The Ghost Files

by Apryl Baker

And that is my screwed-up life in a nutshell. Mattie Louise Hathaway—the foster kid who sees dead people.

My eyes focus on the mirror, and I fall backward trying to get away from the image there. Bloody, broken bits of flesh make up what I think is a face, but it’s hard to tell. It looks like someone carved it up with a cleaver. I don’t even know if it’s a boy or a girl staring at me,

Five. I’d been five freaking years old, and my mother tried her best to kill me. And not just kill me—she’d done it in a way that caused lots and lots of pain.

Typically, a woman kills by way of poison or overdoses. But not my mom. She went into the kitchen, found the biggest butcher knife she could get her hands on, and proceeded to plunge it into my little body not once, not twice, but eight times.