BY Joshua Jones Lofflin
We walk our ghosts at midnight. We’re old fashioned that way. Besides, our ghosts
prefer the dark, the dewy taste of night. We make our way to the neighborhood playground by
the light of our phones. Once there, we let our ghosts run free, and they tear about and shriek the
way ghosts do, climb the jungle gym, push against the swings, bury one another in mulch until
we shout at them for getting dirty. But we mostly let them go and chat amongst ourselves,
discussing plans for trick-or-treating, the sorry state of trash collection, the constant construction
noise of the neighboring development. We puff warm air into our hands and stamp our feet. On
the coldest nights, we tell our ghosts to hurry it up.
Our neighbor Eileen always arrives late still dressed in her cashier’s vest, a cigarette
tucked behind her ear. We know she’s dying to smoke it, dying to find someone to join her, but
none of us do. We’re D.A.R.E. kids or else quit long ago, a testament to our moral fiber, see, to
our student loans and fixed-rate mortgages. Eileen rents, but she’s sweet enough. She always
asks after our ghosts before going on about her Chuck, how he almost got loose again, how it’s
hard in her townhome, he so wants to roam. She’s always yelling at him to stop chasing the other
ghosts, to get his butt over here and behave, Buster! before laughing in a what-can-you-do way.
That Chuck, we mutter, but only after Eileen waves goodbye and limps off, Chuck loping ahead
of her, ignoring her as she yells at him to get back here, I mean it!
The night Chuck runs off, Eileen swears she only looked away for a second. We tell her
she can’t blame herself and don’t mention how she’d been gabbing all night long with barely a
glance toward him. We start shouting Chuck, Chuck! (though some of us not so loud; the last
time he got loose, he called to all the other ghosts until the entire neighborhood was a cacophony
of howls).
Some of us say Chuck ought to run off for good. But not tonight. Not when Eileen would
be so distraught. He’s her first ghost, has been with her since the blizzard of ’08, when she was
living in Jackson Heights and almost became a ghost herself. He was a comfort to her then,
during that great, white silence when, for days, she shivered in her apartment—their apartment—
waiting for the building’s furnace to come back to life, and him nuzzling her, warming her,
keeping watch for the snow plows to dig them out. Maybe that’s why she puts up with him now,
despite how he’s always getting dirty, always reeking of exhaust and Old Spice, a whiff of urine.
We call out Chuck! and our phone lights flash across lawns, under boxwoods and azaleas,
glint off rabbits’ red eyes. They scatter, as if Chuck were after them, or else the stray ghosts he
often calls to, the ones who drift across the neighboring fields. We sometimes hear them pacing
beneath our windows in the predawn hours. The fog of their breath lingers on the panes. Our
own ghosts stare out the windows and whine until we yell at them to shut up.
Eileen’s ahead of us, her shoulders slumped, and one of the younger moms—another
renter—rubs the round of Eileen’s back murmuring we’ll find him, and as one, we all call out
Chuck! and set off back yard security lights, send moths flitting into the wind. Then comes an
airy cry, an echo of a cry, and we hurry toward the edge of the neighborhood, hissing at our own
ghosts to stay close.
I’ll kill him, Eileen’s saying, just like she used to long before the blizzard, long before he
got sick, before he cursed out the hospice van driver saying he wasn’t going anywhere, and
Eileen pleading with him to stop being so damn stubborn, and him shaking his head, because
even then he refused to behave.
We stop when we reach the edge of the development. In the neighboring field, amid
bulldozers and a digger, we can just make out Chuck’s outline amid a glimmer of moonlit
ghosts—strays that crowd round him as he clambers atop the digger. He spiders up it, to the very
top of its arm, and Eileen shouts at him to get down from there, but he doesn’t seem to notice; he
only tosses back his head and howls. Beneath him, the strays follow, mouths pursed to the stars
in a sonorous croon.
Our own ghosts whine, press forward. No, we tell them. Stay! we whisper-shout, but
they’re already lunging across the scrubby verge toward the dirt and mud where the strays
gather, circling now, swaying and eager. And Chuck standing above them all, his eyes finally
alighting on us, as we tear after our ghosts, and Eileen, as she calls at us to let them go.
They just want to play, she cries, but we’re already on them, dragging them back across
the verge and scolding them. They go limp and flop about, insubstantial in our grip, and we yell
at them to straighten up. As we file pass Eileen, our ghosts tight by our sides, someone mutters
she ought to keep Chuck locked up.
Eileen doesn’t watch us leave but stands in the field, the cherry of her cigarette glowing.
Chuck’s jumped down from the digger and is moving amid the strays, gathering the smaller ones
close to him, draping a spectral hand across their shoulders. Our own ghosts grow faint as they
watch him, but they no longer squirm, no longer pull away. They’re well-behaved, our ghosts.
They know when it’s time to go.
Joshua Jones Lofflin’s writing has appeared in The Best Microfiction, The Best Small Fictions, The Cincinnati Review, CRAFT, Fractured Lit, Moon City Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, and elsewhere. He lives in Maryland. Find him online at jjlofflin.com