Ghosts
Pt. 11
My neighbor Steve recently had some heart trouble and wound up in the hospital. He told me in the hospital he had a dream.
“I was with my one and only wife”—how Steve always refers to his ex-wife—“and we were in Washington, D.C. But it was strange. We were like ghosts. Nobody could see us.”
“What’d you do while you were ghosts in D.C.?” I asked.
“Just kind of bopped around.”
I used to have a roommate nicknamed Snake, but you weren’t supposed to call him that. He’d come home drunk and play old rock and roll songs on the busted upright piano we had in our living room. One night he stumbled in at two a.m., sat down, and ripped into “Great Balls of Fire.” Really hollering and banging away. Midway through the second chorus, the overhead lights flickered. That meant our ghost was coming. Snake stopped playing. We heard, as we had so many nights, the thudding steps up to the top of the staircase. And we saw, as we had so many nights, no one there.
The lights flickered again. Snake shrugged.
“Guess he didn’t like the music.”
Once I was in Rouen with a woman I loved deeply. We’d been having a rough spat, but as always when I’m anywhere new, I was in ecstasy. A terrorist attack had happened five miles away, but I insisted we go to dinner. The food was wonderful. The architecture was wonderful. The inn we stayed in was wonderful, hundreds of years of old stone all around us.
Around three a.m. I woke up and saw a young woman in a white nightgown staring out the window of our room. She seemed sad and elegant, gazing at the city. I stepped out of bad, quiet, afraid of frightening her.
“Ma’am,” I said, “I think you’re in the wrong room.”
She didn’t seem to hear me. I walked a little closer.
“It’s okay, but I don’t think you’re supposed to be in here.”
I reached out to touch her on the shoulder.
“Who are you talking to?”
I turned to see my girlfriend sitting up in the bed, eyeing me strangely. I looked back to the window. The woman was gone.
The other weekend I went to the Jersey Shore with my friends Bud, Rae, and Brandi. We sat on the beach, swam in the waves, haunted the boardwalk, drank a million beers, ate all the seafood we could stand.
On the first night, me and Brandi went out to the beach late. We’d heard tell of foxes roaming the Jersey dunes. We wanted to see one. We wanted to experience it for ourselves.
We sat for twenty minutes, an hour. The beach was empty, silent except for the slap of the waves, the tide high, the way the beach just drops off into the black. Cloudy night, just a few stars. Brandi and I quiet. Waiting.
Then we saw it. A fox crossing the dune. It moved like a shadow gliding down to the beach. Utterly silent. I saw a green flash of its eyes, or maybe I imagined that. We watched the fox pass right by us, then down to the water, where it vanished.
“Like a ghost,” said Brandi.
Nice post, Jimmy ☺️