Sheet Ghost Quotes

Dakota's head was stuck in his toga. He staggered around olike a Kool-Aid-stained ghost. "Um," Percy said, "should I wear my bed sheets?

A sleepy smile pulled at my lips as I rolled onto my stomach, stretching my legs out and pointing my toes. The sheets slipped over my bare skin and ended up somewhere at the foot of my bed. There was either a perverted ghost in my bedroom or Cam was wide awake.

You saw a ghost, didn't you?" he said. To my relief, I managed to laugh. "Hate to break it to you, but there's no such thing as ghosts." Huh." His gaze traveled around the laundry room, like a cop searching for an escaped convict. When he turned that piercing look on me, its intensity sucked the backbone out of me. What do you see, Chloe?" I -I-I don't s-s-s-" Slow down." He snapped the words, impatient. "What do they look like? Do they talk to you?" You really want to know?" Yeah." I chewed my lip, then lifted onto my tiptoes. He bent to listen. They wear white sheets with big eye holes. And they say 'Boo!'" I glowered up at him. "Now get out of my way." I expected him tosneer. Cross his arms and say, Make me, little girl.His lips twitched and I steeled myself, then I realized he was smiling.Laughing at me. He stepped aside. I swept past him to the stairs.

She pressed her face into the pillow. His scent was there. She was stupid to have come, yet didn’t have the strength to leave. The ghost of him between the sheets. The shadow of her old self curled into the shadow of him.

all those nights with the phone warming the side of my face like the sun. you made jokes and sure, i may have even laughed a little but mostly you were not funny. mostly you were beautiful. mostly you were unremarkable, even your mediocrity was unremarkable. when friends would ask ‘what do you like about him?” i would think of you holding a bouquet against the denim of your shirt. i mean, you had my face as your screensaver for gods sake, do you know what that does for the self-esteem of girl with an apparition for a father? hey, do you remember the quiet between us in all those restaurants? all the other couples engrossed in deep conversation and us, as quiet as a closed mouth. that one afternoon when i asked ‘why do you love me?’ and you replied as quick as a toin coss ‘because you’re mad, because you’re crazy’ and i said ‘why else?’ and you said ‘that mouth, i love that mouth’ and i collapsed into myself like a sheet right out of the dryer. you clean, beautiful, unremarkable boy, raised by a pleasant mother, was i just a riot you loved to watch up close? there were times i picked arguments just so that we could have something to talk about. last week, i walked through the part of the city i loved when i still loved you, our old haunts. you know, even the ghosts have moved on.

And for just a moment I had reached the point of ecstasy that I always wanted to reach, which was the complete step across chronological time into timeless shadows, and wonderment in the bleakness of the mortal realm, and the sensation of death kicking at my heels to move on, with a phantom dogging its own heels, and myself hurrying to a plank where all the angels dove off and flew into the holy void of uncreated emptiness, the potent and inconceivable radiancies shining in bright Mind Essence, innumerable lotuslands falling open in the magic mothswarm of heaven. I could hear an indescribable seething roar which wasn't in my ear but everywhere and had nothing to do with sounds. I realized that I had died and been reborn numberless times but just didn't remember especially because the transitions from life to death and back to life are so ghostly easy, a magical action for naught, like falling asleep and waking up again a million times, the utter casualness and deep ignorance of it. I realized it was only because of the stability of the intrinsic Mind that these ripples of birth and death took place, like the action of the wind on a sheet of pure, serene, mirror-like water. I felt sweet, swinging bliss, like a big shot of heroin in the mainline vein; like a gulp of wine late in the afternoon and it makes you shudder; my feet tingled. I thought I was going to die the very next moment. But I didn't die...

Stories aren’t fiction. Stories are fabric. They’re the white sheets we drape over our ghosts so we can see them. —ROSCOE AVANGER, Sweet Mallow

And don't you know I'm not your ghost, anymore.

Your spirit is sweet So pull off your sheet And give me a ghost of a smile Show me your teeth 'Cause you're teddy beneath So just grin and bear it a while.

They told of dripping stone walls in uninhabited castles and of ivy-clad monastery ruins by moonlight, of locked inner rooms and secret dungeons, dank charnel houses and overgrown graveyards, of footsteps creaking upon staircases and fingers tapping at casements, of howlings and shriekings, groanings and scuttlings and the clanking of chains, of hooded monks and headless horseman, swirling mists and sudden winds, insubstantial specters and sheeted creatures, vampires and bloodhounds, bats and rats and spiders, of men found at dawn and women turned white-haired and raving lunatic, and of vanished corpses and curses upon heirs.

Stories aren't fiction. Stories are fabric. They're the white sheets we drape over our ghosts so we can see them.

It’s too hard, trying to exist between these poles of hope and death. You just find yourself imagining all these possibilities, all these possible sisters wandering around half unseen like people with sheets over their head, except that somewhere among them, you know that one of them’s real – one of them’s dead, one of them’s the ghost.

Her scent on the sheets slowly fading like the last notes of your favourite song drifting into silence; a ghost of absence haunting the room

Truly the universe is full of ghosts, not sheeted churchyard spectres, but the inextinguishable elements of individual life, which having once been, can never die, though they blend and change, and change again for ever.

Yet man dies not whilst the world, at once his mother and his monument, remains. His name is lost, indeed, but the breath he breathed still stirs the pine-tops on the mountains, the sound of the words he spoke yet echoes on through space; the thoughts his brain gave birth to we have inherited to-day; his passions are our cause of life; the joys and sorrows that he knew are our familiar friends--the end from which he fled aghast will surely overtake us also! Truly the universe is full of ghosts, not sheeted churchyard spectres, but the inextinguishable elements of individual life, which having once been, can never die, though they blend and change, and change again for ever.

You are an anomaly of a man," she said. "Perhaps because I'm not a man at all." He sat closer now. The sheets wrinkled as he scooted himself toward her. "Aye. You gender-malcontent. You otherling," she said..."Me too. I am a boy and a girl and a witch all wrapped into one very strange, flimsy, indecisive body. Do you think my body couldn't decide what it wanted to be?" "I think it doesn't matter because we get to decide what our bodies are or are not," he answered.

This house has always felt full of ghosts to me—not of spirits in white sheets and chains, nothing as clichéd as all that—but of memories snatched away. Memories I’ll never be able to claim as mine.

I know.” The two words ghosted against the skin of her neck, sending goose bumps down her spine. “But I want to touch you. I want to put my hands all over you. I want to kiss every inch of you and taste you as you come apart in my arms. I want to feel you wrapped around me with nothing but my name on your lips and the sheets a tangled mess beneath us. I want…” He exhaled heavily into her ear. “I want. I want. I want!

Just get your clothes back on, and leave the way you came." Or he’d gladly heave her ass out, preferably from the nearest window. Then he’d burn his sheets.

Everyone has ghosts. I think we all need to learn that there's no shame in letting them out.

The streets were full of destruction and rubble, and this town I'd never liked, with its stupid people, stupid streets, and stupid houses, was now unrecognisable, now it had a truly unique beauty, and scantily-clad women traversed it like ghosts. A twelve-storey building in the city centre had totally collapsed. Caught up in her bed sheets, a woman who had fallen from the top floor found herself alive and alone on the pavement. Her husband had been thrown out of bed. From now on she would sleep forever, since reality was now as extraordinary as dreams.

All he needed was a locked room, ink, and sheets of virgin paper. This was his anchor, and he embedded it with the few scraps of energy he had left. He instinctively knew that memory and imagination share the same ghost quarters of the brain, that they are like impressions in loose sand, footfalls in snow. Memory normally weighed more, but not here, where the forest washed it away, smoothing out every contour of its vital meaning. Here, he would use imagination to stamp out a lasting foundation that refused the insidious erosions buffeting around him. He would dream his way back to life with impossible facts.

Her poetry is written on the ghost of trees, whispered on the lips of lovers. As a little girl, she would drift in and out of libraries filled with dead poets and their musky scent. She held them in her hands and breathed them in -- wanting so much to be part of their world... It was on her sixteenth birthday that she first fell in love. With a boy who brought her red roses and white lies. When he broke her heart, she cried for days. Then hopeful, she sat with a pen in her hand, poised over the blank white sheet, but it refused to draw blood... She learned too late that poets are among the damned, cursed to commiserate over their loss, to reach with outstretched hands -- hands that will never know the weight of what they seek.

One or two of the villagers have seen it, too, though not as clearly as he did. Old Buttermere said it was a white thing, that glided over the ground, and vanished into the shrubbery.' 'And a very good place for it to vanish, too,' said Hugo, wholly unimpressed. 'Give me a sheet, and a night without too much moonlight, and I'll engage to do the same!

Some of the stories were conjured by white plantation owners taking advantage of the long-held African belief that ghosts caused disease and death. To discourage slaves from meeting or escaping, slave owners told tales of gruesome research done on black bodies, then covered themselves in white sheets and crept around at night, posing as spirits coming to infect black people with disease or steal them for research. Those sheets eventually gave rise to the white hooded cloaks of the Ku Klux Klan.

She was left to beg for mercy only to burn in torment again the next day. She was a weed struggling through cracks of concrete, unwanted, undesired, crushed and abused under trampling feet. She would never see the sun. She would never be free. She would always be a solitary candle in the dark, cold without a flame to warm it, forever peering out at the world through a laminated sheet of glass too thick to penetrate. When she died, if she was ever allowed, no one would ever know. She would pass a faded ghost of a girl abandoned by all.

I could hear and indescribable seething roar which wasn't which wasn't in my ear but everywhere and had nothing to do with sounds. I realised that I had died and reborn numberless times but just didn't remember especially because the transitions from life to death and back to life are so ghostly eas, a magical action for naught, like falling asleep and waking up again a million times, the utter casualness and deep ignorance of it. I realised it was only because of the stability of the intrinsic Mind that these ripples of birth and death took place, like the action of wind on a sheet of pure, serene, mirror-like water. I felt sweet, swinging bliss, like a big shot of heroin in the mainline vein, like a gulp of wine late in the afternoon and it makes you shudder; my feet tingled. I thought I was going to die the very next moment.

Douglas ignored her look, determined to move to the next phase in his strategy and went on. “Julia, I intend to be your lover.” With Julia’s soft warmth pressed so close, he could smell her. Both the feel of her and her scent made his body begin to tighten in an intensely pleasant way so that, when he spoke, his voice deepened, became hungry, as he, again, made his intentions clear but this time, he made them clearer. “I intend to sleep in sheets that smell of tangerines and jasmine. I intend to have your naked body squirming under mine. I intend to touch you everywhere with my hands and my mouth. I intend to memorise the taste of you, to make you call my name while I’m moving inside you, to make you so excited you beg me to let you come…

The American upper-middle-class citizen is a composite of negatives. He is largely delineated by what he is not. Gains went further. He was not merely negative. He was positively invisible; a vague respectable presence. There is a certain kind of ghost that can only materialize with the aid of a sheet or other piece of cloth to give it outline. Gains was like that. He materialized in someone else’s overcoat.

The Lackses aren’t the only ones who heard from a young age that Hopkins and other hospitals abducted black people. Since at least the 1800s, black oral history has been filled with tales of “night doctors” who kidnapped black people for research. And there were disturbing truths behind those stories. Some of the stories were conjured by white plantation owners taking advantage of the long-held African belief that ghosts caused disease and death. To discourage slaves from meeting or escaping, slave owners told tales of gruesome research done on black bodies, then covered themselves in white sheets and crept around at night, posing as spirits coming to infect black people with disease or steal them for research. Those sheets eventually gave rise to the white hooded cloaks of the Ku Klux Klan.

It took hours, but all of a sudden as she was drawing the plug-in for a vacuum pump that felt as if it was radiating cold, although she didn't know how, Claire saw . . . something. It was like a flash of intuition, one of those moments that came to her sometimes when she thoughtabout higher-order physics problems. Not calculation, exactly, not logic. Instinct.She saw what he was doing, and for that one second, it was beautiful.Crazy, but in a beautiful kind of way. Like everything Myrnin did, it twisted the basicrules of physics, bent them and reshaped them until they became . . . something else. He's agenius, she thought. She'd always known that, but this . . . this was something else. Something beyond all his usual tinkering and weirdness. "It's going to work," she said. Her voice sounded odd. She carefully set the vacuum pumpin its place on the meticulously labeled canvas sheet. Myrnin, who was sitting in his armchair with his feet comfortably on a hassock, looked up. He was reading a book through tiny little square spectacles that might have once belonged to Benjamin Franklin. "Well, of course it's going to work," he said. "What did you expect? I do know what I'm doing." This from a man wearing clothing from the OMG No store, and his battered vampire-bunny slippers. He'd crossed his feet at the ankles on top of a footstool, and both the bunnies' red mouths were flapping open to reveal their sharp, pointy teeth. Claire grinned, suddenly full of enthusiasm for what she was doing. "I didn't expectanything else," she said. "When's lunch?

We are all ghosts, hiding our hollow selves beneath spurious sheets of virtue.

I lay a dress on the white sheets, and see the monster nod his approval. A girl who intends to run doesn't bring a wardrobe with her. (But a girl who intends to fight does.)

Sent out batch of letters. Mother. PL, Fran, HV, G. Smuggled out responses to business letters in envelope to D. As I gave Nurse the bundle, I thought of myself dying as all my letters were en route. Each sheet a ghost.

I meant run out the front door. The dude had a gun.” I threw my hands up. I couldn’t believe him. I turned around, ready to walk out the door and make him drive back. It was late. I was a mess. I wanted to be between the sheets next to Kota and Nathan and not getting shot at while stealing a digital camera. Stone, C. L. (2014-01-19). Drop of Doubt: The Ghost Bird Series: #5 (Kindle Locations 3840-3843). Arcato Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Still less could I be afraid of those ghosts who touch my thoughts in passing. Any library is filled with them. I can take a book from dusty shelves, and be haunted by the thoughts of one long dead, still lively as ever in their winding sheet of words.

... I don't believe in ghosts - not the scary white sheet, boogie-woogie type of ghost anyway. And yet ... I don't disbelieve either. I'm kind of sitting on the ghost fence, dangling my legs on both sides, not sure which way to jump. I think I might be here for a while.

I always hated loose ends. Dangling phrases, unopened packages, or a character that inexplicably disappears, like a lone sheet on a clothesline before a vague storm, left to flap in the wind until that same wind carries it away to become the skin of a ghost or a child's tent.

When a traveler from the future must talk, he does not talk but whimpers. He whispers tortured sounds. He is agonized. For if he makes the slightest alteration in anything, he may destroy the future. At the same time, he is forced to witness events without being part of them, without changing them. He envies the people who live in their own time, who can act at will, oblivious of the future, ignorant of the effects of their actions. But he cannot act. He is an inert gas, a ghost, a sheet without soul. He has lost his personhood. He is an exile of time.

When a traveler from the future must talk, he does not talk but whimpers. He whispers tortured sounds. He is agonized. For if he makes the slightest alteration in anything, he may destroy the future. At the same time, he is forced to witness events without being part of them, witnout changing them. He envies the people who live in their own time, who can act at will, oblivious of the future, ignorant of the effects of their actions. But he cannot act. He is an inert gas, a ghost, a sheet without soul. He has lost his personhood. He is an exile of time.

When everyone you loved in your life is gone, you have days when the wind comes into your house like a person. You get so alone the wind sits down at your table and tries to have itself a cup of coffee, but it can't, there's no time, it has to move on, it's the wind. I'm not saying the wind is a ghost, only that the feeling is of the wind, the whole notion of the wind, is different when all people you ever loved are gone. It's not fresh air blowing through your hair and airing out your sheets and kitchen. No, sir. It's company. The wind is company that has to go

He walked in the room like a ghost and like a ghost slipped in between the sheets, barely creasing them. He was not unkind in the ways that the television and newspapers were full of. His cruelty was in his absence. Even when he came and sat at her dinner table and ate her food, he was not there.

Order fails, and ghosts come in. Now there are hands on my body, the sheets tangling like a snare around us. He stinks of cigarettes and booze, and I am floating, falling, somewhere, between here and there, and I think: Remember me. And I think: Want me. And I think: Stay with me. But no one ever does.

I am slowly learning to disregard the insatiable desire to be special. I think it began, the soft piano ballad of epiphanic freedom that danced in my head, when you mentioned that "Van Gogh was her thing" while I stood there in my overall dress, admiring his sunflowers at the art museum. And then again on South Street, while we thumbed through old records and I picked up Morrissey and you mentioned her name like it was stuck in your teeth. Each time, I felt a paintbrush on my cheeks, covering my skin in grey and fading me into a quiet, concealed background that hummed everything you've ever loved has been loved before, and everything you are has already been on an endless loop. It echoed in your wrists that I stared at, walking (home) in the middle of the street, and I felt like a ghost moving forward in an eternal line, waiting to haunt anyone who thought I was worth it. But no one keeps my name folded in their wallet. Only girls who are able to carve their names into paintings and vinyl live in pockets and dust bunnies and bathroom mirrors. And so be it, that I am grey and humming in the background. I am forgotten Sundays and chipped fingernail polish and borrowed sheets. I'm the song you'll get stuck in your head, but it will remind you of someone else. I am 2 in the afternoon, I am the last day of winter, I am a face on the sidewalk that won't show up in your dreams. And I am everywhere, and I am nothing at all.

The image on the film or print has been exposed to light but not developed yet. It's there, but you can't see it. like a ghost image. it's like... the darkness is hiding. All it takes is light and chemicals and patience to make it appear. Humans have hidden darkness, too, like secrets and sadness. But you cant just stick a person in developer fluid, can you?

Jennette, I, the spirit of the Holy Ghost, command you to cross your name out on the sign-in sheet, go to the restroom, touch your underwear band five times in a row, twirl on one foot, unlock and relock the bathroom door five times, come back, and re-sign in on the sign-in sheet.” I’m elated. He has spoken. The Holy Ghost, aka my Still Small Voice, has finally spoken to me.

No one, not a soul, intimidating stillness. Uncannily, though, in the midst of all this, a fire is blazing, lit, in fact,with petrol. It's flickering, a ghostly fire, wind. On the orange-coloured plain below I can see sheets of rain, and the annunciation of the end of the world is glowing on the horizon, glimmering there. A train races through the land and penetrates the mountain range. Its wheels are glowing. One car erupts in flames. The train stops, men try to extinguish it, but the car can no longer be extinguished. They decide to move on, to hasten, to race. The train moves, it moves into fathomless space, unwavering. In the pitch-blackness of the universe the wheels are glowing, the lone car is glowing, Unimaginable stellar catastrophes take place, entire worlds collapse into a single point. Light can no longer escape, even the profoundest blackness would seem like light and the silence would seem like thunder. The universe is filled with Nothing, it is the Yawning Black Void. Systems of Milky Ways have condensed into Un-stars. Utter blissfulness is spreading, and out of utter blissfulness now springs the Absurdity. This is the situation.

Alone in their town house, Tara wanders absently. She abandons half-read novels on chairs and tables. The invitations from Mme. Padva to join her for tea or accompany her to the ballet are politely declined. She turns all of the mirrors in the house to face the walls. Those she cannot manage to turn she covers with sheets so they sit like ghosts in empty rooms. She has trouble sleeping.

What is this, behind this veil, is it ugly, is it beautiful? It is shimmering, has it breasts, has it edges? I am sure it is unique, I am sure it is what I want. When I am quiet at my cooking I feel it looking, I feel it thinking 'Is this the one I am too appear for, Is this the elect one, the one with black eye-pits and a scar? Measuring the flour, cutting off the surplus, Adhering to rules, to rules, to rules. Is this the one for the annunciation? My god, what a laugh!' But it shimmers, it does not stop, and I think it wants me. I would not mind if it were bones, or a pearl button. I do not want much of a present, anyway, this year. After all I am alive only by accident. I would have killed myself gladly that time any possible way. Now there are these veils, shimmering like curtains, The diaphanous satins of a January window White as babies' bedding and glittering with dead breath. O ivory! It must be a tusk there, a ghost column. Can you not see I do not mind what it is. Can you not give it to me? Do not be ashamed--I do not mind if it is small. Do not be mean, I am ready for enormity. Let us sit down to it, one on either side, admiring the gleam, The glaze, the mirrory variety of it. Let us eat our last supper at it, like a hospital plate. I know why you will not give it to me, You are terrified The world will go up in a shriek, and your head with it, Bossed, brazen, an antique shield, A marvel to your great-grandchildren. Do not be afraid, it is not so. I will only take it and go aside quietly. You will not even hear me opening it, no paper crackle, No falling ribbons, no scream at the end. I do not think you credit me with this discretion. If you only knew how the veils were killing my days. To you they are only transparencies, clear air. But my god, the clouds are like cotton. Armies of them. They are carbon monoxide. Sweetly, sweetly I breathe in, Filling my veins with invisibles, with the million Probable motes that tick the years off my life. You are silver-suited for the occasion. O adding machine----- Is it impossible for you to let something go and have it go whole? Must you stamp each piece purple, Must you kill what you can? There is one thing I want today, and only you can give it to me. It stands at my window, big as the sky. It breathes from my sheets, the cold dead center Where split lives congeal and stiffen to history. Let it not come by the mail, finger by finger. Let it not come by word of mouth, I should be sixty By the time the whole of it was delivered, and to numb to use it. Only let down the veil, the veil, the veil. If it were death I would admire the deep gravity of it, its timeless eyes. I would know you were serious. There would be a nobility then, there would be a birthday. And the knife not carve, but enter Pure and clean as the cry of a baby, And the universe slide from my side.

He walked steadily, feeling them behind him. His stride did not falter; he pretended they weren’t there. He pretended that all was well—that those hideous things knew nothing about what he had done earlier in the night. But each pumpkin he passed nearly leapt off its porch or railing or wooden chair, expanded and morphed and throbbed as if in a funhouse mirror, and joined the procession behind him. The wind picked up, suddenly and fiercely, and construction paper decorations adorning the houses that surrounded him flapped helplessly against their doors and windows. The man ducked against the cold wind, and from the pursuing army of the jack-o’-lanterns behind him. Cardboard skeletons with fastener joints and witches with shredded yarn hair and ghosts with cotton ball sheets and black crayon eyes escaped their thumbtacks and scotch tape and newspaper twine and they flashed and danced in his face. He brushed at them desperately with his hands, attempting to tear a hole through them and escape.

So the Scouts went to work setting up camp-- raising the tent, filling the lamp, building the fire, getting it lit. Jane took time to explore a bit. She collected some leaves. She studied some seeds. That’s when she heard a voice in the weeds. Chuckling and talking to himself in there was--you guessed it-- Papa Q. Bear! “This trick will be fun,” Papa Bear said as he pulled the sheet over his head. “Hmm,” said Jane as she tiptoed away. “This is a game that two can play!” Then using twigs and leaves as a base, she started to make what looked like… A FACE!

Then you think, is this a better world, closer to the one before you knew of wars— earth wars? Before you found that canary in its cage laying, barely heaving. And you took it outside and said, Go Free! Go free! But it died there, right in your hands… like all of life. Is the ash in trees, babies, flowers, and visions of God better than the visions themselves? Then you think, none of this is tangible or concrete. So you have another cigarette and think about the (not one) but many ghosts you keep tucked away, under sheets, under beds, in notes, within other ghosts.

At last, after three days of variable winds, we have caught the north-east trades. I came on deck, after a good night’s rest in spite of my poor knee, to find the Ghost foaming along, wing-and- wing, and every sail drawing except the jibs, with a fresh breeze astern. Oh, the wonder of the great trade-wind! All day we sailed, and all night, and the next day, and the next, day after day, the wind always astern and blowing steadily and strong. The schooner sailed herself. There was no pulling and hauling on sheets and tackles, no shifting of topsails, no work at all for the sailors to do except to steer.

Lucille would tell this story differently. She would say I fell asleep, but I did not. I simply let the darkness in the sky become coextensive with the darkness in my skull and bowels and bones. Everything that falls upon the eye is apparition, a sheet dropped over the world’s true workings. The nerves and the brain are tricked, and one is left with dreams that these specters loose their hands from ours and walk away, the curve of the back and the swing of the coat so familiar as to imply that they should be permanent fixtures of the world, when in fact nothing is more perishable. Say that my mother was as tall as a man, and that she sometimes set me on her shoulders, so that I could splash my hands in the cold leaves above our heads. Say that my grandmother sang in her throat while she sat on her bed and we laced up her big black shoes. Such details are merely accidental. Who could know but us? And since their thoughts were bent upon other ghosts than ours, other darknesses than we had seen, why must we be left, the survivors picking among flotsam, among the small, unnoticed, unvalued clutter that was all that remained when they vanished, that only catastrophe made notable? Darkness is the only solvent.

Hyla Brook" By June our brook's run out of song and speed. Sought for much after that, it will be found Either to have gone groping underground (And taken with it all the Hyla breed That shouted in the mist a month ago, Like ghost of sleigh bells in a ghost of snow)— Or flourished and come up in jewelweed, Weak foliage that is blown upon and bent, Even against the way its waters went. Its bed is left a faded paper sheet Of dead leaves stuck together by the heat— A brook to none but who remember long. This as it will be seen is other far Than with brooks taken otherwhere in song. We love the things we love for what they are.

It had all begun on the elevated. There was a particular little sea of roots he had grown into the habit of glancing at just as the packed car carrying him homeward lurched around a turn. A dingy, melancholy little world of tar paper, tarred gravel, and smoky brick. Rusty tin chimneys with odd conical hats suggested abandoned listening posts. There was a washed-out advertisement of some ancient patent medicine on the nearest wall. Superficially it was like ten thousand other drab city roofs. But he always saw it around dusk, either in the normal, smoky half-light, or tinged with red by the flat rays of a dirty sunset, or covered by ghostly windblown white sheets of rain-splash, or patched with blackish snow; and it seemed unusually bleak and suggestive, almost beautifully ugly, though in no sense picturesque; dreary but meaningful. Unconsciously it came to symbolize for Catesby Wran certain disagreeable aspects of the frustrated, frightened century in which he lived, the jangled century of hate and heavy industry and Fascist wars. The quick, daily glance into the half darkness became an integral part of his life. Oddly, he never saw it in the morning, for it was then his habit to sit on the other side of the car, his head buried in the paper. One evening toward winter he noticed what seemed to be a shapeless black sack lying on the third roof from the tracks. He did not think about it. It merely registered as an addition to the well-known scene and his memory stored away the impression for further reference. Next evening, however, he decided he had been mistaken in one detail. The object was a roof nearer than he had thought. Its color and texture, and the grimy stains around it, suggested that it was filled with coal dust, which was hardly reasonable. Then, too, the following evening it seemed to have been blown against a rusty ventilator by the wind, which could hardly have happened if it were at all heavy. ("Smoke Ghost")

The whispers of wind became puffs, the sails filled, the Ghost moved. Wolf Larsen put the wheel hard up, to port, and we began to pay off. The wind was now dead astern, muttering and puffing stronger and stronger, and my head-sails were pounding lustily. I did not see what went on elsewhere, though I felt the sudden surge and heel of the schooner as the wind-pressures changed to the jibing of the fore-and mainsails. My hands were full with the flying-jib, jib, and staysail; and by the time this part of my task was accomplished the Ghost was leaping into the south-west, the wind on her quarter and all her sheets to starboard. Without pausing for breath, though my heart was beating like a trip-hammer from my exertions, I sprang to the topsails, and before the wind had become too strong we had them fairly set and were coiling down. Then I went aft for orders. Wolf

A descent into an unlit place from which there is no escape, an underwater labyrinth of impossible mazes. No ghosts floating around down there with writing utensils hidden under their white eyehole sheets. I prefer to either drown like a cockroach in the toilet, or swim the English Channel like a hero. I may well be an eleven-fingered oaf slobbering over a typewriter, pounding out a thorny jumble of trash, an uneducated animal who runs on instinct and feeling. But this is my voice. The facts and figures aren’t important to me, the colors and shapes that make up my world are; they are who I am, right or wrong. The limits of my memory are their own reward. Like Rashomon, the same thing looks different to everyone from their angle. The greatest fault of humankind belongs to those who think their view of what’s real is the only truth. I can only write and hope. Hope to arise from the muddy depths of this process, clear and cleansed, laser beams shooting from my eyeballs, holding the sunken treasure aloft, resplendent in silver and gold, an ebullient grin plastered on my face, and sea monsters docile at my feet.

Scent is the strongest link to our memories. What I do just makes a deeper connection. Brain chemistry or black magic—it’s unclear. People pay a lot of money for it, though. To the best of my knowledge, I’m the only person who knows how to do what I do. Jonathan certainly didn’t teach me, except through his unwilling participation in my first experiments. Perhaps it was something he had dreamed of, in concept. In execution—as it were—the product was all mine. Except, of course, for the components that went into it. Then again, he was a secretive bastard, and I don’t exactly shout about my talents from the rooftops. There could be other perfumers offering the same services, but I have as little idea of them as I hope they do of me. The memory began to swim, growing indistinct as the brighter elements of brine evaporated. The leather and coffee would linger through the last of my Scotch. If I didn’t shower, I would go to bed with Jonathan’s ghost beside me and wake in sheets that smelled like he had stayed the night and slipped away before I woke. I finished my whisky and went to the windowless bathroom, turning the water on so hot the whole apartment filled with steam. When I came out my skin was pink and I only smelled like soap. Castille, unscented.

And for just a moment I had reached the point of ecstasy that I always wanted to reach, which was the complete step across chronological time into timeless shadows, and wonderment in the bleakness of the mortal realm, and the sensation of death kicking at my heels to move on, with a phantom dogging its own heels, and myself hurrying to a plank where all the angels dove off and flew into the holy void of uncreated emptiness, the potent and inconceivable radiancies shining in bright Mind Essence, innumerable lotus-lands falling open in the magic mothswarm of heaven. I could hear an indescribable seething roar which wasn't in my ear but everywhere and had nothing to do with sounds. I realized that I had died and been reborn numberless times but just didn't remember especially because the transitions from life to death and back to life are so ghostly easy, a magical action for naught, like falling asleep and waking up again a million times, the utter casualness and deep ignorance of it. I realized it was only because of the stability of the intrinsic Mind that these ripples of birth and death took place, like the action of wind on a sheet of pure, serene, mirror-like water. I felt sweet, swinging bliss, like a big shot of heroin in the mainline vein; like a gulp of wine late in the afternoon and it makes you shudder; my feet tingled.

And for just a moment I had reached the point of ecstasy that I always wanted to reach, which was the complete step across chronological time into timeless shadows, and wonderment in the bleakness of the mortal realm, and the sensation of death kicking at my heels to move on, with a phantom dogging its own heels, and myself hurrying to a plank where all the angels dove off and flew into the holy void of uncreated emptiness, the potent and inconceivable radiancies shining in bright Mind Essence, innumerable lotus-lands falling open in the magic mothswarm of heaven. I could hear an indescribable seething roar which wasn’t in my ear but everywhere and had nothing to do with sounds. I realized that I had died and been reborn numberless times but just didn’t remember especially because the transitions from life to death and back to life are so ghostly easy, a magical action for naught, like falling asleep and waking up again a million times, the utter casualness and deep ignorance of it. I realized it was only because of the stability of the intrinsic Mind that these ripples of birth and death took place, like the action of wind on a sheet of pure, serene, mirror-like water. I felt sweet, swinging bliss, like a big shot of heroin in the mainline vein; like a gulp of wine late in the afternoon and it makes you shudder; my feet tingled. I thought I was going to die the very next moment.

The use of ghosts as a means of social control predated the Klan. Slave owners employed so-called patterollers, usually poor whites, who would patrol the countryside at night; such patrols would regularlyuse spook stories, among other tactics, to help keep enslaved people from escaping. "The fraudulent ghost," [Gladys-Marie] Fry writes, "was the first in a gradually developed system of night-riding creatures, the fear of which was fostered by white for the purpose of slave control." A man in a white sheet on horseback riding ominously through a forest could help substantiate rumers that the forest was haunted and that those who valued their lives best avoid it. By spreading ghost stories, Southern whites hoped to limit the unauthorized movement of black people. If cemeteries, crossroads, and forests came to be known particularly as haunted, it's because they presented the easiest means of escape and had to be patrolled. Now it's common to think of such places as the provenance of spirits. We have stories for such places: a tragic death, forlorn lovers, a devil waiting to make a deal -- stories that reflect a rich tradition of American folklore. But all this might have come much later, and these places might have first earned their haunted reputation through much more deviant methods. In the ghost-haunting legacies of many of these public spaces lies a hidden history of patrolling and limiting access.

How many of these do you suppose will be alive at this time to-morrow?" asked Sir Henry. I shook my head and looked again at the sleeping men, and to my tired and yet excited imagination it seemed as though Death had already touched them. My mind's eye singled out those who were sealed to slaughter, and there rushed in upon my heart a great sense of the mystery of human life, and an overwhelming sorrow at its futility and sadness. To-night these thousands slept their healthy sleep, to-morrow they, and many others with them, ourselves perhaps among them, would be stiffening in the cold; their wives would be widows, their children fatherless, and their place know them no more for ever. Only the old moon would shine on serenely, the night wind would stir the grasses, and the wide earth would take its rest, even as it did æons before we were, and will do æons after we have been forgotten. Yet man dies not whilst the world, at once his mother and his monument, remains. His name is lost, indeed, but the breath he breathed still stirs the pine-tops on the mountains, the sound of the words he spoke yet echoes on through space; the thoughts his brain gave birth to we have inherited to-day; his passions are our cause of life; the joys and sorrows that he knew are our familiar friends—the end from which he fled aghast will surely overtake us also! Truly the universe is full of ghosts, not sheeted churchyard spectres, but the inextinguishable elements of individual life, which having once been, can never die, though they blend and change, and change again for ever.

Hold Everything Dear for John Berger as the brick of the afternoon stores the rose heat of the journey as the rose buds a green room to breathe and blossoms like the wind as the thinning birches whisper their silver stories of the wind to the urgent in the trucks as the leaves of the hedge store the light that the moment thought it had lost as the nest of her wrist beats like the chest of a wren in the turning air as the chorus of the earth find their eyes in the sky and unwrap them to each other in the teeming dark hold everything dear the calligraphy of birds across the morning the million hands of the axe, the soft hand of the earth one step ahead of time the broken teeth of tribes and their long place steppe-scattered and together clay's small, surviving handle, the near ghost of a jug carrying itself towards us through the soil the pledge of offered arms, the single sheet that is our common walking the map of the palm held in a knot but given as a torch hold everything dear the paths they make towards us and how far we open towards them the justice of a grass that unravels palaces but shelters the songs of the searching the vessel that names the waves, the jug of this life, as it fills with the days as it sinks to become what it loves memory that grows into a shape the tree always knew as a seed the words the bread the child who reaches for the truths beyond the door the yearning to begin again together animals keen inside the parliament of the world the people in the room the people in the street the people hold everything dear 19th May 2005 Gareth Evans

And for just a moment I had reached the point of ecstasy that I always wanted to reach, which was the complete step across chronological time into timeless shadows, and wonderment in the bleakness of the mortal realm, and the sensation of death kicking at my heels to move on, with a phantom dogging its own heels, and myself hurrying to a plank where all the angels dove off and flew into the holy void of uncreated emptiness, the potent and inconceivable radiancies shining in bright Mind Essence, innumerable lotus-lands falling open in the magic mothswarm of heaven. I could hear an indescribable seething roar which wasn’t in my ear but everywhere and had nothing to do with sounds. I realized that I had died and been reborn numberless times but just didn’t remember especially because the transitions from life to death and back to life are so ghostly easy, a magical action for naught, like falling asleep and waking up again a million times, the utter casualness and deep ignorance of it. I realized it was only because of the stability of the intrinsic Mind that these ripples of birth and death took place, like the action of wind on a sheet of pure, serene, mirror-like water. I felt sweet, swinging bliss, like a big shot of heroin in the mainline vein; like a gulp of wine late in the afternoon and it makes you shudder; my feet tingled. I thought I was going to die the very next moment. But I didn’t die, and walked four miles and picked up ten long butts and took them back to Marylou’s hotel room and poured their tobacco in my old pipe and lit up. I was too young to know what had happened.

Yet another unexpected development emerged from this bizarre duality, called the holographic principle. Holograms are two-dimensional flat sheets of plastic, containing the image of three-dimensional objects that have been specially encoded within them. By shining a laser beam at the flat screen, the three-dimensional image suddenly emerges. In other words, all the information needed to create a three-dimensional image has been encoded onto a flat two-dimensional screen using lasers, like the image of Princess Leia projected by R2-D2 or the haunted mansion at Disneyland where three-dimensional ghosts sail around us. This principle also works for black holes. As we saw earlier, if we throw an encyclopedia into a black hole, the information contained inside the books cannot disappear, according to quantum mechanics. So where does the information go? One theory posits that it is distributed onto the surface of the event horizon of the black hole. So the two-dimensional surface of a black hole contains all the information of all the three-dimensional objects that have been thrown into it. This also has implications for our conception of reality. We are convinced, of course, that we are three-dimensional objects that can move in space, defined by three numbers, length, width, and height. But perhaps this is an illusion. Perhaps we are living in a hologram. Perhaps the three-dimensional world we experience is just a shadow of the real world, which is actually ten- or eleven-dimensional. When we move in the three dimensions of space, we experience our real selves actually moving in ten or eleven dimensions. When we walk down the street, our shadow follows us and moves like us, except the shadow exists in two dimensions. Likewise, perhaps we are shadows moving in three dimensions, but our real selves are moving in ten or eleven dimensions.

Footsteps came to her, nearly invisible in the worn carpet. There were no words, just the creaking of old joints as they approached the bed, the lifting of expensive and fragrant sheets, and an understanding between two living ghosts. Jahns's breath caught in her chest. Her hand groped for a wrist as it clutched her sheets. She slid over on the small convertible bed to make room, and pulled him down beside her. Marnes wrapped his arms around her back, wiggled beneath her until she was lying on his side, a leg draped over his, her hands on his neck. She felt his moustach brush against her cheek, heard his lips purse and peck the corner of hers. Jahns held his cheeks and burrowed her face into his shoulder. She cried, like a schoolchild, like a new shadow who felt lost and afraid in the wilderness of a strange and terrifying job. She cried with fear, but that soon drained away. It drained like the soreness in her back as his hands rubbed her there. It drained until numbness found its place, and then, after what felt like a forever of shuddering sobs, sensation took over. Jahns felt alive in her skin. She felt the tingle of flesh touching flesh, of just her forearm against his hard ribs, her hands on his shoulder, his hands on her hips. And then the tears were some joyous release, some mourning of the lost time, some welcomed sadness of a moment long delayed and finally there, arms wrapped around it and holding tight. She fell asleep like that, exhausted from far more than the climb, nothing more than a few trembling kisses, hands interlocking, a whispered word of tenderness and appreciation, and then the depths of sleep pulling her down, the weariness in her joints and bones succumbing to a slumber she didn't want but sorely needed. She slept with a man in her arms for the first time in decades, and woke to a bed familiarly empty, but a heart strangely full.

Chapter 1 Death on the Doorstep LIVY HINGE’S AUNT lay dying in the back yard, which Aunt Neala thought was darned inconvenient. “Nebula!” she called, hoping her weakened voice would reach the barn where that lazy cat was no doubt taking a nap. If Neala had the energy to get up and tap her foot she would. If only that wretched elf hadn’t attacked her, she’d have made her delivery by now. Instead she lay dying. She willed her heart to take its time spreading the poison. Her heart, being just as stubborn as its owner, ignored her and raced on. A cat with a swirling orange pattern on its back ran straight to Neala and nuzzled her face. “Nebula!” She was relieved the cat had overcome its tendency to do the exact opposite of whatever was most wanted of it. Reaching into her bag, Neala pulled out a delicate leaf made of silver. She fought to keep one eye cracked open to make sure the cat knew what to do. The cat took the leaf in its teeth and ran back toward the barn. It was important that Neala stay alive long enough for the cat to hide the leaf. The moment Neala gave up the ghost, the cat would vanish from this world and return to her master. Satisfied, Neala turned her aching head toward the farmhouse where her brother’s family was nestled securely inside. Smoke curled carelessly from the old chimney in blissful ignorance of the peril that lay just beyond the yard. The shimmershield Neala had created around the property was the only thing keeping her dear ones safe. A sheet hung limply from a branch of the tree that stood sentinel in the back of the house. It was Halloween and the sheet was meant to be a ghost, but without the wind it only managed to look like old laundry. Neala’s eyes followed the sturdy branch to Livy’s bedroom window. She knew what her failure to deliver the leaf meant. The elves would try again. This time, they would choose someone young enough to be at the peak of their day dreaming powers. A druid of the Hinge bloodline, about Livy’s age. Poor Livy, who had no idea what she was. Well, that would change soon enough. Neala could do nothing about that now. Her willful eyes finally closed. In the wake of her last breath a storm rose up, bringing with it frightful wind and lightning. The sheet tore free from the branch and flew away. The kitchen door banged open. Livy Hinge, who had been told to secure the barn against the storm, found her lifeless aunt at the edge of the yard. ☐☐☐ A year later, Livy still couldn’t think about Aunt Neala without feeling the memories bite at her, as though they only wanted to be left alone. Thankfully, Livy wasn’t concerned about her aunt at the moment. Right now, Rudus Brutemel was going to get what was coming to him. Hugh, Livy’s twin, sat next to her on the bus. His nose was buried in a spelling book. The bus lurched dangerously close to their stop. If they waited any longer, they’d miss their chance. She looked over her shoulder to make sure Rudus was watching. Opening her backpack, she made a show of removing a bologna sandwich with thick slices of soft homemade bread. Hugh studied the book like it was the last thing he might ever see. Livy nudged him. He tore his eyes from his book and delivered his lines as though he were reading them. “Hey, can I have some? I’m starving.” At least he could make his stomach growl on demand.

forgotten. Yet man dies not whilst the world, at once his mother and his monument, remains, His name is lost, indeed, but the breath he breathed still stirs the pine tops on the mountains, the sound of the words he spoke yet echoes on through space; the thoughts his brain gave birth to we have inherited today; his passions are our cause of life; the joys and sorrows that he knew are our familiar friends – the end from which he fled aghast will surely overtake us also! Truly the universe is full of ghosts, not sheeted churchyard spectres, but the inextinguishable elements of individual life, which having once been, can never die, though they blend and change, and change again forever.

Say something,” she forced out, already bracing for an unfavorable reaction. Annoyance. Or amusement. Or worst of all, pity. Ewan still looked odd, as if he hadn’t quite understood what she’d said. “You love me?” She supposed she could pretend it was a joke. By now, he must be used to her sarcastic ways. He might almost believe her. And if he did, it would salve her pride, if not the gaping wound inside her. But she’d ventured this far. She wasn’t coward enough to retreat. With shaking hands, she dragged the sheet up to cover her nakedness, hoping the fragile linen might armor her against the hurt she’d invited. She pressed back against the bedhead. “Yes.” The blue eyes continued to measure her with almost detached curiosity. “I’m….I’m astonished.” Better than pity, she supposed. At least it should be. “You don’t have to love me back. After all, it’s absurd to fall in love in the space of a few days.” To her chagrin, a ghost of a smile played around his lips. “Absurd.” Anger came to her aid. Thank goodness. She’d much rather feel angry than vulnerable. “This doesn’t have to make you feel uncomfortable. I won’t cling, or pine, or make scenes.” “I’m not uncomfortable,” he said steadily. His expression remained enigmatic. “Well, good,” she said, at a loss. Her fingers tightened on the sheet. What on earth happened now? Had she expected him to tell her he loved her too? The shaming truth was that somewhere deep inside her, she’d hoped that if she was henwitted enough to crash headlong in love with him, he might love her back. If only a little. “Charlotte, I didn’t fall in love with you in a couple of days.” He spoke deliberately, making every word count. She flinched at his honesty. Although she supposed the truth was kinder in the long run. Even if right now, she felt like he stuck a knife into her. “You don’t have to—” He raised his hand to silence her. “I fell in love with you at first sight. Before I met you.” Bewildered,

Don’t tell Mom, but I think my little emergency last night was a sign. And I was thinking of you when it happened. So, I’m worried that this is a prediction about you. Do you have something big planned? Something dangerous that you’re going to do?” Mike looked away. He didn’t want to lie to her but he also couldn’t tell her his plan. “Well, whatever it is, don’t do it, okay? You’re going to get the feeling soon too. I know it,” she yawned, “It feels like it’s a long way off, but I’ve never had this strong a reaction before. And now that I’m stuck in bed, I can’t help you…or stop you. So please, whatever you’re doing, let it go, okay? Especially if it’s about the shop. Just let me handle it.” “I’ll be careful,” he said. “Huh?” she yawned again. He didn’t answer. Her eyelids grew heavy until they closed all the way. Mike lifted the sheet that was turned down from the bed and draped it over her. Then, he left the room, closing the door behind him. - Saving Hascal's Horrors

By the time we returned, he’d always be three sheets to the wind, shouting into the sky and having conversations with the ghosts that surrounded him. We

He was already everywhere. In my bed, in my sheets, sprawled on my couch— he was a ghost before he even left, a memory in the present,

Everyone set to work with a will and plodded back and forth between the Sea Gull and the cabin. Joe noticed that Chet was less talkative than usual. “Thinking about your meal?” he asked. Chet shivered. “Not now. I’m thinking about Hanleigh’s warning. What did he mean about ‘this spooky place’?” “Probably meant it’s haunted,” Biff said somberly. “You wouldn’t mind a couple of ghosts for company, would you, Chet?” “Cut it out!” Chet quavered, glancing around into the deepening shadows. “If there’s a ghost here, I wish he’d show himself,” Frank put in, chuckling. “We could use an extra hand. But this should be the last load.” He unreeved the main sheet completely, so the sail would be free to swing in the wind. The four were halfway to the cabin, their arms filled with provisions, when suddenly Chet stopped short and gave a startled cry. The provisions he had been carrying fell to the ground. “What’s wrong?” Joe asked. For a moment Chet could only point. Then he declared in a strange, hollow voice, “There! In the woods! A ghost!

And for just a moment I had reached the point of ecstasy that I always wanted to reach, which was the complete step across chronological time into timeless shadows, and wonderment in the bleakness of the mortal realm, and the sensation of death kicking at my heels to move on, with a phantom dogging its own heels, and myself hurrying to a plank where all the angels dove off and flew into the holy void of uncreated emptiness, the potent and inconceivable radiancies shining in bright Mind Essence, innumerable lotus-lands falling open in the magic mothswarm of heaven. I could hear an indescribable seething roar which wasn’t in my ear but everywhere and had nothing to do with sounds. I realized that I had died and been reborn numberless times but just didn’t remember especially because the transitions from life to death and back to life are so ghostly easy, a magical action for naught, like falling asleep and waking up again a million times, the utter casualness and deep ignorance of it. I realized it was only because of the stability of the intrinsic Mind that these ripples of birth and death took place, like the action of wind on a sheet of pure, serene, mirror-like water. I felt sweet, swinging bliss, like a big shot of heroin in the mainline vein; like a gulp of wine late in the afternoon and it makes you shudder; my feet tingled. I thought I was going to die the very next moment. But I didn’t die, and walked four miles and picked up ten long butts and took them back to Marylou’s hotel room and poured their tobacco in my old pipe and lit up. I was too young to know what had happened.

Faith screamed louder than she’d ever screamed before. The sky devoured every bit of sound before it reached the ground. She could have pitied herself for at least another hour had she been given the chance, but screaming had turned her mind into a sheet of white noise. She started falling; and not having a lot of experience with the weight of her own body falling through open space, she panicked. Arms and legs were dangling in every direction, turning her sideways and upside down, tumbling through space. The top of the building she would soon hit was dark enough that she couldn’t say for sure how close she was to impact. And for one last, dreadful moment, she thought about letting it happen. It would be less painful. One moment, a split second, and it would be over. No more regrets about how she’d failed, no more guilt about broken relationships she’d willingly chosen not to fix. No more anger about how unfair it all was. Three thoughts kept her from dying that night. Faith. The meaning of her name haunted her like a ghost from another world, flying in the air all around her. There was something, not nothing, on the other side of death. An eternity in which everyone felt sorry about her tragic ending was not the kind of afterlife she looked forward to. Hope. As she plunged toward her death, she saw Dylan’s face the way he sometimes looked at her, and she couldn’t imagine leaving him behind. Something below the surface of her mind told her Dylan could heal all the terrible scars she carried. And she saw Hawk’s face, too. He could never replace Liz, but he had the intangible quality of being comfortable. She could sit in a room for ten hours and simply be with Hawk. He was easy that way, and she needed that. It could sustain her through the minefield of feelings she navigated on a daily basis. And in the end, there was the fire that threatened to overwhelm her. Revenge. For better or worse, the fuel that would keep her from death was vengeance. She would destroy the Quinns or die trying. It was the thing that cleared her mind and slowed her descent. Revenge got her to stop flailing around, center her mind, and come to an abrupt halt three inches short of plowing her face into the roof of a clothing store.

Once in a while a kind nurse will call me that there is a bed available in the ward from the unfortunate death of a patient. They have cleared the bed and put a clean bed sheet on it. That was good enough for me. At last a bed to sleep in! Who cares if some dead patient has just occupied it? A bed was a bed. I have no qualms about sleeping in the bed, with a ghost of a patient who has just departed.

Sibil is white. Not Caucasian but white: as sheet ice as new paper as porcelain, from her braids to her bare feet. Not a blemish, not a variation, every feature of her—hair, skin, pupilless eyes—smooth like the inside of a shell, dazzling like a torch, as though carved from a single radiant white stone. Likewise her ornaments—her beads and star pendant, diadem, hoop earrings, the pedestal she rests on—are made of the same ghostly matter. She clasps in her casual hand blank pages, a skinny book with its cover torn off.

[Indians] don't think about ghosts as those stereotypical spook in white sheets that scare the knickers off everybody. We believe that we coexist with many, many spirits. They're all around us - because the soul never dies. The body withers away, but the essence of the person remains, watching over us.

You know that part in the story where the character thinks, I bet I didn’t really see a ghost after all. I bet it was just a sheet. Wearing chains. Floating through our pantry. Shrieking. I bet it was just my imagination. You know how you always kind of hate characters who think that? You hate them, and you know you’d never be so stupid not to know a ghost when you saw one, especially when the title of your story is The Shrieking Specter, for God’s sake, pardon my language. This is that part of the story. You

Is the ash in trees, babies, flowers, and visions of God better than the visions themselves? Then you think, none of this is tangible or concrete. So you have another cigarette and think about the (not one) but many ghosts you keep tucked away, under sheets, under beds, in notes, within other ghosts.

I’m going to faint, Norman thought, just as his legs gave way, and he sat down hard on the stage. The world came back in a snap, led by the nauseating sound of Alvin’s Hyena Laugh. “Normie fell down and go boom, baby! Look at him! He’s white as a sheet! Whassamatter, Norm, you look like you saw a ghost! Get it? Get it? A ghost!” The laughter of Alvin and his Meaty Henchmen was momentarily drowned out by the sound of the bell. Leaving his script where it had fallen, Norman jumped to his feet and sped out of the gym. For just a moment, he was the only person in the hallway—everything looked oddly deserted and devoid of human life. Like how a school might look in a ghost town.

boy went to a Halloween party with a sheet on his head. "Are you a ghost?" asked his friends.

The Holy Ghost? What was a Holy Ghost? A ghost with upper connections? A sacred linen sheet with holes for eyes that roamed around old castles trying to scare tourists? How would you have known if you had bumped into it?

a long line of men, each with a torch, all dressed in the finery of the Highland chieftains. They were barbarous and splendid, decked in grouse feathers, the silver of swords and dirks gleaming red by the torchlight, picked out amid the folds of tartan cloth. The pipes stopped abruptly, and the first of the men strode into the clearing and stopped before the stands. He raised his torch above his head and shouted, “The Camerons are here!” Loud whoops of delight rang out from the stands, and he threw the torch into the kerosene-soaked wood, which went up with a roar, in a pillar of fire ten feet high. Against the blinding sheet of flame, another man stepped out, and called, “The MacDonalds are here!” Screams and yelps from those in the crowd that claimed kinship with clan MacDonald, and then— “The MacLachlans are here!” “The MacGillivrays are here!” She was so entranced by the spectacle that she was only dimly aware of Roger. Then another man stepped out and cried, “The MacKenzies are here!” “Tulach Ard!” bellowed Roger, making her jump. “What was that?” she asked. “That,” he said, grinning, “is the war cry of clan MacKenzie.” “Sounded like it.” “The Campbells are here!” There must have been a lot of Campbells; the response shook the bleachers. As though that was the signal he had been waiting for, Roger stood up and flung his plaid over his shoulder. “I’ll meet you afterward by the dressing rooms, all right?” She nodded, and he bent suddenly and kissed her. “Just in case,” he said. “The Frasers’ cry is Caisteal Dhuni!” She watched him go, climbing down the bleachers like a mountain goat. The smell of woodsmoke filled the night air, mixing with the smaller fragrance of tobacco from cigarettes in the crowd. “The MacKays are here!” “The MacLeods are here!” “The Farquarsons are here!” Her chest felt tight, from the smoke and from emotion. The clans had died at Culloden—or had they? Yes, they had; this was no more than memory, than the calling up of ghosts; none of the people shouting so enthusiastically owed kinship to each other, none of them lived any longer by the claims of laird and land, but … “The Frasers are here!” Sheer panic gripped her, and her hand closed tight on the clasp of her bag. No, she thought. Oh, no. I’m not. Then the moment passed, and she could breathe again, but jolts of adrenaline still thrilled through her blood. “The Grahams are here!” “The Inneses are here!” The Ogilvys, the Lindsays, the Gordons … and then finally, the echoes of the last shout died. Brianna held the bag on her lap, gripped tight, as though to keep its contents from escaping like the jinn from a lamp. How could she? she thought, and then, seeing Roger come into the light, fire on his head and his bodhran in his hand, thought again, How could she help it?

As if the weather knew the calendar the last day of August broke with a hard killing frost. Where the sun fell the world spangled, autumn arriving in glacial brilliance, almost suggesting snow over the grass and low shrubbery. Where the sun has not yet struck it was ghostly, a pewter finish over the sagging grass and wilted goldenrod stems. The pods of milkweed were brittle and broke open to release their slight spherical webs of seed onto any straggle of breeze. Smoke streamed white straight up from chimney tops and mist obscured the lake, hanging in sheets of cold vapor that disintegrated slowly from the top down as the sun came over the hills. A third-quarter moon hung against the endless fathoms of a colbalt heaven, the moon a quartzite river stone.

Word Silence" There's a flame like the flame of fucking that longs to be put out: words are filings drawn toward a vast magnetic silence. The loins ask their usual question concerning loneliness. The answer is always a mountaintop erasing itself in a cloud. It's as if the mind keeps flipping a coin with a lullaby on one side and a frightening thrill on the other, and if it lands it's back in the air at once. A word can rub itself rosy against its cage of context, starting a small fire in the sentence and trapping for a moment the twin scents of now and goodbye. The sexual mimicry always surprises me: the long dive the talky mind makes into the pleasures of its native dark. Like pain, such joy is locked in forgetfulness, and the prisoner must shout for freedom again and again. Is that what breaks the sentences apart and spreads their embers in a cooling silence? The pen lies in the bleach of sunlight fallen on the desk, ghost-sheet of a bed turned back. If I look for a long time into its wordlessness, I can see the vestiges of something that I knew dissolving. Something that I no longer know. And there I sleep like an innocent

Shattered Silence" (aka "When Michael Calls") for that early 1970s Halloween school carnival feel. It stars a young Michael Douglas and has decidedly autumnal feel. The nostalgic/vintage Halloween also includes the classic elements of the season from ghosts made of sheets and witches flying on broomsticks to pumpkin patches, corn mazes, apple cider, apple bobbing, fall leaves, Sleepy Hollow, and the like. You might start getting inspired with some candy of your childhood with candy crate collections – 1950s, 1960s

Kaye half-wakes. Half-wishes she were half-dead. Imagines she is half-dead. Imagines herself wrapped in an antique lace shroud. No, it’s not lace. Nor is it a shroud. It’s spiderwebs. Spiders skitter through her esophagus. Their footfalls are light, but sticky. The lace is really a spider web. No, the spider web is actually a threadbare sheet. Actually, the threadbare sheet is the skin of a ghost. Yes, a ghost is nothing more than an animated sheet. They’re raised on sheet farms, slaughtered, and taxidermied. The sheets you buy at the store are ghost corpses.

My broken and fragmented ghost would forever haunt her sheets.

Makes about seventy-two 3-inch cookies 16 tablespoons (1 cup) vegetable shortening 2 large eggs, beaten 2 cups sorghum molasses (see Tip) 1 tablespoon ground ginger 1 tablespoon ground allspice 1 tablespoon baking soda ½ teaspoon table salt 6 tablespoons hot water (110°F) 5 to 6 cups all-purpose flour, sifted, plus more for the work surface Beat the shortening in the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with a paddle attachment, or in a bowl with a hand mixer, on medium speed until smooth and creamy. Stop to scrape down the bowl. Add the eggs, sorghum, ginger, allspice, baking soda, and salt, beating on medium speed until well incorporated. Add the hot water and start by adding 4½ cups of flour or more as needed, beating on low speed to form a soft, evenly caramel-colored dough that just pulls away from the sides of the bowl. Cover and refrigerate for at least 1 hour and up to overnight. When you’re ready to bake, move the middle oven rack up one level and preheat the oven to 350°F. Line several baking sheets with parchment paper or silicone mats. Lightly flour a 2-inch cookie cutter or the rim of a small glass, your rolling pin, and a work surface. Turn out half the dough and roll it to an even thickness of ¼ inch. Cut out the cookies, transferring them to the prepared baking sheets, where they should be spaced 1 inch apart. The cookies will spread as they bake. Re-flour the cookie cutter and rolling pin and reroll the dough. Gather up the scraps and reuse them as needed. Bake one sheet at a time on the repositioned rack for 7 to 9 minutes, turning the pan front to back halfway through. The cookies will be lightly golden and soft. Let them sit on the sheet for a few minutes, then transfer the cookies to a wire rack to cool while you repeat rolling, cutting, and baking the remaining dough. tip: Sorghum molasses (syrup) is different from blackstrap or unsulphured molasses. It’s made from the cooked cane of sorghum grasses, and it is sweeter, lighter in color, and thicker than molasses.

I’m in the middle of my fantasy when I hear Him, loud and clear in my mind. “Jennette, I, the spirit of the Holy Ghost, command you to cross your name out on the sign-in sheet, go to the restroom, touch your underwear band five times in a row, twirl on one foot, unlock and relock the bathroom door five times, come back, and re-sign in on the sign-in sheet.” I’m elated. He has spoken. The Holy Ghost, aka my Still Small Voice, has finally spoken to me. I’ve been waiting for Him to speak to me since my eighth birthday when I had my baptism.

Perhaps because I’m not a man at all.” He sat closer now. The sheets wrinkled as he scooted himself toward her. “Aye. You gender-malcontent. You otherling,” she said, the fog of anesthesia wearing off. She could see him clearly now. The curl of his lashes. The white flecks of skin over his dry lips. “Me too. I am a boy and a girl and a witch all wrapped into one very strange, flimsy, indecisive body. Do you think my body couldn’t decide what it wanted to be?” “I think it doesn’t matter because we get to decide what our bodies are or are not,” he answered.

Hidden in the pockets of the things that frighten him most is the realization that he doesn’t like his mother. Once, he did, but she was different back then, full of love and light. Now she’s a ghost playing at being alive, a faded sheet hung upon a coatrack, only there to ensure he doesn’t become a ghost too.

When he pressed his palm over my mouth, I could see the woman who fucked him to feel freedom in disappearance. When he held a handful of my flesh in his hands, I could tell he’d loved a body more yielding than mine. His lips running along the arches of my feet let me know he had worshipped a woman in her entirety – that he had loved the bones of her toes as much as the brackets of her hips; that he had known her blood on his skin as well as he’d known her perfume on his sheets. He held me like a hot-water bottle when he slept and I knew that night after night after night he had shared a bed with another body and together they’d constructed an oasis from just a mattress.

There’s hardly a minute of my life in which I’m not obsessively fretting about something. I suppose I get a break when I sleep, but even then, I have horrible anxiety dreams; ones in which someone attacks me and I go to scream, but no sound comes out. I’m rendered mute by fear. Or dreams in which my childhood home is suddenly moved to a swampland, and I have to wade through water where crocodiles and other awful beasts wait to devour me. I toss and turn in my twisted sheets, restless, ruminating. I’m often worried by how overpowering loneliness can be. We are ourselves before we are actually ourselves. Clay waiting to be shaped by experience, perhaps, but there’s something pre-formed about our personalities before they are even molded. I write this book while sitting in my front room just before dusk. Faint light through the window renders me a ghost of myself. i gaped at the wall where someone(my -ex) has scrawled “LOVE" on the wall in shaky cursive in the middle of an illustration of a heart broken in two. There are other indiscernable writings near it. One said. Run Away. Crystal Evans

overloaded horses bent backwards by the chisel of the mason who once sculpted an eternal now on the brow of the wingless archangel, time-deformed cherubim and the false protests, overweight bowels fallen from the barracks of the pink house carved with grey rain unfallen, never creaking, never opening door, with the mouth wide, darkened and extinguished like a burning boat floating in a voiceless sea, bottle of rum down threadbare socks, singing from pavement to pavement, bright iridescent flame, "Oh, my Annie, my heart is sore!", slept chin on the curb of the last star, the lintel illuminated the forgotten light cast to a different plane, ah the wick of a celestial candle. The piling up of pigeons, tram lines, the pickpocket boys, the melancholy silver, an ode to Plotinus, the rattle of cattle, the goat in the woods, and the retreat night in the railroad houses, the ghosts of terraces, the wine shakes, the broken pencils, the drunk and wet rags, the eucalyptus and the sky. Impossible eyes, wide avenues, shirt sleeves, time receded, 'now close your eyes, this will not hurt a bit', the rose within the rose, dreaming pale under sheets such brilliance, highlighting unreality of a night that never comes. Toothless Cantineros stomp sad lullabies with sad old boots, turning from star to star, following the trail of the line, from dust, to dust, back to dust, out late, wrapped in a white blanket, top of the world, laughs upturned, belly rumbling by the butchers door, kissing the idol, tracing the balconies, long strings of flowers in the shape of a heart, love rolls and folds, from the Window to Window, afflicting seriousness from one too big and ever-charged soul, consolidating everything to nothing, of a song unsung, the sun soundlessly rising, reducing the majesty of heroic hearts and observing the sad night with watery eyes, everything present, abounding, horses frolic on the high hazy hills, a ships sails into the mist, a baby weeps for mother, windows open, lights behind curtains, the supple avenue swoons in the blissful banality, bells ringing for all yet to come forgotten, of bursting beauty bathing in every bright eternal now, counteract the charge, a last turn, what will it be, flowers by the gate, shoe less in the park, burn a hole in the missionary door, by the moonlit table, reading the decree of the Rose to the Resistance, holding the parchment, once a green tree, sticking out of the recital and the solitaire, unbuttoning her coat sitting for a portrait, uncorking a bottle, her eyes like lead, her loose blouse and petticoat, drying out briefs by the stone belfry and her hair in a photo long ago when, black as a night, a muddy river past the weeds, carrying the leaves, her coffee stained photo blowing down the street. Train by train, all goes slow, mist its the morning of lights, it is the day of the Bull, the fiesta of magic, the castanets never stop, the sound between the ringing of the bells, the long and muted silence of the distant sea, gypsy hands full of rosemary, every sweet, deep blue buckets for eyes, dawn comes, the Brahmanic splendour, sunlit gilt crown capped by clouds, brazen, illuminated, bright be dawn, golden avenues, its top to bottom, green to gold, but the sky and the plaza, blood red like the great bleeding out Bull, and if your quiet enough, you can hear the heart weeping.

The Exorcism of the North Sea On Sundays we sing. Ghost birds. You lead us to the southern cliffs. With our girl guide tents. The sun is ours. We have verses to prove it, tucked in the hems of our midwinter pockets. We are snow globes. Along the rows of whitewashed caravans young boys peer out and whistle if their mums aren't home. Everything is seen through murky glass. The sea lurches. Someone should save the soul of her. Lukewarm and watered down, holding all the girls in bathing suits. We stretch out our carol sheets and hum like bees.

(Business itself, of course, is the very best at offering solid, life-structuring agendas, and business days are always better than wan weekends, and are hands-down better than gaping, ghostly holidays that Americans all claim to love—but I don’t, since these days can turn long, dread-prone and worse.) This morning, however, has already turned at least semi-eventful. Up and dressed by 8:30, I spent a useful half hour in my home office going over listing sheets for the Surf Road property, followed by a browse through the Asbury Press, surveying the “By Owner” offerings, estate auctions, “New Arrivals

Ignore him.” She cut him a murderous glare. “He hung his sheet over a chair in our room last night, got up to pee, thought he was seeing a real ghost, and screamed until I punched him in the stomach.