his secretary were murdered by a serial killer. She tries not to think about it, but actually she thinks about it a lot. Her work has been published in various journals, including Sweet Tree Review, Wigleaf and Adroit.
