A Head Full of Ghosts

It was so dark it was like nothing was there in the room with us. Only the nothing was actually something because it filled my eyes and lungs and it sat on my shoulders.

I slowly tiptoed in, careful not to trigger any unseen trip wires that might set off Marjorie and her increasingly unpredictable mood swings. Any perceived transgression on my part could spark an argument that
would end with either my crying and running to my cardboard house or with Dad’s brutish method of mediating (i.e., his yelling the loudest and longest).

I stay off the stones and walk across the neglected front yard, grown wild and unbounded in spring and summer, now beginning to retreat in the new cold of autumn. Leaves and weedy fingers tickle my ankles and grab at my sneakers. If Marjorie were here now, maybe she’d tell me a quick story about worms, spiders, and mice crawling underneath the decaying greenery, coming to get the young woman foolishly not keeping to the safety of the pathway.

Rachel enters the house first. She has a key and I don’t. So I hang back, peel a strip of white paint off the front door

I was good at imagining the somethings worse.

couldn’t look away from the page. It was terrible and would give me nightmares, and yet there was something wonderful in its terribleness.

She shrugged, then she giggled, then she stopped, and she shrugged again

Marjorie’s face was a giant smile; all white teeth and all wide eyes.

there are some parts of this that I remember in great, terrible detail, so much so I fear getting lost in the labyrinth of memory. There are other parts of this that remain as unclear and unknowable as someone else’s mind, a

only wanted to demonstrate how tricky this is and how tricky this could get.

they are desperate to believe in the middle class and the values of bourgeois capitalism.