In the dream, there is a house haunted by a ghost and a young girl that knows its name. I stand around a corner and watch as the clock strikes midnight. A handle turns, the bedroom door creaks open, and a faint song echoes down the hallway. I lean forward — I don’t know the words, and in my loss I stagger like a drunkard. She doesn’t see me.
In the dream, the ghost walks down the hallway and meets the girl at the threshold. It looks down at its empty hands, “How will I repay you?” It asks.
The girl smiles, assure it, “I give you only what I give myself.”
In the dream, they walk past me and as I look into the face of this pale, ragged thing there is a familiarity, a string that ties us together at the wrists, and I feel it tugging me along with them. The girl stops , checks left and right, waves in the direction of the front door making a way. She opens it, leads the ghost our into the soft February breeze. It sighs, “Ah, to think that I was once a captive.”
“Go,” The girl whispers, “Down there, on the corner of the street, that is where the path begins.”
The ghost kisses the girl on the forehead, lifts its eyes to me and whispers inaudably. The girl nods, walks back into the house. I stand by the living room windows.
She closes the door, looks over at me, “This is how we learn to live,” She says.
My feet hit the floor before I fully wake, I stumble to the door and sing out into the hall — no one comes. As I peer through the living room windows and into the haze of the early morning, the trees sway eastward as if they were a hand that directs the gaze to the corner of the street, where the path begins. There, a shadow seems to pass through the gaps of the fencing lined alongside it again and again until it is far beyond my line of sight, and there is only the steady drawing in of light.
