The Invited

by Jennifer McMahon

Fear does that to a person: shrinks them down, makes them small and weak. Hattie had learned, over the years, to put her own fears in a box at the back of her mind, to stand tall and brave, to be resilient to whatever enemy presented itself.

When a child’s life is lost, it’s the mother who bears the most grief, the most fury. The women, Hattie knew, might be more dangerous than the men.

What people don’t understand, they destroy.

As they walked around the land, Helen had this strange sense of familiarity, of déjà vu almost, like she’d been there before. Silly, really.

Shape your reality. Make it true because you say it is.

She came to believe that some objects were like that boomerang—they went out, then found their way right back where they started from. Some things didn’t want to let go.

the labyrinth that held the Minotaur. Only in her version, there were Minotaurs everywhere, around every corner, and they wore letter jackets, or cheap perfume and pounds of makeup.

“I guess when you think of it, that’s what survival is really all about, right?” Riley asked. “I mean, not just as a species, but on a mundane, day-to-day level. Life throws shit at us and we roll with it. We adapt and evolve.”

“Yeah, you know, not everyone is designed to fit in. For those of us who don’t, those of us destined to blaze our own paths, well, other people can be downright shitty to us. Especially in high school.”

What if objects didn’t just hold memories but held traces of the people who’d touched them, threads that connected them still?

“I’ve always had this idea that objects hold history,” Helen said. Riley nodded. “But maybe it’s more than that. Maybe they don’t just hold it—maybe it flows through them, you know? Gives the dead a kind of…touchstone; something to pull them back to this world.”

There, sitting in the living room in the place the new brick hearth would go, was Hattie. She was on a stool. Where does a ghost get a stool?

This made me audibly cackle

People take pity on you when you are young and pretty and have a sad story to tell. People are drawn to sorrow.

That was the cruelest part about history, whether your own or a stranger’s from a hundred years ago—there wasn’t a damn thing you could do to change it.

Some people move into a haunted house, but you, you want to build a haunted house, Helen. How fucked up is that?”