I DON'T KNOW WHEN IT BEGAN. I know it doesn't end; I'm rearing on 26, and I don't know if I'll ever do anything I want to do. Fear. Anxiety. Loss.
I barely remember. I'm forgetting it.
Mom and Dad took me along on an appraisal when I was younger. Up North. It was an abandoned house in a ghost town a few miles from Canada. Nothing is very clear. I remember it being hideously big, hollowed, off a long, desolate rank of wilderness, Mom explaining Uncharted Territory.
I'd been fidgety.
Nobody else lived anywhere nearby, I knew.
Empty, a driveway, an overgrown lawn, and an unsettling knot in your body. Everything dried a crusty brown. Everything achingly quiet. It must've been October. November.
Frosty.
Mom and Dad going on about its property values: "It has land," a voice chiming. "Acreage." I could've disappeared, if I hadn't been holding a hand—I don't remember who. No, I was led up a creaking porch between Mom and Dad. My gaze level with an old doorknob, choked by a lockbox. Mom unlocked it quickly, unlocked a heavy door, pushed it open calmly.
Dustiness itched at my skin as I crossed a threshold, felt for my footing, ignored an icy chill of unfurnished openness. It hadn't been lived in. Everything reeked of aged abandonment. Decay. Rot.
"It'll need work." Her voice echoed, bounced round into doorways, faded off. Dad looked at anything but you. His gaze high-rising to a moldy ceiling. His footsteps drumming. Nobody.
"Fuck, I mean," Mom cursed softly, pausing to glance out a window: a thicketing view of pine trees. "It's in the middle of nowhere, Rich."
Maybe it was your first memory of being... nowhere.
Suddenly knuckles rasping a knock. Gentle. Patient. It held your breath. Nobody was around for as far as you'd seen.
But I watched it happen, I watched it—
"Hello?"
I snuck up behind as Dad opened the door slowly. I don't remember if he'd closed it. But I know he opened it again, glanced down; a set of schoolgirls, barely fourteen, holding a pamphlet up. I never saw it.
Dad took it, looked at it, and called for Mom. "Sorry, not, uh, from here," he said, awkwardly. They didn't say anything. Both in doll shoes and dresses, gazing up blankly. "I didn't know anybody... else..."
Eyes beady black, bulging. Lips curling upwards unnaturally. I stifled a surprised sob, clutching at Dad. Mom trudging across creaky wooden floors, complaining, rambling under her breath, and I lost it. I blinked. Gone.
They turned and walked away so... quietly, so harmlessly.
"What? What? Sorry, I'm sorry." Mom huffed up behind us. "What's wrong? Who..." Her gaze drifted. "Who are they?"
Ghosts are harmless, I could tell you. Shadows are intricate, I'd tell you, too; brutally abandoned, restlessly abound. Missing. Lost. Imitations.
Whatever you're running from, it will catch up to you.
It always does.
Death finds you. Death may have already found you. It'll look like you.
