20th Century Ghosts

by Joe Hill

It was about young people, young healthy bodies, punched full of holes and the life pouring out in arterial gouts, not a single dream realized, not a single ambition achieved.

And over all this, Dorothy’s small, brave voice fills the darkened theater. She is saying something about home. She is saying something everyone knows.

Because it isn’t obvious—that nothing can be something. That something which can’t be measured or seen could still exist and have meaning. Same with the soul, when you think about it.

Then he wrote: You get an astronaut’s life whether you want it or not. Leave it all behind for a world you know nothing about. That’s just the deal.

I’m going to see how high I can go. I want to see if it’s true. If the sky opens up at the top.

I hope if there is another world, we will not be judged too harshly for the things we did wrong here—that we will at least be forgiven for the mistakes we made out of love. I have no doubt it was a sin of some kind, to let such a one go.

He had written you were the only one I knew how to talk to and I am sometimes so lonely.

It’s a nice memory of my father sitting with his hands cupped behind his head and the wintry blue sky over the both of us. It’s a nice memory with that old seagull floating over the outfield and not going anywhere, just hanging in place with its wings spread, never traveling any closer to wherever it was heading. It’s a nice memory to have in your head. Everyone should have a memory just like it.

The phone rang again. The fat man’s gaze flicked toward it, then back to Finney’s face. Albert’s pupils were very wide, so wide the golden ring of his irises had shrunk to almost nothing. His pupils were a pair of black balloons, obscuring twin suns. The phone rang and rang. Finney pulled at the wire. On Albert’s dark, bruise-colored face was a horrified question. “It’s for you,” Finney told him.

But now, sometimes when I’m out there, in the wide-open of the yard, the wind will rise and shriek, tearing at my clothes. What else shrieks with it, I wonder?

He was often crushed by the decency of other people who had almost nothing themselves; at times he felt their kindnesses so powerfully he thought it would destroy some delicate inner part of him.

“He’ll be the funny kid now. The funny kid always has something wrong with him. That’s why he’s funny—to shift people’s attention to something else.”

I can go on for a while longer, pulling myself through the dark, through the tight spaces of my own memories. Who knows what may lie just around the next corner? There may be a window somewhere ahead. It may look out on a field of sunflowers.