GHOSTS

He bought a house but couldn’t get the hang of it. He’d arrive home loaded down with groceries and kick the front door shut behind him, clever like, with a fancy swing of the heel. But the back door would shudder a moment later, as if someone was ducking out that way to avoid him. Same thing with the window over the sink, like there might have been a crowd of them in his place. The possibility, even though he knew it was addled thinking, sparked a tension in the air, a static he couldn’t discharge. He understood it had something to do with the air being pressurized, hassled from front of the house to back, but he dwelled instead on the possibility of a crime or even a haunting.  Thing was, when he started talking ghosts and such, his girlfriend called him mad, pointed at his history of visions like they were a symptom rather than simply backstory, and even though most were a lifetime ago, back home, where his grandparents were spiritualists (and pranksters too, it must be said, which clouded things). She stormed off after his latest lament (slamming all the doors), and he watched her through inherited lace drapes as she navigated the wet High Street, arms windmilling and birds seeming to explode into the air from nothing, as if starting take-off from somewhere just inside the asphalt.