Ghost Wall

by Sarah Moss

can you imagine, on your CV? CV, I thought, and felt a thrill of fear, the backwash of my desperation to have such a thing, to leave childhood and dependence behind me, to enter the world.

Of course, that was the whole point of the re-enactment, that we ourselves became the ghosts, learning to walk the land as they walked it two thousand years ago, to tend our fire as they tended theirs and hope that some of their thoughts, their way of understanding the world, would follow the dance of muscle and bone. To do it properly, I thought, we would almost have to absent ourselves from ourselves, leaving our actions, our re-enactions, to those no longer there. Who are the ghosts again, we or our dead? Maybe they imagined us first, maybe we were conjured out of the deep past by other minds.

Break her and stake her to the bog, stop her before she gets away. They weren’t dead, the bog people, not to those who’d killed them.

Stay with me, I said, please, just tonight. She moved away and pulled back the worn brown duvet cover on the bed for me. Lie down, she said, I’ll be on the outside, you’ll know I’m between you and everything else,