A Ghost Haunts a Grieving Family's Home Movies in This Eerie Short Story
The developer of this neighborhood went bankrupt, so most of these houses were abandoned before they were fully built. Like the daughter was abandoned before fully built; her father’s gone. Cancer, awful and quick. Just a year earlier. She and her mom and brother are still trying to find the new orbit, to reconstruct a family around a massive, cratered hole of absence. The father had been a good father.
Holly sees a girl, a middle-schooler, standing in a driveway, pointing something at her then walking away. Holly feels like she’s slipped into something that isn’t the world she’s known. She’s hungry. Not literally hungry, but a physical feeling in her chest and ribs but also her legs and arms, like she’s been starving for a long time. For what?For everything. Air, dirt, houses. My God, the girl with her bike. Going into a house.
Holly is at a birthday party. The girl with the bike is younger, turning seven. The mother is presenting a Barbie baked into a cake, which is the bottom of her ball gown. Smart, the girl thinks. Did they put the Barbie in after the cake was baked? Still, she can’t help it—she imagines the Barbie burnt to char.Holly stands at the back of the room, holding her flute. She doesn’t recognize these people, these toys. All of these things gripped in their hands. They point and shoot like cameras.
The mother made dinner—fish sticks, frozen veggies, chopped pickles in mayo—left it for the kids. Her glass of wine bobbles as she situates herself in bed. Laptop open. This used to be her son’s room. The bedroom she shared with her husband, where he died, is untouched.“I know this game,” the mother says. “You need to sleep in your own bed. Are you still afraid of monsters?” It’s supposed to be a joke but comes off cold.The daughter’s afraid of a lot of things. “Whatever.
She grabs a bottle of Xanax off the nightstand and swallows a pill. This is grief, she tells herself.“Welcome to my YouTube channel!” the daughter practices, wearing lip gloss and her mom’s mascara. Her nose is too big for her face. It used to be cute, but now it’s not. Her poofy hair looks dumb. The son’s girlfriend blew off her curfew by an hour, but she’s finally gone. He’s supposed to work on a group project designing a city on the moon. He’s in charge of making tubes for housing. One thing he’s learned about building a city on the moon is that it shouldn’t be left to teenagers. He wants to write the team’s conclusion: This should only be tried by NASA engineers and shit. We’re too stupid and lazy.A mess of Sharpies, cardboard, a box cutter, poster board. He’s too wired to focus.
“No. It’s just . . . we should talk. Because if there’s something wrong. Well . . .” She’s not sure what she’s supposed to be saying. “Grief does strange things.” Maybe she does want something to be strange—so strange that their father comes back.The son thinks about the teaser. Could it have uploaded to the cloud automatically? “I’m fine. Can we wrap this up?”“This isn’t grief,” the daughter says. “This is a dead girl, alive in our videos. I’m sure it’s why Dad’s different on the tape.
She looks at him, completely confused. “All of this. All of it. A life! Look at what you got!” She remembers the girl in the basement taking off her tank top, the boy on top of her, their heavy breathing, kissing, the roughness and sweetness. Can’t she have that?”He lifts his head. The prayer is over. “What about the man who . . . did this to you?”
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