The ghost hovers at the top of the stairs.
Usually, it waits behind closed doors. It tumbles around the buzzing lights like a moth, wings of checkered red and blue beating at the hot glass. I notice that the lamps are always louder at night, when a cold black blanket gets thrown over the sky, the sound of electricity jumping through the walls of the house is always louder. When the ghost moves, the light flickers with it. It brings wind with it. It floats through the door with heavy footsteps.
It hovers at the top of the stairs twice a day. It glowers disapprovingly from where it stands. I flinch as it passes. It’s not a scared flinch. Not really. The ghost appears on a schedule. During lunch and dinner on weekends. Just dinner for weekdays. No, I’m not scared of it anymore. The fear passed long ago, as did the novelty of the apparition. I flinch because it’s cold. It looks at me with resign and disinterest – touches of disgust, too.
It hovers at the stairs and then it makes its way down to the first floor, silent and weighty and disappointed. Sometimes it talks like the adults in Charlie Brown – like a head dunked in water, the sound run through a choppy fan. Bubbles and blades of air cut up its words. It doesn’t really care if I’m listening, anyways. It’s given up on communicating with anyone who isn’t dead – living, half-dead, whatever. We used to be closer, the ghost and I, which is ironic because I was full of life when I was younger.
Maybe it’s being exposed to the ghost that drains me. It ages me. Its lack of hope is discouraging. I sit in a graveyard planted on the second-floor landing. The ghost walks past me in the evening, its eyes of air passing over me like a hand flinching away from boiling water.
It’s kind of funny how we both jump when we pass each other. You’re a ghost, right? An apparition at the top of my stairs, rising from your graveyard right under the light switches twice a day. Why are you scared?
Or is it a cold flinch? Do you hate my eyes too?
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