Ghosts Are Everywhere

Grandmama used to say ghosts hide in everything. They speak through more than rattled shutters and billowing curtains and the wind. They are tangential.

I don’t want to believe her, but something happened. Now I think they’re everywhere. I wake at every creaking floorboard; I jump when Mama closes the oven too loudly, or when the vase of roses tips and shatters, or the Spanish fans crinkle in the salty breeze. I avoid going into the drawing room, where Mama and Papa keep Grandmama’s old furniture, draped with white cloth like ghosts as it collects dust an the smell of aged linen and lavender.

Because ghosts are everywhere. They don’t wait until the daylight has gone, or you are walking through an abandoned passage of the house (which isn’t very creepy anyway when it’s hung with pictures of yourself as a baby, or maps with crayon flower sin the corners). They’re there at tea time, and on the patio, and when you wake, and next to the dogwood roses, and in the piano. And yesterday I’m sure I heard voices from the gramophone in the drawing room. 

Text by Lucie MacAulay