In retrospect I noticed the ghost right away, though it took a few weeks after moving in to recognize that a ghost was indeed what I was dealing with. For one thing, I was too preoccupied with my breakup—not to mention the end of the world—to make mental room for a haunting. That, and it’s easy to chalk a creaking door or a whining floorboard up to the whims of an old home begging for care, and the sea-house was geriatric. A tap against the glass? Moths drawn by the glamour of your lantern. A whisper in the night? Your own lonely conscience. But the ghost was lonely too, and persistent. Beach rocks began appearing on the windowsills—outside at first, but then I woke up one morning about a month into my time at the sea-house to find a perfectly smooth moonstone on the floor beside my air mattress. I carried it in my pocket all that day, thumbing its coolness as I watched the surf swallow the hulking black boulders of the beach and then withdraw, again and again.
The sea made me think of my mother, how she’d laugh as we kids ran from the spray, how she broadly performed the pleasure she took in the world, breathing in and singing “what a lovely day” until the phrase had no meaning. Every day was lovely, every wave majestic, every sea-slicked stone that we brought her was precious and worthy of display, and there was no end to it, or ever could be. As a child it was easy to dwell inside of that abundance; when I learned that the beaches were eroding, in part, because so many children had whisked away stone after stone after stone after stone and the ocean, try as it might, could not keep up with our heartless collecting, I blamed myself, and I blamed my mother more.
After a long walk, I tossed the moonstone into the sea and went back to the house. In the bedroom window, a shadow moved. The next morning, another stone sat on the sill.
I didn’t mind the idea of a ghost. I’d always liked scary stories. But I hadn’t anticipated—nor did I want—an audience for my solitude, or a fellow traveler. I’d come to the sea-house to mourn.
The reason I’d moved, the reason I’d left my partner and my life behind, was because I could no longer fathom how to live normally when everything around me was expiring. Each day was an elegy in the footnotes of the news: wildfires, hurricanes, oceans overpowering their glaciers and being overpowered in turn. I’d chosen the sea-house because it looked the way the world felt: ancient and beyond repair, with toxic paint chips dusting the splintery hardwood floors. I had no plans to renovate. Instead, upon moving in, I bought a camping stove and a lantern and set up my air mattress to face the windows that looked out to the rising seas. My house and I would keep vigil over a dying world. From here we would witness the end.
So each morning, I put the mysteriously given stones in my pocket and deposited them back in the brine, hoping their giver would take the hint.
Instead, the ghost became increasingly insistent on getting my attention. It began pulling my blanket off my feet, which was annoying, and then it started spilling my food and drinks, which was infuriating. I hated waste. The ghost left oatmeal footprints on the floor. He tipped a precious bottle of rye bourbon off my table.
One night, as I sipped a mug of canned minestrone, I heard the ghost’s footsteps coming from the bedroom, quickly, and before I could defend myself, I was covered in lukewarm soup.
“Fuck off!” I yelled. “Christ, just get the fuck out!” I threw my mug in anger; it shattered against the kitchen wall. I heard a whimper.
“Oh, you’re crying now?” I said. “Cry me a river. Fuck off.”
The kitchen door shuddered open and then slammed shut again; I was alone. I sighed. I grabbed a towel and dabbed at my irrevocably stained shirt, then collected the pieces of my mug. I’d have to go into town to buy a new one. After I dumped the wreckage into the garbage can, I passed the window and stopped short.
I could see it, the ghost, in silhouette against the gray glow of the sea and twilight sky. He—for it was a he—was small and skinny. Just a boy. His shoulders shook; his hair whipped with the breeze just like the tide-spray against the rocks he stood on. His dark figure against the sea-spray reminded me of the illustration in my childhood copy of Peter and Wendy showing Peter gamely facing a sunset, stranded and solitary on a rock, assuring himself that to die would be an awfully big adventure. I opened the kitchen door and stepped out onto the porch.
“Are you ok?” I asked. “Sorry if I scared you.”
He stiffened, and my skin prickled. I couldn’t see his eyes, but I knew he was looking at me.
“You can come back in,” I said. “Just please don’t spill my food anymore. Ok?”
His silhouette was still for a moment, and then appeared to come closer. It disappeared as he left the rocks behind for the pitch-black yard, and then I heard the creak of the porch steps and the tread of the doorway. He hazily reappeared as he passed in front of the lantern on the kitchen table, again in silhouette, bony and slight and hunched with fear and shame.
“I won’t yell at you again,” I called after him. “I promise.”
I heated another can of soup and put it in a Thermos, just in case, but the ghost stayed away, and I drank my dinner in peace.
The ghost laid low for a time after that, but for me he was even harder to ignore. I’d enter rooms and feel the walls holding their breath in an inexpert attempt to keep the secret that he’d just left. Outside along the rocks, my skin would radiate with goosebumps and I’d know that he was watching me from the house. But turning back, I’d see only the sky reflected in the window glass.
The only store in town was a Dollar General, so I set aside a day to drive over to Bangor, where I could go to Target and find a decent mug. What a guilty pleasure that was—brightly lit rows of stylish, modern homewares, mass-produced clothes crafted to project a free-spirited aesthetic, the latest movies on Blu-Ray. I spent hours walking through the store, easily pretending that the world wasn’t ending after all; that a future in which I’d need a new set of deck furniture—and decorative, faux-aged lanterns to match!—was not only imaginable, but definite.
Finally returning to my original mission, I scoured the offerings of mugs. Funny sayings, encouraging floral-ringed mantras, astrological signs: none fit my life. What does one drink from at the end of the world? I chose a sturdy, unadorned mug in seafoam teal and was ready to shrug all this fantasy off for good when it occurred to me that maybe the ghost would like something too.
I don’t know why the hedgehog mug seemed right, but I’d never had much experience with young boys, or with ghosts. Something about the ceramic white creature sitting calmly between the colorfully insistent optimism of half the choices and the sensible, grown-up neutrality of the others endeared me to it. When I returned to my house, I set the hedgehog on the kitchen table and loudly announced, “This is for you.” The house gave me no response. I poured four fingers of bourbon into my new mug. As the hours passed and the sun set, I felt foolish. What would a ghost do with a mug shaped like a hedgehog anyway? After another drink, I went to bed and dreamed that I was back in Target, trying on a closet-full of frothy, floral dresses while my mother stood outside the dressing room tossing more over the door. This one looks hopeful, she said cheerily, as cheap, synthetic fabric plummeted down on me like a collapsing parachute.
A plinking sound woke me shortly before dawn. I crawled up from the air mattress and pulled on my slippers before going to the kitchen, where, inside the hedgehog mug, I found a pink cockle shell as perfect and otherworldly as a newborn’s eyelid.
I knew that the most responsible thing to do was to fling it back into the brine, but I put it on the windowsill instead. “Thank you,” I called out to the house.
Over the next several days, the ghost gave me a still-hinged mussel shell, the nacre of which was an almost unnatural midnight blue; a salt-weathered red marble made cloudy, yet still resolutely round, by what must have been decades, if not centuries, in the tides; and finally, the whitest, most translucent moonstone I’d ever seen, the moonstone of my childhood collection’s very dreams. It glowed from within, even on nights when the moon was barely a hangnail, from its place on my bedroom sill.
When the news got too overwhelming, I used to fantasize about what my partner and I referred to as the “quiet life,” meaning that we’d essentially go off the grid and live somewhere with a grocery store and a library and not much else, and we’d raise chickens and children and guard our minds against talk of planetary doom with a moat of green woods and the reassurance of self-sufficiency. It worked, this fantasy, for a while, and I think he might even have believed that living this life of diligent, unassuming creation would make some kind of a difference, in the larger sense. Like we’d be some sort of example. But I kept thinking of everything we might lose, not the least of which was grief.
He wasn’t one to dwell, my partner. One morning, upon scrolling past photographs of heavy, ash-red sky over the forests of the Pacific Northwest, I’d thrown down my phone and wailed. I asked him to comfort me. “We’ll be fine,” is what he told me. He said we were lucky to live where we did, meaning the temperate mid-Atlantic, meaning hundreds of miles inland, meaning in a town with a steadfast local economy and a thriving food supply chain.
“Hold me,” I’d asked him. But he didn’t. Instead he shook his head.
“You can’t let it get to you like this. What are you going to do, stop living your life?” But not living our life, as it was, seemed like the only sane reaction, and the “quiet life” we’d envisioned suddenly felt like even more foolish of a lie.
Here too at the sea-house was a quiet life, where the silence allowed me to listen to things falling apart at their natural pace. If I sat in one place for long enough—some days I spent hours at this—I imagined that I could hear the water scraping sediment away from the rock, the dried husks of insects settling further into the salty earth, or the wind’s cold tongue licking up the siding. The slow disintegration of my surroundings was audible, and this felt like a more fitting memorial.
But then there was the ghost, and I had no accounting for him. You could not wear down the edges of a ghost with sun, water, or wind; you could not plant him somewhere to rot away, forgotten. You could not even dissolve him slowly from the inside with alcohol or generically-branded canned food. A ghost was both untethered to the world, and immovable in it. And yet he was the one afraid, afraid of me. I am the one who has no right to be here, I thought. I am the one capable of withering away.
It was on a night when the moon was full that I woke up with the early-hour sweats of a hangover and saw the ghost sitting on the floor between my air mattress and the window. I couldn’t tell whether his shadowy form faced me or whether he was inspecting his lined-up treasures on the sill. I didn’t speak, because I had no breath; I was terrified, but I also wanted him to feel safe. I couldn’t bear to close my eyes, so I stared at him for what must have been nearly an hour until somehow, lulled by his small movements—a tiny lean of his head, a shoulder shrug—I fell asleep again. In the morning, he was gone.
Clouds gathered as I made coffee, and by early afternoon, the entire sky was the flat, consistent grey of weathered slate. Inside the house, the rooms dimmed and the corners blurred. I lit my oil lantern long before sunset. The surge of moisture poured from the sky and swirled up from the sea all at once, attacking the window-glass as though trying to break in. The roof leaked over the kitchen; I put my single-serving cooking pot under the drip and laughed at how quickly I had to empty it. The house and I, we were besieged by the storm.
And then he was there, my ghost, just a dark form in the kitchen doorframe, lit from behind by the hazy window in the next room. I turned down my lantern to see him better.
“Hello,” I said.
His face was all shadow except for his eyes, which reflected small flickers of the lantern-light. I couldn’t see his mouth, but I heard him speak: “Why are you here?”
“I live here,” I answered.
“Nobody lives here.”
I glanced at my campstove, my lantern; I thought about the air mattress in the next room.
“Maybe you’re right,” I said.
“Are you here for me?” he asked.
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t want to go away,” he said.
A crack of lightning and immediate bellow of thunder surprised us both. I yelped, and the ghost disappeared into the bedroom. I picked up the lantern and followed, but of course, as I swung the light into the room, I knew that I was lessening my chances of actually seeing him.
“It’s ok,” I said, in case he was hiding right in front of me. “You don’t have to go anywhere.” I wondered how long he’d been here. I wondered whether the house had been a nice one to die in, in his time.
Every once in a while I would think about a piece of furniture I’d left behind, some chair that I’d rarely sat in anyway, and while I could remember the physical sensation of sitting in it, its old springs and cat-scratched armrests, I could not remember purchasing it, and I wondered how it had come into my life at all, and why I’d ever hung onto it so long. Then the thought of the chair would lead to a plant stand, a book, a plastic tub of magazines, and so on, and soon the clutter of my old life was back with me, taking up space in my mind and giving me a headache. The waste, the absolute waste of it all. A plastic tub, what had I been thinking? It would exist someplace forever, while other, lovelier things, precious objects, were ground down and broken and forgotten. What we choose to accumulate and to keep still baffles me, and in the sea-house, it pained me to consider.
But I kept the ghost’s gifts, morning after morning, until they lined every windowsill in the house. The collection of objects reminded me of a book I’d read as a kid about a girl who ran away from an orphanage and hid in a house whose walls were covered in seashells.
One night, instead of simply sitting by my mattress, when the ghost saw that I was awake, he spoke.
“Why are you here?” he asked me.
I sat up; the air mattress buoyed and squeaked underneath me.
“It seemed like a good place to be sad,” I said.
“Why are you sad?”
I considered: he was young, but presumably he knew about endings.
“Because sometimes things change too quickly,” I answered.
“Change isn’t so bad,” he said. “At least you can change with it.”
“I guess that’s true.”
He rose and backed away from the bed.
“I’m sorry I woke you up,” he said, with the earnestness of a child who fears being unforgiven. “I just think you’re interesting.”
“Thanks.”
“And I’m sorry about your other mug.”
“That’s ok.”
He lingered in the door for a moment before disappearing.
As I settled back down onto the mattress, I thought of my last fight with my partner. We’d given up on the idea of getting married (why spend the money?) but he still wanted children, and loved to remind me that once, I had too. But then I’d imagine trying to explain to a child the obsolete meaning of the words polar bear. Having to confess what we had done, or had failed to do.
“Don’t you think having a baby might help you feel less depressed?” he had asked. He was right, which only made me feel guilty—guilty that I could exact that cruelty to stave off my own unease, guilty for wishing that I could resign myself to blinded gratitude as easily as he could, guilty for my own inability to save anyone or anything. So I left.
What is your favorite thing to remember?
I asked the ghost this question one afternoon as we sat on the floorboards of the porch. The sun’s bright rays skipped around his form, turning him into a sunspot being swallowed by shadow, a darkness outlined in rainbows. He was very beautiful.
“I like to remember when you first came here,” he said. “I watched you set up your cans and bottles just so.”
“That’s very sweet, but I meant from before. From your life.”
His shoulders hunched and he drew his knees up to his chest. From his hazy profile I could tell he was looking out at the sea.
“I don’t know,” he said half-heartedly.
I settled onto my back; a loose nail poked my spine.
“Let’s pretend that everything is the way it was then,” I said, closing my eyes. “We’ll lay here and imagine that it’s a perfect day, and we have nothing to worry about. What kinds of things are around us?”
“Ospreys,” he said. “There was a nest just on the other side of that rock, in the pines.”
“What else?”
He described fresh green paint on the porch floor, the smell of it, and how he stepped on it too soon as it was drying and while the paint lasted you could always see the outline of his foot. The boards above us were sky blue, he said. He told me of the sound of bees flitting in a bed of perennials. Lupines reaching the end of the season, and Queen Anne’s Lace just beginning.
“Who planted the flowers?” I asked. “Your mother?”
He went very quiet for a moment.
“Sometimes it hurts to remember things that were nice,” he said finally.
I felt the porch rocking like a rowboat, an after-effect of the mug of bourbon that sat, nearly empty, by my left hip.
“What about your life?” he asked. “What do you most like to remember?”
I breathed in deeply and then hummed, clearing my nose and head of the figurative fog that had begun to blow in, a fog in which I could hear the shouts of children playing down by the rocks.
“New books in the mail,” I said. “You order a book you haven’t read because you want to love it. Then there’s the anticipation of it arriving in your mailbox. And then after that, you can believe for as long as you want that you’ll get around to reading it someday. It’s a triple dose of hope.”
I hoisted myself onto my elbows and drank the last of the rye from my mug.
“If you could snap your fingers and go back to the way it was, would you?” I asked.
The ghost shook his head.
“I wouldn’t want it to be just the same,” he said. “Because I’d be different. But something like the way it was, with colors? And if there could be flowers again, that would be good.” His head turned and I sensed he was looking at me with wishful expectation.
“I don’t have a green thumb,” I said. “Sorry.”
The mosquitoes had begun to swarm. Unbothered by them, the ghost stayed outside, but I went in and flopped down on my air mattress. I let myself wonder what it might actually be like to plant flowers here, to spruce up the porch with some paint. Whoever had done so before had believed in a future at the heart of which was a cheery home. The ghost’s very presence suggested that belief hadn’t quite panned out. But we could be free of that, he and I. We could live here together, and I would never have to worry that he’d perish in some catastrophe or that I would have to consolingly explain to him that humans had successfully doomed the earth. Would he even care? He was the perfect child, in that way—his world was already gone. And I would not have to bear, not alone, the knowledge that to love something is to accept that it will die. I fell asleep in my clothes pondering this new version of a quiet life, and when he came into my room hours later and crawled onto the air mattress with me, I almost didn’t wake up.
“I had a nightmare,” he whispered, and began crying.
“Do you even sleep?” I asked.
“No,” he said. He pulled at the blanket, exposing my feet. The temperature had dropped, and I curled my legs up against the cold. “But I still have bad dreams.”
“What about?”
He whimpered.
“Hold me?” he asked.
But he could not be held; my hand floated down through his shoulders to the bedsheet. He gasped.
“You’re so cold,” he said, and he cried all the harder.
I rolled onto my back and closed my eyes. His weeping became everything, filling my ears and the velvet darkness behind my eyelids. It was a creature roaming my mind, prodding every corner of memory and thought. I could reach up to my temples and feel it, and I did.
We played a game.
“If you were a bird and I was the ghost of a bird,” said the ghost, “we could live in a pine tree instead of in the house, and then everything would be green all the time and you’d be much happier.”
“North American bird populations have fallen by one in four, in just the last few decades,” I answered.
“But if you were a bird, would you know that?” he challenged.
“Good question,” I said. “I hope not.”
We were walking along the beach. It was a cloudy day, and the diffused light, silver and shining on the rocks, the water, the lichen, on every little thing, meant that my ghost was invisible to me, but his eager voice kept pace.
“So I win.”
“Not so fast,” I said. “What kind of tree do we live in? Because if it’s an evergreen, then it’s probably susceptible to Hemlock Scale. Invasive disease.”
The ghost sighed.
“We could be plovers,” he said, and even without seeing him, I knew that he was pointing to the sandy beach a couple hundred yards ahead of us, where a curved outcrop of rocks shielded the ground from all but the most persistent waves, and where at that moment the silhouettes of nesting sea-birds quivered into the air, swooped once, twice, then careened into the pines, away from our approaching noise.
“Then we wouldn’t care about the trees at all, or if the ocean got bigger.”
“You’re right,” I said, deciding to give him this one, even though I’d read that seabirds such as the Piping Plover, the Least Tern, and others were now suspended in an ironic position between self-extinction, as human proximity led them to abandon their nests, and vulnerability from harsher coastal storms, which only human stewardship, at this point, could protect them from.
“You win this round,” I said. A mussel shell flicked unnaturally across the sand a few feet in front of me; the ghost was skipping. I fished my flask out of my jacket pocket and took a long, fiery sip.
“I don’t want to live somewhere where everything stays the same, though,” he called back to me.
“You like watching things die?” I joked.
“Everything dies, everything dies,” he sang.
I rolled my eyes, then stooped to examine a gray rock with a perfect band of white quartz through its middle. My mother had called them wishing stones. I could still remember how she’d take such stones in both hands after we brought them to her. She’d scrunch up her nose, smiling, as she made a silent wish that we would never be privy to. For a second I considered taking up the stone and wishing that everything would just freeze like a paused film and stay exactly the same until I was long gone and didn’t exist to care about it anymore.
“What I don’t like is watching everything around me change when I can’t,” the ghost said. “But if I could!” He started singing to himself again. “If I could change, I wouldn’t be scared, I’d never be scared again, I’d never be scared like you.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
He didn’t answer; instead he ran ahead, his invisible feet scattering detritus behind them.
“It’s called adapting,” I called. “And it’s harder than it sounds.”
The clouds above us had become more lace-like, and shimmering rays of pale honey-colored sunlight poured through. The ghost danced in and out of view, in and out of the light. I sat and finished off my flask while he glimmered through the low-tide waves, kicking up sprays of sediment, sand, and the slag of broken shells.
In my mind, I continued the game. Stewardship of habitat meant nothing over time. It was laughable to think that the slow, dispassionate force of erosion could be deterred by a preservation sign, and what then, if I were a tern and he was the ghost of a tern? What happens when there’s no more cliff? I wondered. What happens to all the ghosts when the sea swallows up their haunted houses? I imagined the earth itself as a ghost, flickering dark gray in an empty space where once it was solid as a shooter marble, blown from the most careful swirls of turquoise and emerald glass.
“If you were a rock and I was the ghost of a rock,” he shouted, as though reading my mind, “we’d wash up on a beach together. There will still be a shore somewhere.”
“Good one,” I said.
“I win,” he crowed. “I’m not scared and I win, I win, I win!”
I picked up the wishing stone and put it in my pocket, chiding myself for my sentimentality. But something about the way the ghost-boy danced, how little he seemed to care for the demise of everything he had once held precious, made me envy him. Adaptation is overrated, I thought. If only he knew how lucky he was to be so free. And like that, I knew what it was my mother must have wished for as she watched me and my siblings dashing and screaming in the surf, and I was sorry that, between time and myself, we had been powerless to make her wish come true.
“What shall we do since I’m me and you’re you, what shall we do since I’m me and you’re you,” he sang, to a tune vaguely like “The Drunken Sailor.”
“Nothing to do,” I said, only to myself, then stood up and walked back to the house to refill my flask.
“Wake up,” the ghost called.
I opened my eyes; the ghost was impossible to see in the pitch-black room.
“What’s that noise?” I asked the darkness. A low hissing ate at the air. I felt like I’d awakened from a hundred-year sleep.
“Get up,” said the ghost. “You have to go outside. Get up!” […]
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Cate Fricke’s fiction has been published in The Masters Review, Jabberwock Review, Fairy Tale Review, the Tin House Open Bar, and other venues, with the short story ‘Fox and Girl’ winning the 2012 Sycamore Review Wabash Prize, judged by Aimee Bender. Fricke’s play “In the Forest Grim” is published and licensed by Stage Partners. In addition, Cate’s book reviews have appeared in Slate, Bookslut, and The Brooklyn Rail. Cate has written a semi-regular column series for Catapult on fairy tales and their lasting power and influence.