How to Sell a Haunted House

by Grady Hendrix

She felt slow and stupid boarding her flight. She kept wanting to apologize to everyone. I’m sorry I can’t find my boarding pass, but my parents are dead. I’m sorry I stepped on your laptop bag, but my parents are dead. I’m sorry I sat in the wrong seat, but my parents are dead. The idea felt too big to fit inside her head. It was the thought that blotted out all other thoughts.

She wondered if she was supposed to cry. She hadn’t cried yet. She felt like she’d feel better if she cried.

Whenever Louise got anxious, her dad always said, You know, Louise, statistically, and there’s a lot of variance in these numbers, but in general, from a strictly scientific point of view, everything turns out okay an improbable number of times.

“Whoever heard of scattering your parents’ ashes on the beach?” Constance asked. “People swim in that water.” Mercy began filling glasses way over the halfway mark. “Children tee-tee in that water!” Aunt Honey said, outraged. “Fish! Dogs! It’s a toilet bowl!”

Louise felt small and safe, sipping her wine, surrounded by these loud women doing everything for her.

Women talked about their mother’s cooking in the quiet, tragic whispers they reserved for somebody dying of cancer.

“A puppeteer has passed, dear woman,” a literal clown in oversize shoes and a rainbow wig said as he slapped past them. “The puppets gather hither to bid her bon voyage.” “See?” Mercy said. “It sounds nice.” “If any of them tries to hug me I’m going to get my gun and shoot them dead,” Aunt Honey growled.

You know, Louise, her dad said, statistically, and there’s a lot of variance in these numbers, but in general, from a strictly scientific point of view, everything turns out okay an improbable number of times.

Her mom looked thin and her cheeks looked stretched too tight over her cheekbones. For the first time, Louise was aware of her mother’s skull beneath her skin.

There were so many dolls in there, waiting for her. Somewhere, in a less rational part of her brain, Louise felt that nothing could look so human and exist for so long without starting to develop thoughts on its own. What did the dolls think about?

“They were grown-ups. We’re just . . . tall children.”

If the house was haunted it was haunted by memories,

“Reality is not a consensus!” Louise said. “We don’t all get a vote! And Aunt Gail believes the vial of water she got from the river Jordan cures her headaches, so maybe she’s not the best example.”

“This is where we grew up. It’s not The Shining.” “It’s Shining-adjacent,”

“Look what you’re doing!” Louise said. “When you don’t like the way a conversation is going you deflect with personal attacks. You’re like some kind of emotionally abusive octopus entangling everyone in your word tentacles.”

Mark was cleaner but he looked like exactly the type of guy who’d go to a Waffle House at three in the morning after shooting a haunted puppet.

“The Velveteen Rabbit is not a compelling theoretical framework for the physical universe,” Louise said. “It’s a children’s story.”

“I don’t subscribe to your Velveteen Rabbit theory of the universe.”

“When I went to BU,” he said, “the first thing I did was join a radical puppet collective.”

Everyone else could sense the depressing Eastern European vibes coming from these puppets and stayed the hell away, but not me.

Put real puppets in a church and they’d burn it down. Puppets unleash anarchy.

puppet is a possession that possesses the possessor.”

Boston is a brown town with a gray sky, and everyone stomps around like they’ve already had a few and are ready to start a fight, but if you open the right door you fall into puppetland: church basements in Somerville, back rooms in Cambridge, a squat in the South End, a dirt-floor basement in a Malden row house.

Everyone realizes that at some point, right? It’s part of growing up. You realize you’re not going to be the star of the show. You realize you’re going to be lucky to scrape by and pay the rent.

I had to do something while I was still myself because right at that moment “myself” felt like chasing a slippery bar of soap around the tub

My bones felt too big for my skin.

“Capitalism’s really got us over a barrel,”

The dark attic smelled like sap and raw pine and forgotten things.

“Cursed dolls are prone to violence and malevolence,” Aunt Gail said. “It’s their nature. My friend Barb collects them off eBay.”

She cried because at last it hit her that time only moves in one direction, no matter how hard we wish it wasn’t so.

“It just hurts a little,” he said. “And by ‘a little’ I mean ‘a lot’ and also ‘all the time.’ ”