A Ghost Story

The day was gray and wet. Ugly raindrops fell after the wind blew dark-fingered clouds right over the small town I call home, Shelbyville. There's two gas stations and a main street where Teddy’s Pub and Judy’s Hair Salon are. Three L-shaped neighborhoods outline the town on the north, south, and east side. They close down every 4th of July for the block parties. Music can be heard at the opposite end of the Jeffreys’s field, a hundred rows deep. People live here like there isn’t any other place in the world. Like the center of Earth is Haddad’s Grocers and the world's biggest problem is the new priest who’s young and doesn’t stay to shake hands after mass. Large-scale hunger here just meant the stray dogs who sometimes showed up on Dixon’s land. The mayor doubles as the catcher at the little league games. There’s an oak tree off county road 42 where half the population had their first kiss. This is where I grew up. 

My family was small. Me Mom Dad my twin brother Tyler and our dog Seamus. Tyler was louder, stronger, faster, and better looking (I was born with a white birthmark across my forehead that looked like a page turning). Tyler became the school’s starting running back until he tore his ACL junior year. I was pretty good at chess, but that tended to garner less attention. Mom was always proud of me though.

I had friends, a few good ones. A kid we called Lucky because he liked to smoke Lucky Stripes before school and a boy named Jun who’d read every book ever written. We would sometimes drink beers after class in Lucky’s dad’s pickup and we’d ask Jun questions about the world and he’d always have an answer. I was pretty sure he was just taking things from the books he read though I never said anything. He once told us he’d met a talking pig who wanted to take over the world and it wasn’t until a year later when my AP Lit teacher told us about a man named Orwell that I had proof that Jun was lying. Still, I let him talk on. When we got older Jun moved away to Chicago and Lucky went to fight in some war that wasn’t his. He died just weeks after they deployed him, and I never did hear from Jun.

Tyler had fallen victim to the opiates he was prescribed after the surgery. He couldn’t go an hour without something or he’d scratch his neck like a dog. Mom and Dad sent him off to rehab then Dad had a stroke at work and died. Tyler was allowed to come home for the funeral but had to be right back when it ended. After I moved out, Mom sold the house and moved to a yoga commune in Santa Barbara. She threw her phone into the Pacific Ocean and I didn’t hear of her until I saw her face on the news a few years later—turns out her commune had started a wildfire during some new moon ritual they’d thought was important enough to burn some trees on their property for. Houses had burned with dogs and kids in them. I was grateful she’d given me Seamus before she left.

I was working as a gas station attendant when the wheezing started. It was minor at first, coming only with some congestion in the back of my head. Like the front half was being pushed from the back half at the mouth and my throat had a frog in it. I ignored it but threw out my cigarettes just in case. Next day I woke up and the wheezing was worse but I could still get up and walk around so I went to work thinking it’ll go away in its own time as things are wont to do. Gas prices had gone down since the election a few days ago and the days were busier than normal. By the end, I needed a smoke even though I knew I shouldn’t, and by bedtime, I’d had six more. Friday woke me up hard and I called an ambulance. 

The day was gray and wet. Outside, the clouds stretched their miles of gray farther than I could see from my small window. They domed over us at the end like hedgerows. I was sitting on the couch sounding like I'd swallowed a rattler while Seamus just sat across the room just looking at me. When the paramedics got here, they hooked me up to a breathing machine right away then they took my vitals with pumps and wires. It felt like I was sucking the clouds right from the sky but they wanted to bring me to a doctor anyway. I asked the young one to feed Seamus which he did. Then, they drove me to the McLean County Hospital forty minutes away. They didn’t use the sirens and I thought that was a good sign.

My hospital room had a window and a large painting of an eagle with an American flag backdropping it. It made me think of Lucky. I was watching little raindrops slither downwards on the window like little kids crawling down a steep clear hill when the doctor came in.

‘We’ll have to do some tests to be sure but . . .’

They let me go a few hours later with an inhaler, some pills, and directions to drive north to a clinic where you pay them to poison you for an hour at a time. 

‘Once a week, for now. Maybe more later, maybe less’ the nurse had told me. She had a pretty smile and I’d have done anything she asked me to do right then.

I need the inhaler about every four hours. Seamus will side-eye me in his peculiar way before walking into the other room where his bed is and I’ll hear him plop down with a sigh I couldn’t reproduce even on my hardest days. I guess he knows what's coming. I tried to call Tyler the other night, to let him know. But the line I had was dead. He must’ve changed it. Still haven’t made it up to the clinic either. I don’t yet have a good reason for that. Mom would want me to go. That I know. For now I just hang out with Seamus instead. We stay inside and look at our shadows and I tell him that’s what I’ll look like when this is all over. He sleeps in his bed and I lie awake all night wondering if anyone would remember me, if anyone even could— but people don’t remember ghosts.