Ghost Stories by Chris Palmer

There was calm picking up and making empty disarray into empty order. When the house was bulging at the seams, putting toys and trinkets back in the bins - if only for a short span - gave Silas the peace he needed to wrap up the final hours each day. Since things cleared out he found himself doing it more and more - roaming room to room for anything to put in place. He read some people kept everything as they were but Silas wanted the house damn near sterile to the point where he kept lines in the carpet when possible. Time used to be of the essence, but the shift left idleness; every room, every edge and cranny, a memory to weather - there was no shoving aside, ignoring; quiet was a strange animal that didn’t need food or water, couldn’t be distracted by music or television. It was just a residual of memory. 

Unlike the years he spent in a fog, all the after was crystal; he paused at the window and looked out on the lawn - he already spent a few hours in the sun, pruning bushes, de-thatching winter’s pounding, one of those perfect spring days when the morning cold eddied away, leaving a slip of humidity so he could taste summer a few months away. He loved when the kids used to pull every damn thing out of the garage, one item at a time; littered the driveway then the yard while he sat on the front stoop and watched. Sometimes Hannah joined, mostly she stayed inside. Lanie rode out first and for the sake of speed Charlie grabbed the scooter, he was adept on one foot, swiveling up and down the sidewalk while his older sister wove in and out of the grass with a mocking hackle as he played  catch up. The bike and scooter were long gone, put out along with the garbage and foraged by a scrapper or hopefully another family - Silas just saw them gone. Pretty much around the same time they lost interest in the front yard. 

He wasn’t by nature a social creature, although he could talk with the best - Silas preferred to watch, smile when the time called for it. His kids rarely failed to make him smile; from that stoop he was part of the neighborhood and distant from it. Watching the other kids wander from their yards into his, dragging Charlie and Lanie into the most preposterous games. In a blink the toys were gone, sidewalk chalk rotted in the back of the garage until he tossed it out. The black top untouched; those kids were older, the cul-de-sac aged out, with just a few new ones who moved in while Silas adjusted. But not enough where the laughter turned his head. If the sun was hidden he wasn’t nudged by nostalgia; it was the beautiful days where the sun rode through the house, shards splitting through the blinds leaving nothing left to hide - a house lived in enough was untethered in time. For a few years Silas found it difficult reconciling how charm could turn tragic until he accepted the walls and floors had memories, shadows dancing with his children as morning dawned on Christmas or the first snowfall when they pinned their faces against the glass; their laughter still born echoes. Hannah kneeling, her voice soft when Lanie cried because she wasn’t invited to a birthday party next door. He missed that voice. When they first met, she talked to him with love, unfettered by years - it wasn’t like the kids, it was the discovery of love; something unspoken, screaming through her actions and his reciprocations. If he tried he could unearth a million moments, revise the endings where the beauty was few and far between and conjure nostalgia. 

He quit that trail early on, the memories had a chimeric ability to turn inward, form a regret Silas wouldn’t indulge. Once the dust settled he promised to move ahead but the house compiled memory, even after he renovated. The once purposeless front room became a place for his music, the one area in the house specifically for Silas - vintage posters, records, a dry bar - yet it was the missing pieces that made memory so fickle. Then again, the chair didn’t have life without the dog or the boy. 

Charlie was a staple: under the table, hiding from tooth paste and blue jeans - his pajamas crumpled. Once Silas coaxed him from the floor, he usually ran to another room but the morning of his cousin's Baptism, Charlie hopped up and smiled. “Sit with me,” an olive branch. He passed the couch where Silas was heading and went to a wingback chair in the corner primarily occupied by the dog a few years gone. No one sat there but he climbed up and patted the edge where Silas was supposed to fit. Silas looked at the wall, knowing the picture he imagined was in the other room - the yellow pup sitting in the backyard, eyes to the camera, as living as anything he’d ever loved. Charlie smiled but didn’t say anything, fear of the toothbrush in Silas’ right hand. 

Silas fished, quiet calm, wondering: “Do you remember Penny?”

He burrowed in, “She’s a dog.”

Silas smiled, “That’s right buddy. She used to sit here. This was her chair.” He paused thinking of her in the afternoon, chin at rest on the arm, sun shining through the windows, “Do you know what happened to her?”

“She left.”

He nodded, “Where?”

Charlie’s voice rose, “To a farm.” The idea of her out there, running free with a hundred other dogs filled Silas with a liminal joy he couldn’t dare to fully indulge. 

“Was she happy with us?” His voice cracked, as if the wonders inside a little boy’s head could change the past, death. 

“Yep.”

“Do all happy dogs go to the farm?”

He nodded. 

Silas held on, letting the boy melt in the silence. He never liked that chair, a hand me down from his parents and once the room was repurposed - the couch and tables moved, he put the chair out to the curb but never quite considered how it measured another movement forward that was a regression of sorts. 

The dinner table went out too….he hated it. And he couldn’t retrieve any redeeming qualities from the overpriced West Elm piece Hannah picked up on Facebook Marketplace. Lanie always had splinters, their old set went with Hannah’s mom. Silas was never as good at decorating the house as he was cleaning it. The old table housed dinner and no matter how many conversations he recollected, it never clicked; “You hate this?” 

He immediately regretted commenting that he never quite liked the table: “Why did you let me get it?” The armory response in full flex.

“I didn’t have an opinion,” he shrugged, trying to let the conversation whither. 

She huffed into passive aggressiveness, a go to Silas came to understand was a reaction to his indifference. He wasn’t the most present; she never quite understood when he didn’t care there was nothing else attached to it; if the table made her happy, wonderful. He spent most of his marriage in compliance, never getting he was supposed to shove back, form an action, move her. 

Throughout childhood he saw his mother serenaded with material items, while his father dismissed the communicative duties that Silas found too late was the spine of a lengthy relationship.  

He gladly let the table go, now a swath of space that didn’t need to be repurposed so much as refilled. The light dangled over the floor, too low to walk beneath, too shallow to serve as a light for the kitchen or the living room where the kids used to post up. The ground most often a quagmire of toys Silas danced around to get to the television. But he rarely watched anything of worth, usually purposed by an innocuous comfort of white noise that came from any event using a ball - the ability to tune in and tune out. But when things sifted into an irreparable cruise control he remembered watching For All Mankind, needing to see it out. He couldn’t wait another day for the privacy the treadmill offered.

Lanie sat on the couch while he was on the floor staring intently at the television: the woman on screen hurtled through space, Silas paralyzed by the thought of her drifting into nothingness - there was something profound in the ruthlessness of the void they were part of; outmatched by a word beyond nature, and space nothing but natural. Hannah was moving around the house, readying for a workout and he couldn’t look away, tears coming out but not enough to have the extra breathing - even Lainie failed to notice anything was off until he yelled “No!” She turned from her book and looked at him, unable to ask what but their eyes locked for a moment and went back to the woman, the void. They watched together in silence as she avoided the kind of doom reserved for season finales and the much more real and lower stakes the every day provided. 

The television didn’t get much play after that. The shows he loved so much before kids, didn’t have the same kind of smack. Silas lived the mundane, then the tragic, afterwards there was only retrieval - whatever that looked like. His therapist told him to live within the day and find beauty in being present, but isolation made it difficult. When he was out of the house, that idea had a little more traction, inside was claustrophobic. The idea of family in the room didn’t track as it once did, they ended their day there together more often than not but it was tenuous, a group (man, woman, children) that was family in appearance - outbursts more frequent and emotions difficult to jockey from the couch where activities unfurled; gracious offerings of coloring, Barbies or Matchbox cars, but they remained rote; the laughter less and less - then gone. 

Silas held onto that moment when he yelled at the astronaut. He never quite marveled at the darkness the television possessed when nothing was being projected, an abyss with a slight reflection of the room that gave him the creeps if he was being honest.

There was a time when he shared all his thoughts and feelings with Hannah as they traveled uncharted worlds together; navigating alone was aimless - idle hands and such. He still wasn’t sure if that was when things shriveled, when distance disintegrated into spite. Neither were the bitter, retaliatory type but there was surety in the chasm that formed over the years, the kids’ tethers neither could bear to loosen. Not enough material to mend, or even reimagine the strangers they’d become and become acquainted with the new iterations, give them a chance.

He looked at his watch, the thoughts always close to the vest and like clockwork a car pulled into the driveway, the engine humming as the kids hopped out, bounding to the front door. Silas nudged the storm door open just in time for the kids to peel up the stairs: “Daddy!” they screamed in unison. He smiled as they rushed by. He raised a hand to Hannah already backing out. She wasn’t watching and he let his hand linger with the smile easing back into the stoic. 

Over his shoulder they were already settling in, getting a snack and pulling out God only knew which toys he put away three days ago. 

Chris Palmer has three publications under his belt. When he’s not writing, he’s an avid marathoner and nature lover.