The Invited

by Jennifer McMahon

“Don’t you be afraid.” As if it could be that easy. As if you could banish fear just like that. As if words could have such power.

What people don’t understand, they destroy.

Helen began feeling stuck and unhappy, believing that there had to be more to life than waking up each morning and going to work, even though it was a job she loved:

she, too, would die one day, perhaps sooner than expected, perhaps without warning, and it was entirely possible that she wasn’t living the life she’d been meant to live. The thought filled her with dread, with a sinking leaden feeling that encroached on everything.

He saw Helen’s new angst as a puzzle to unravel, a problem to solve.

There was comfort in making lists, in knowing just what to put on them, in checking off items accomplished.

Their colleagues and friends thought they were crazy when they described their plans to build a house, grow a garden, raise chickens and goats.

“So happy.” Shape your reality. Make it true because you say it is.

Your life might feel like it’s in upheaval, but really, you’ve got to remember that with change comes positive stuff, too. You’re gonna grow from this. With destruction comes transformation, right?

And there was something meditative about working with tools: you had to clear your mind of everything else and focus on what you were doing.

Spirits are borrowers. They are fascinated by objects from this world.

She loved this idea that some humans might be evolving right now, in minuscule ways, ways you couldn’t even see at first.

Everyone’s looking for something, she thought. Ghosts. Scientific explanations of the world around us. A new and different life somewhere else. Buried treasure.

It was 3:33 a.m.

See, people then, like now, I guess, are afraid of the things they don’t understand. They want something, someone, to blame.”

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

“Interesting. I mean, albinism has always been linked with mystical stuff. In folklore, the ‘pure white animals’ often have magical abilities.

Sometimes a vivid imagination truly was a curse.

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.

Maybe it’s like everything else, she thought; it’s hardest to see what’s right in front of us.