Station Eleven

by Emily St. John Mandel

“We should go, Charlie,” she’d said. “We’re a mile from the road.” But Charlie gave no sign of having heard her. “Come on,” Kirsten had said, “we can take it with us,” gesturing to the tea set, which had been set up with improbable precision on a miniature table. Charlie still said nothing. She was staring at the tea set as if in a trance. August called their names from downstairs, and all at once Kirsten had the impression that someone was watching them from a corner of the room, but except for Kirsten and Charlie, the room was empty. Most of the furniture in the nursery was gone, nothing remaining except this little table set for dolls and there, in the corner, a child-size rocking chair. How could this table have remained set, when the rest of the house was ransacked and in disarray? Now that Kirsten looked, she realized there was no dust on the tea set. The only footprints in the dust were hers and Charlie’s, and Charlie wasn’t sitting close enough to the table to touch it. What small hand had placed the doll’s teacups on the table? It was very easy to imagine that the rocking chair was moving, just slightly. Kirsten tried not to look at it. She wrapped the tiny plates and saucers in a pillowcase as quickly as possible while Charlie watched, still not speaking, and then Kirsten stuffed the bundle into Charlie’s bag, took her hand and led her downstairs, out to the overgrown lawn, where Charlie blinked and came back to herself slowly in the late-spring light.

When I do events for Station Eleven, this is the passage that I get the most questions about. I understand why it comes up so often. It’s kind of out of step with the rest of the book, isn’t it? You’re reading a post-apocalyptic novel, and then all of a sudden there’s this weird little ghost story in the final stretch. I have several answers for why this passage is here, but the most relevant one, I think, is that I just really wanted to write a ghost story. I’ve always loved ghost stories and seek them out whenever possible, which sometimes backfires on me. (Pro tip: you don’t really want to read the creepypasta Reddit when you’re alone in a hotel room at night.) In my new novel, The Glass Hotel, there are so many ghosts that one of my questions for my agent, when I sent her an early draft a year or two ago, was “Are there too many ghosts?” She said no, so I kept them all in.