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Chris Scott
The First Ghost
When Henry closes the refrigerator door, his dead wife is standing right there.
“Jesus, Audrey!” Henry drops the carton of milk. It thuds and flops on the tiled floor.
This isn’t how she’d wanted to re-introduce herself. “Hi Henry,” she says, trying to warm him up with an exploratory smile.
“You can’t be here,” Henry says. “You’re dead. You’re completely dead. This will not do.”
“Well,” Audrey says, “I don’t want to be.”
“You don’t want to be what?”
“I don’t want to be dead,” Audrey says, taking a seat at the kitchen table, motioning for him to do the same. “And frankly, you shouldn’t want me to be dead either. 38 years of marriage. Goodness.”
“That ain’t up to me,” Henry says, remaining standing. “Not up to you either. You had a stroke. Right there,” he gestures at the foyer. “Right in front of that door.”
“A stroke?” Audrey asks, her memory fuzzy.
“Said some gibberish, and keeled over. Kaputt.”
“Well, what kind of gibberish?”
“It was all slurred,” Henry says. “Sounded like Hi, Mars.”
“Hi, Mars?”
“I’m calling Dr. Weingardt,” Henry says, going to the rotary phone. “Don’t you try to talk me out of it.”
An hour later, Dr. Weingardt puts his stethoscope to Audrey’s chest. It goes right through her. He shivers and says, “Oh boy.”
“Explain this to me,” Dr. Weingardt says.
“You’re the doctor,” Audrey reminds him.
“We had a funeral,” Dr. Weingardt says, Henry nodding along next to him.
“So?”
“Audrey...” Henry begins.
“38 years of marriage!” Audrey yells. “I thought you’d be happy I’m not dead!”
“But you are dead,” Henry says.
“And yet...”
***
Audrey and Henry are encouraged to travel to the city for more tests. But the thought of leaving her house fills Audrey with a deep down sick feeling. A bug trapped in a jar. Ice vanishing under the July sun. Looking down at the Earth from a tremendous height. Dr. Weingardt offers his final diagnosis: Good luck.
A ceaseless tide of visitors come around. Nieces and nephews, cousins from out of town, children with their quickening stampede of more and more grandchildren. The young ones take turns daring each other to walk through Audrey. She feels like a carnival attraction, and tells them so. Nobody seems to hear her.
“What do you eat?” their son Robert asks.
“I don’t,” Audrey says.
“Good for our budget,” Henry adds.
“Where do you sleep?” their daughter Claire asks.
“I don’t,” Audrey says. This disturbs Claire more than her mother being dead and not dead.
“So you don’t dream,” Claire says.
“I keep myself occupied,” Audrey answers without answering.
“Don’t you miss the world?”
“Not especially.”
***
When Henry finally kicks the bucket, he doesn’t come back like Audrey did. She’s hurt, can’t help it. She tries to picture where his soul has gone, and it fills her with the same terror that grips her when she imagines leaving the house.
A loud, messy new family moves in. They’re surprised to find Audrey.
“Who are you?” the father asks.
“I’m Audrey. I’m dead.”
“Get out of here,” the father says, but not in the literal sense.
The family invites a reporter from a newspaper to visit the house, a confused and hapless man who negotiates around piles of toys and magazines and nicknacks before eventually making his way to Audrey on the sofa in the living room, where she spends much of her time.
“Explain this to me,” the reporter says. She is tired of explaining herself to everybody.
“I died but I didn’t want to be dead,” Audrey says. “Simple as that.”
“Actually seems pretty complicated,” the reporter says, frantically scribbling everything down in his little notepad.
“It isn’t,” Audrey says.
“What I mean to say,” the reporter sets his pad down on the coffee table, “is that I think it would surprise people to know they had the option. I think that has not occurred to most people.”
The reporter’s column runs in the paper, and more reporters visit after that. But the family quickly tires of them, stops letting them in. Eventually the family tires of Audrey, too.
"The children are unsettled,” the father says. “They are disturbed.” As though Audrey doesn’t see with her own eyes that the children couldn’t care less about her. She stomps into the basement, wondering if they can even hear her descent. Below it smells like mildew and resignation.
***
More years, and more people. Some sad, some happy, most both. One family buys an impossibly bright screen that displays colorful images of what the world outside the house is like, how much everything is changing. There are others like Audrey, the booming voice announces. She tiptoes upstairs to watch. They have created a new word for these not-people that can’t leave their homes. And they keep accumulating, crowding out living spaces, making it harder and harder for anyone to tell the difference. Living people invent new ways of leaving. Outer space, the moon, Mars.
“Hi, Mars,” Audrey whispers at the screen where a shielded body leaves a small footprint of red dust. “Hi, Mars.”
***
The decades crawl and rush all at once. Audrey finds it harder and harder to navigate the turbulence of souls overcrowding the basement. The constant intimacy of not-bodies passing through each other all day, the endgame of decades of nobody leaving. What Audrey started. She makes her way up the stairs, can barely see her own feet through the tangle of limbs, and arrives to find her crumbling home, not a living soul left to repair it.
She makes her way to the foyer, pauses and kneels. It was here. The decision she made, all those years ago. She tries to still her racing heart, bracing herself for another decision, the biggest. The last. She takes a moment, her mind a blur of doubt and hope. She opens the door to sunlight, crisp air, a perfect breeze. She steps out and understands she has all of this to herself.
Chris Scott's work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Observer, Maudlin House, Flash Fiction Magazine, Weird Lit Magazine, The Fantastic Other, Flash Frog, Tiny Frights and elsewhere. He is a regular contributor for ClickHole, and an elementary school teacher in Washington, DC. You can read his writing at www.chrisscottwrites.com and on social media at @iamchrisscott.
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