Category Archive

If ghosts could kill themselves, they would. They long to be either here or there. Bodiless but not yet dimensionless light, they darken like shadows the houses they lived in. My dead twin brother finds ways to tell me he’s still half-with us, and I more than half believe him. Ghost stories have it all wrong. Rattling chains aren’t threats or warnings; they’re diplomatic feelers from the nearly departed. So far, he’s dropped hints about the gun I helped him buy, about his accidental death, and about the novel he was writing, but not enough to pull it all together. With my clean record, my legitimate ID, and a photo of the  face we share, I secured a license to arm ourselves against what I never knew, but it helped him sleep, and so it helped me, too. He’d gotten it in his head that his foot was diseased, or menacing in a way that his chapter drafts don’t specify. In the garden at dusk, he aimed down the barrel with single-eyed intensity, fired one shot, and severed the pinkie toe, then laughed at what he called my much ado. He got it in his head that we were triplets next and aimed at me in turn, calling me the one in the middle before he fired. Lonely as Adam, I dug a hole that seeped a bit and laid him in damp earth, then filled it alone. I meant to write that it pains the ghost to haunt the living, but it doesn’t ring true. This note I found in his own hand, which looks so much like mine, bears no hint of anguish or remorse. There is no twin, it says, the novel has always been mine, and who will bury you now that you’ve killed me?

Copyright © November 24, 2006