A Modern Ghost Story
I couldn’t sleep, the house felt stuffy and oppressive, even after having the windows open all day. Naturally, it did me no good to be staring at my ex-girlfriends remaining few things. There was nothing overly important, it was all the tiny things that hurt the most to see I remember standing in the living room pawing through her box of odds and ends, every dumb little thing made me cry, it was a bad day.
Everything was kind of okay until I found the picture of us at Pride the year we’d met. We were so young and beautiful, our arms around each other, glitter on our arms and smiles full of bright beautiful hope. We had even made the local paper; we were a sort of baby dyke interracial girls in love Pride mascot couple. It was annoying to everyone including us but, it was such a good time.
Our favorite bar framed the article and photo; we were so happy. Happy until we weren’t and then I was alone. There I was, sitting on the floor crying my eyes out in the dead of winter, knowing why but unable to stop. I snapped back to reality and looked down at the tear dotted photo and dried it on my shirt. I hauled myself upright and without another option decided to take a walk. Something about that winter made it too hard to resist wallowing.
Bundled up and armed with my decrepit old digital camera I wandered into the darkness of our neighborhood. My neighborhood. She had always complained that it was creepy at night with such long distances between rickety old streetlights. She had complained so often but moving hadn’t been an option. The house had belonged to my Aunt and it was simply too good not to live there. I remember the first time my girl saw it, “Lola what? This is it? This is amazing.”
I loved the neighborhood. Though it wasn’t far out of the city it was just far enough to feel more isolated than it was. I loved hearing the water in the distance on quiet nights and the little fruit bats that flew through our yard to eat and the tiny shy deer who visited in the mornings. As I walked, I remembered the night she came in from her walk ashen and trembling. Granted she was my first white girl but, I didn’t know they really did go completely white.
“Honey are you okay? Did you see a possum?” She was terrified of most wildlife and as she locked the door behind her she shook her head violently. “No, I saw a fucking ghost. It was a ghost and I thought it was a person I almost hit oh god.” She broke into terrified sobs, and I held her on the couch, stroking her back. She cried so hard she gagged; her poor face turned an alarming shade of scarlet.
“Oh, come on Jeeves. I’m sure it was just a trick of the light. It’s pretty foggy out tonight.”
I thought she would laugh when I called her Jeeves the way she usually did but instead she pushed me away and stood up to stomp into the bathroom to wash her face. “No Lola, it was a fucking ghost. I know what I saw and what happened. Why don’t you believe me?” I knew better than to chase after her. “You want me to go check it out?”
The bathroom door slammed, and I heard her yelling over the water. “Do whatever you want. I’m not going out there tonight. You are a Black woman what the fuck.” I hadn’t gone out to check, instead I stood at the door apologizing and reassuring her that I didn’t think she was either lying or crazy. I wish I had gone out to check then.
In the months after that she constantly talked about the weird things she heard, saw and felt. Nothing major, it was little things. Unexpected cold drafts, feeling like she was being watched. I probably could have taken her more seriously. The sort of things you see on those tv shows and you laugh at the guys who run or whatever. Once she came screaming out of the bathroom that something had pulled her hair. I could have listened, but I didn’t. I was never an atheist but, the idea that there was some mysterious ghost woman tormenting her was too much for me.
Eventually, we fought constantly. I couldn’t take it, the more she talked about the ghost and the touches, the whispers, the cold breezes the less I wanted to hear it. I don’t even remember how that last fight started; I just remember the silence after. Our house had been wrapped in cotton and no sounds from outside leaked in, we just stared at each other. Time stretched and what had been hot and passionate was instantly cold and empty. It was over.
As I walked, I remembered all of it, and I headed down towards the small park behind my house. I wanted to see if I could feel the creepy things she’d always talked about. After the first thing happened, she talked about how I walked down the gentle small slope and could just make out the small playground. I sat on a swing and started taking photos. I thought if I could capture something or feel something maybe everything would start making sense.
I hadn’t been taking photos in months, I’d forgotten how much I loved to just find a place to stand then turn in a little circle and shoot shoot shoot. I shot the enormous rock I was fond of, I shot into the copse of trees where once I had seen a single coyote. I caught eye-shine in the dark and stood stock still. I waited holding my breath and a stepped out to check me out.
Or I thought he was checking me out. I squatted and whispered, “hi buddy, I haven’t seen you in a while. You don’t call, you don’t write.” He meowed at me, pressing his big head into the palm of my hand. I kept talking to him and stroking his muscular back when his head turned, and his ears laid back against his head. He went rigid under my hand and growled in a way I had never heard a cat growl.
He stared at something on my left, and I turned just in case it was another animal. I saw nothing. The fog swirled a little bit but hard as I looked, I could see nothing. He swiped at the air and in the same instant I swore my dreadlocks swung as if someone had brushed by me. Unsure what to do, I put my finger on the shutter button of my camera, pointed it over my left side and pressed the button as many times as I could.
For his part the cat relaxed after a moment, I was trying not to be afraid. I was just tired and overwrought. Of course. I scooped the cat up and held him up to my face, his fur smelled of warmth and pine. While he purred, I whispered in his ear to soothe myself. “Come on kitty. You’re coming to my house I have food.”
The cat yawned and nestled between my breasts while I hurried home. Inside I fed him and sat at my desk with him in my lap when he was done eating. He curled up purring loudly while I plugged my camera into my computer and started moving the raw photo files onto my hard drive. I relaxed through the first dozen photos or so. I was rusty but some of them were nice. I’d forgotten how good it felt to have just a warm comfort against my belly.
When the photo of the rock loaded, I sat back staring. I bent forward again to zoom in, I had to be off. It was probably an anomaly but, even when I loaded the photo into an editing program and fiddled with it, there it was. Leaning against the rock was the outline of a person. It was slightly darker than the surrounding area but not as dark as the rock, I could see the outline of a hood and a long coat.
“Oh, shit.” I went through the rest of the photos and only one more had something in it. I moved a little too fast and the cat complained, “sorry friend. I moved him to the couch where he just rolled his eyes and went back to sleep. One of the pictures I had shot awkwardly while the cat was freaking out, right there was a hand. Not a flesh and blood hand, it was not see through, it was desaturated. As if I’d edited the image to make it transparent. I could just make out the long-fingered hand, those fingers trailing in my locs, one just one when i zoomed in even floated above the others.
“Oh, my fuck.”
I would like to say that I went into super rational mode and debunked or gone out ghostbusting or something. I want to say I sat at my desk late into the night like some movie and did research and found a local legend detailing the mysterious death of the most beautiful, nicest, light up a roomest woman who pined for her lost lover who was also the most handsome adventurous man ever- of course that happened. Of course, it did. I was so brave.
Fact is I was scared shitless. I got drunk and crawled into bed with the lights on and the guest cat. I turned on every light in my house. I tried to make my own holy water following an insane tutorial on youtube, I lit some candles, and it was still all fucked. In the month after that I saw things. Nothing concrete or insane, just things. I thought I saw a lovely round face in the window over the sink, I thought I saw a woman in a long black coat in the fog near the end of my driveway, I heard little things. Whispers, someone saying my name.
I was okay until she started saying my name. “Lola, Lola, Lo-lah.” I could hear it clearly; worse I could hear the inflection. It wasn’t taunting, it was loving. It was wanting. It was driving me crazy. “What? What do you want please stop that. Please.”
The Guest Cat whom I wound up calling Dozer because of his size and habit of knocking things out of his way in his favored napping spots, often he would just stare off at things and that made me nervous. He stopped hissing but I would watch him track things across the room that I couldn’t see.
I learned to live with it though I still flinched when she spoke my name. I tried the I don’t believe in this shit method to deal with it. I’d hear, “Lola, Lola, Low-Lah” over and over, a singsong whisper, sometimes I thought when I stepped out into the yard she was there. I gave myself a lot of atheist pep talks. I laughed. I called myself dumb.
At the start of that summer things took a turn. My this doesn’t exist method was sort of working, I’d convinced myself at least enough that the nightmares were just stress, my constant cold was my near anemia. Then in June when the weather finally got nice, I was working at home in my pajamas and left a text document up on my screen, I puttered, fed Dozer and made myself lunch.
While I was eating at the kitchen table reading, I heard a clatter in the living room where my desk was and Dozer went running past me in the kitchen, his tail bushed out and his ears laid back. I got up to see what might have scared him, figuring he’d knocked something over on my desk again and was just having a cat moment. Or he wanted food.
When I came around my desk I saw it, the document was filled with my name. Over and over again in all capital letters filling hundreds of pages.
LOLA LOLA LOLA LOLA LOLA LOLA LOLA LOLA LOLA LOLA LOLA LOLA LOLA LOLA.
I sat down heavily in my chair panting and nauseated. I scrolled page after page, it was all my name. I scooted back and stared at the seemingly never-ending document. I stood up and paced in the living room talking.
“Maybe Dozer sat on the keyboard.”
Three steps.
“That cat has done some weird stuff. It was probably in my clipboard- like computers do weird shit all the time. I bet that’s it I bet-”
Three steps.
“I should just take apart my keyboard or no, I bet I put in some weird macro.”
Three steps.
I stopped talking and whirled around, I thought I saw what? There was nothing. Dozer peered out of the kitchen and waddled to me, twining between my ankles. Before I could pick him up I watched him tip his head up, nose lifted. Dozer’s head turned again, and he took a few steps toward the hall, he meowed his loud raspy new mother come look meow. I walked behind him shaking. As I passed the doorway and stepped over him, I saw right there in the glass in the front door.
I watched her plump lips move and I heard, I heard her voice right in my ear. “Lola,Lo-la, Lowwww-lahhhh.” The voice was singsong the way you tease a lover in bed before you make love. She smiled and faded. I’m not proud of this, in my haste to get away from her I stepped on poor Dozer’s tail and ran. I ran to the kitchen and puked my lunch into the sink, I held the faucet and ran cold water over my face and sobbed.
That night I packed Dozer, two bags and spent the night with a friend. I told him everything that was happening, and he assured me in the comforting smug way of white atheists that everything had an explanation and he’d help me take care of it all. I hated to feel it but, for the first time I believed the hype. I did. His confidence, his smug just knowing. I took Dozer home and walked in ready. I ignored the whisper, “Lola, Low-lah, Lowwwwlaaah.”
–
One-week later Ret. Sheriff Omar Morgan pulled up to the little house and sighed. He knew the drill. He would have shown up sooner, but it had been a good thirty years since he’d needed the key and he’d hidden it in hopes he’d never have to use it again. He ignored the feeling of eyes on him as he got out and headed for the door. Inside was silent, dust hung in shafts of sunlight, nothing moved.
He walked around the living room, he got an immediate sense of the occupant. Nice young Black woman, book lover, her favorite color was sage, and she was gone just like the others. When he went upstairs it was all the same, peace, silence, air holding secrets only he and a few others knew. He checked the basement knowing it too would be silent and waiting.
Outside he knew where to go, the old property had extended way down past the playground and to the little creek. He stopped when he saw her. Like everyone else he said her out of habit, the being only stood by the big rock a solid black outline against a bright innocent day. He felt his balls contract, his asshole quivered and the terror that lived in him just like everyone else in the area welled up but, he knew his job.
“It’s done, just go.” He couldn’t just leave, he had to see. He went back inside and started plucking notebooks and journals off of the bookshelves looking. He was careful, sure to leave no messes, then he turned on the computer. As the screen filled he had one bitter thought that elicited a hard bark of laughter, modern problems require modern solutions.
The screen filled.
Lola Lola Lola Lolalolalolalolalola Lola Lola Lola Lolalolalolalolalola Lola Lola Lola Lolalolalolalolalola Lola Lola Lola Lolalolalolalolalola Lola Lola Lola Lolalolalolalolalola Lola Lola Lola Lolalolalolalolalolalolalolalolalolalolaloaloa……
and filled as he watched for a moment. “I understand. Until next time.”
In times past, the sacrifices were never so hard. No one was born believing they too would waltz through life without ever being the one. Outside the cat yawned and watched. He too had a job. He knew who to draw in and he knew that when the man left, things would go back to the way they were. When the rickety old truck finally pulled off it was late, the sheriff had found as many identifying documents as possible and official things that he felt okay to leave and let history take its course.
The little house abutting a dilapidated park, at the very edge of suburban comfort settled. The cat waddled off of the porch to sprawl on the walk to watch, he cleaned his face while he waited, the show was nothing new for him. In the silence the house waved lightly, as fabric stirred by a light breeze. Something pulled it from the world bit by bit, greedy fingers pulled the memories, the photos, the laughter and tears into itself.
Before her girlfriend moved out, she’d held Lola tight and whispered, “please come with me?” Lola, like her aunty, like their great aunty only smiled and shook her head. Lola didn’t know anything about genetic memory or trauma but her blood did, her spirit knew and the sacrifice was made. A little blood for a little peace.
Lola waited near the big rock in the park. She watched the man come and go with her things, she didn’t care. When the time came, nothing else mattered. Her confusion, her exes, her life it just didn’t matter anymore and she was ready to wait for her replacement.
