My Wife Wanted a Ghost by Elizabeth Rosen

My wife wanted a ghost, so I became one.

At night, when her fingertips tick deep in dreaming, I pull the blankets slowly, deliberately out from the bottom of the bed and uncover her sleeping body until the strangeness startles her awake and she lays petrified.

After silent dinners, as she sits tucked into the claustrophobic couch corner reading her horror novels, legs curled tightly under her to protect her from her artificial fear, I take the back scratcher she bought me so she didn’t have to touch me any longer and drag it lightly, repeatedly, across the baseboard in the neighboring room until she looks up and begins listening anxiously. Only then do I run my fingers up the wall like millipedes. I return to the living room to see the uneasiness in her eyes as she asks if I heard a strange noise.

I steal little things: the mother-of-pearl barrette I bought her on our Jamaican honeymoon, the filigree bookmark she places between the stirring pages before turning her back to me and turning off her light. I hold onto these items until some unexpected moment when she is occupied –the dishes, the taxes–and I loft them soft-hand into the room where she is as I quietly pass the door. I listen to her exclaim as she finds the item that clinked against the ceiling and came to rest on the carpet as though it has appeared out of thin air. She holds these relics out to me in amazement, in confusion. “But…” she says, unable to finish her thought. Her eyes are wide, gleaming with worry, but also with an excitement I haven’t seen in a long time, outside of her novel reading. She tells me she thinks there is something odd happening in our house.

And there is. Unaware of her own witchy power, she has conjured this ghostly presence.

Under a floorboard in our dusty attic, I have hidden a tiny speaker that I activate

remotely with my phone when I am out. Sometimes I play the snuffling, squealing violence of pigs eating, sometimes the eerie fifes and marching footsteps of Union soldiers. I do not play these loudly; their ghostliness should match mine. I let the sounds drift through the wall cavities only long enough that she could never get to the attic in time to investigate. She meets me shivering at the door when I return home. She is part terrified and part thrilled, delightfully agonized by the thought our house might be haunted.

I have toyed with the idea of hiring someone to creep around the house while we are in bed at night, but this is a step too far I think, particularly since her imagination is fertile with her reading and Travel Channel ghost-hunting shows. Instead, I move things a few inches this way or that when she is not paying attention. I turn potted plants on their sides so the dirt spills out. I write mysterious words like lonely and help on steamed mirrors so that they reappear later like otherworldly messages.

Tonight, as we lay on our separate sides of the bed, listening to the intermittent, insistent knocking that seemed, impossibly, to come from every part of the house, she reaches across the gulf between us and takes my hand. She says she thinks we have a ghost.

And we do. We do.

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ELIZABETH ROSEN — Elizabeth is a native New Orleanian and a transplant to small-town Pennsylvania. She misses gulf oysters and Southern ghost stories, but has become appreciative of snow and colorful scarves. Her stories have appeared in places such as North American Review, Baltimore Review, Pithead Chapel, and Gargoyle, and have been nominated for the Pushcart, Best of the Net, and Best Small Fictions. She still wants her MTV.

Art by ADAM BARMORE — Adam is a Louisville, Kentucky artist whose work is rooted in essential line, color, and iconic form. Guided by restraint, his paintings seek clarity, calmness, and presence through simplicity. After a 25-year career in community mental health, he turned his full attention to art—drawing on a deep connection to regional material culture and the quiet power of what is necessary and nothing more.