A Head Full of Ghosts

by Paul Tremblay

Everything is old and neglected and in some ways exactly the same. But the dust and cobwebs and cracked plaster and peeling wallpaper seem faked somehow. Passage of time as a prop to the story, the story that has been told and retold so often it has lost its meaning, even to those of us who lived through it.

Our dining room table, as far as I could tell, was not for dining, but for stacking the clean and folded laundry we were supposed to bring upstairs to our rooms and neatly put away, which we never did.

Real lol

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.

It sounded like the saddest of sad songs with notes floating down the staircase and into the foyer like dead leaves; red, brown, and purple.

I’d become so very tired of other people’s secrets and stories.

I wasn’t sure if I wanted to hear such a big secret. It might not fit in my head and then it would spill out everywhere. But at the same time, my skin prickled with wanting to know what it was.

I mean, we’re there with them but not really there. We watch from the spaces between their spaces, and that’s always where the monster dwells.

“The distance is easier than you think, and I’m always afraid. But I think it’s good to be afraid. It means that I’m alive.”

These men all blamed the breakdown of their once-ideal family on something outside their control, something outside themselves.