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This was stupid. I wasn’t going to find any answers here, but some fault of the human spirit made me still want to try. I stared at the dark window, the vinyl of the giant red palm on it starting to peel. There were the classic palmistry lines drawn all across it, promising life lines and love lines and lines to tell your whole life, right there in your hand. A destiny you could grab onto. There was a buzzing neon sign in the upper corner, flickering in and out of life, that read “OPEN” whenever the electricity crackled just right.
I pushed through the wooden door, its dark green paint peeling, and heard the tinny jingle of the bell above it as I entered. Almost immediately, I was facing a dark staircase down into the basement. Seemed like a bit of a tripping hazard, but I did have to admit, it added to the atmosphere.
I looked around, but the rest of the main level was clearly more retail-oriented. It formed a perfect little block around the abrupt staircase, as if protecting it. Crystals, tarot decks, candles, and incense were all laid out in nice piles across tables and counters, all with little white price stickers on them. A chunky cash register straight out of the eighties watched over its domain from the back corner, and the thread-bare carpet wheezed out mildew and dust from under my tread.
It was cold too, but that I was used to - I always wore a jacket now out of habit. Now that it was fall, I didn’t get so many strange looks for it. I tugged it a little tighter around me, and headed down the steps.
At the bottom sat a large table, draped in a red cloth, and the proprietor I had come to see - Madam something-or-other, dressed in the same borderline racist garb you’d expect. It was an offensive gimmick, but after visiting every other fortune teller, exorcist, and ghost hunter in town, she was all that was left. This was just to tick off all of the boxes before I threw in the towel and accepted that I’d be haunted for the rest of my life, however long that may be.
I wasn’t even listening as she started her prologue, complete with hokey accent. I just nodded when she listed the prices for a reading, watching her tacked-together headwrap sway unsteadily. I decided to spring for the whole package - tarot and palmistry. Her skin was papery, pale, and wrinkled beyond belief, the harsh light of the hanging fluorescent doing her no favors. She didn’t look much over fifty honestly, but it was a hard fifty.
Cracked and yellowed nails shuffled the deck and dealt out three cards.
“Zis card,” she said, pointing as she flipped the first over, “zis is ze fool. Is about journeys and beginnings.”
I nodded along. I’d dabbled in everything from ouija boards to Wicca in my personal research, so I had a vague knowledge of the cards. This version of the card depicted the jaunty blonde fool with his bindle in tow, about to obliviously walk straight off of a cliff. A little brown-and-white dog followed at his heels barking, presumably a warning.
Something pricked the hairs at the back of my neck, and I jerked my head up from examining the card. It wasn’t the cold, although I could’ve sworn I felt it shift. I looked around, and caught my breath as I saw it.
A dog. A glowing blue dog.
It looked like something between a German shepherd and a Chow Chow, big and fluffy but with a well-defined, thoroughly dog-shaped face. I think it would’ve been all black if it weren’t an eerily transparent apparition. It watched me intently, but it didn’t look angry by any means. Its ears were perked, but it just...watched.
I couldn’t take my eyes off it, I didn’t dare.
“What is that?” I asked, desperately hoping this wasn’t some parlor trick.
She turned around, looking to the corner of the room where the dog stood, before looking back at me with furrowed brows.
“What’s what?” she asked.
“You don’t see it?” I asked incredulously.
Her face folded into clear annoyance, her posture suddenly changing.
“Fine, you don’t like the reading, you don’t like it. Don’t yank my chain. Pay up and get out,” she snapped, her accent having suddenly disappeared entirely as she leaned back and folded her arms.
I stared for a second, first at the dog and then at her. She really didn’t see it? Was I going insane? Either way, I didn’t need another invitation to leave. I got up, throwing the wad of cash from my pocket onto the tablecloth while staring back at the corner. The dog hadn’t moved this whole time - it just watched me, occasionally tilting its head in confusion.
“Thanks for all the help,” I murmured without looking back over at the fortune teller, only turning my gaze away at the last second before I bounded up the stairs.
When I burst out of the store’s front door, bell dinging behind me, the dog was waiting for me. It was sitting across the street, still just watching with perked ears.
What was I supposed to do? Was it going to lead me somewhere?
I checked the still-empty street and crossed it, but the dog still didn’t move as I approached. I was mere feet from it, but nothing changed. I didn’t dare touch it, and after a few long seconds, I decided to just...keep walking.
I looked back over my shoulder a few times as I walked away, but it stayed there. I threw one last glance at it as I turned a corner, and nearly screamed when I looked back and it was sitting directly in front of me.
Hand pressed to my heart, I struggled to get my breathing under control.
The dog flipped its tail a few times, slowly, unsure.
Was this the thing haunting me? Had I been harassed for the past year by a dog?
-----
It had started benignly enough for a haunting. It’s normal, they say, to think you hear your loved one in the house just after you lose them. Your brain is so used to the noises - the spoon clinking against the coffee cup, the stairs creaking underfoot, the click of low heels on the floor - that it starts to play them of its own accord when it expects to hear them. A sort of auto-fill for daily life. Brains don’t handle grief well, because it means they have to change all those patterns.
I had lived with Mom long enough at that point, even after moving out for those few years, that I had a lot of those patterns built up. It freaked me out a little at first, but I got used to it. Or I grew numb to it - I lost the ability to distinguish between the two somewhere along the way.
But then the night terrors started. I would wake up, unable to move, something heavy sitting on my chest, or my legs, or even just my feet. That freaked me out too, until I learned that practically everyone with sleep paralysis thinks there’s something sitting on their chest. And of course, having nightmares in the aftermath of planning a funeral and watching your sister go through your mother’s things was nothing exactly notable.
I was actually supposed to go through her things too, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Evie had always been the put together one. The planner, the achiever, the big sister. I was just the screw up who had to move back home.
Evie let me stay in the house even though I’m sure she just wanted to sell it. Hell, she even helped me pay the mortgage. She didn’t talk to me much in the wake of everything, but to be fair, I talked even less. She went through most of the boxes silently, and I stood in the doorway, arms crossed, just watching. She was the executor, having to hand out bits and pieces of our mother to relatives and friends. I had told her I would do my portion - the things that stayed, but would need packed up or donated - later, and she didn’t press me on it. “Later” became a catchphrase of mine around that time.
I would do the dishes stacked in the sink, later. I would call Evie, later. I would go through the photo albums, I would get a job, I would stop drinking so much. Later, later, later.
Time didn’t have much meaning to begin with anyway. I started measuring things in Before and After. Before could be measured in days and weeks and months, but After was a blur. It was measured in rejection letters, bottles, and crying jags.
I think that’s part of what took me so long to notice the weird stuff. I could hardly notice when I needed to shower, how was I supposed to notice anything beyond myself? I don’t even know how long the night terrors and little auditory hallucinations had been going on by that point. Maybe weeks, maybe months. It didn’t really matter.
But things escalated until I did notice them. It started with the knife.
-----
I stared at the knife, lost in thought. I could do it. No one would notice, now that I wore long sleeves again - just like high school. And it’s not like I had really accomplished anything since high school, either. I was still the same ugly ghost of a person, I still deserved this just as much.
I was so lost in the rabbit hole of those ugly thoughts that when the knife clattered to the floor suddenly, I jumped back with a shriek.
I stared at it, heart racing, fingers desperately gripping my sleeves. I tried to reassure myself - obviously it just fell. It wasn't like that was impossible, the way everything was thrown on top of each other around the tiny house. A lot of our junk (no, it was just my junk now) was stacked in precarious jenga towers, why was I so surprised a knife fell from its perch?
But no matter how I tried to reason myself out of it, it unnerved me too much - the knife falling just as I stared at it so intently? From its place on the counter where it didn't even seem like it could fall in that direction? It was too much. That was when I knew - or maybe just decided - that I was haunted.
I went out later that day and bought child-proof cabinet locks. That was impressive in and of itself, because I don’t think I’d left the house in days at that point. I even showered, just for the occasion. After I got back, I hunted through the whole house, collecting every sharp edge I could find. Hell, I even threw my seam ripper and sewing needles in the drawer. It was the most I’d done in days, and I collapsed on the couch afterwards with the effort of it all.
I honestly don’t know if it was more to keep me or the ghost out, but either way, it worked. I never bothered the drawer again, and neither did my visitor, although I kept a close eye on it just in case. I didn’t cook or sew much anymore, so it wasn’t much of a loss to have all my knives and needles put away. I hadn’t realized how much I had stopped doing lately.
After that, it was the bottles. The countertops in the kitchen had long ago become an impromptu bar, filled with handles of vodka as much as with takeout bags. Again, when I found the first bottle smashed on the floor, I told myself it was my own fault. I was just a sloppy drunk, I’d probably even knocked it over myself if it hadn’t just fallen.
But every morning after that, I would find two or three more smashed on the tiles. Sometimes takeout bags were on the floor with them - for flavor, I assume. By the fifth morning, I just decided to haul everything out of the kitchen. I cleaned out the cabinets, the fridge, the pantry, the sink. It took more garbage bags than I’d ever admit to a living soul and an iron stomach for some of the fridge’s contents, but by dusk, I’d done it. It was empty. It wasn’t clean, but it was empty.
After that, I stopped drinking at all. Part of it was that I couldn’t keep anything at home, but most of it was that I didn’t want to be drunk with a ghost around. That seemed like just about the stupidest thing I could do, and I wasn’t about to have Evie find my body in the wrecked remains of Mom’s house. The shame would’ve killed me all over again. That, and now I knew how much work I would be putting on her if I did die.
It was a lot of long and tortuous nights after that decision, feeling a strange kind of empty, but somehow I kept going. Everything always seems to just keep going. The same grueling pace, never relenting. It turned out to be a good call overall though, because soon the ghost decided I wasn’t about to get much sleep, either.
It took me a couple weeks to figure it out - the shift was so tiny, it seemed like a normal amount of supernatural variance. But after the tenth or twelfth morning, I realized - it wasn’t a particular time I was getting woken up, it was a time of day. Dawn. Every morning, without fail, I would wake up to see the faint warm glow of dawn seeping over the skyline. It didn't matter if I turned my phone off, unplugged the radio clock, whatever I tried it wasn't enough. Sometimes it would be something shoved off a counter waking me up in a panic, sometimes a knock at the door when no one was there (who knocks on a door at dawn?). I gave in eventually, just plugging the radio back in. It was less destructive that way.
I laid in bed a lot of mornings trying to puzzle it out - did my ghost used to be a farmer? A vampire hunter? Scared of the dark? But the most compelling reason I could suss out was that ghosts had less power in the daylight, and maybe mine was pissed about it. A final fuck you for the night, if you will. Fair enough.
Eventually, I started actually getting up once I’d been woken, beyond jumping up to see a smashed glass or empty doorstep before going back to lie in my bed. I even tried jogging, although I only made it about two days before the burning sensation in my lungs convinced me otherwise. But just the fact that I could be one of those sunrise-morning-jog people put a pep in my step. The thought that I could, in fact, be a real put-together human person, and not just a lump that laid in bed until the afternoon, was surprisingly reassuring.
I was still living off my savings and a part time job - and religiously avoiding ever looking at my account balance, as if that would somehow stop it from decreasing - but I started spending more time job hunting. I even reached out to a few acquaintances for resume help; it was a convenient reason to talk to them again after my uncomfortably long radio silence, and it was actually pretty helpful for my resume too.
All of this - the bottles, the knife, the alarm - it was annoying, maybe even scary, but that was fine. I lived with it. I probably would’ve let that ghost haunt me my whole life if it hadn’t managed to cross the line - the line into Mom’s bedroom.
I had kept the door closed ever since Evie had left for the last time, finally rifling through the last of the things. I didn’t want to see her perfectly made bed, the half-read library book on her nightstand (I didn’t even want to think of the fines), the bathroom set up with her own personalized mix of skincare and makeup and trinkets. It was too much. It was too her .
So when I walked by one morning and noticed early sunlight filtering in through the crack of the door, my heart leapt into my throat. I didn’t even bother trying to explain it away to myself anymore. The ghost went into Mom’s room, simple as that. I went numb.
I don’t know if it was from fear, or anger, or confusion, but my brain simply turned off. I remember pushing open the door slowly, not even expecting anything, just standing. Just registering the covers on the floor, the sheets halfway across the bed, a pillow on the ground by the nightstand. I stood there for a solid five minutes as I felt the numbness wear off and anger seep in.
Fuck this ghost. Fuck this stupid haunting. Fuck this bed, and the pillows, and the house, and my life and most of all fuck death .
By the time I had straightened the last pillow ever so gently, so precisely, there were tears streaming down my face. My fists, no longer occupied by sheets, were balled at my side. I finally stepped back, looking at the whole room now as my scowl dropped, my tears drying cold on my hot cheeks. A few silent seconds passed before I tore my eyes away, practically running out the room and slamming the door behind me.
I would figure out this ghost. I would find out how to get rid of it, no matter what. I wasn’t about to let this house - my house - be haunted.
-----
The dog continued to pop up periodically on my way home from the fortune teller, scaring me less each time but still unnerving me nonetheless. Finally I made it back, locking the door behind me even though I knew as I did it that it wouldn’t help.
I collapsed into the closest armchair, mulling it over. I would be a lot less mad about Mom’s room if it was a weird ghost dog - I mean I could hardly expect it to care whose bed was whose, right? But still, what dog would even be haunting me? Why? A poltergeist pup seemed silly at best, never mind the fact that we’d never even had a dog. Or maybe we’d had one as kids? Maybe I’d just been too little to remember.
My mind slid to the boxes of Mom's stuff. There were photo albums in there, tons of them. She'd had a passion for scrapbooking, always taking photos for them (something Evie had always hated, for reasons that later became obvious). She always labelled them too - she said someday we'd be going through them and she didn't want us messing up her system. There was always a system. There'd been a system to the house, too, before I let it slide into disrepair, I thought with a flinch.
Surely if we'd had a dog, there'd be photos. Maybe a whole book. It would be so easy to check.
So incredibly easy.
It took me a week to get up the courage to actually go through the scrapbooks. I found the box easily in her neat closet - past her still made bed, thankfully - and pulled it out to the kitchen table, but that was as far as I got for a while.
I passed the box every morning while getting my cup of coffee, studiously avoiding eye contact with it as if it would somehow trap me. It made my gut twist every time, and I had to stamp down heartache until I reached the bottom of my mug.
But finally I managed to go over and open it.
I had grabbed a box of tissues, taken two ibuprofen, and I had the day off. I was ready. As ready as I’d ever be. I sat down, staring at the box. I pried open the flaps like there was a feral cat inside, but it was just albums and a shoebox. I went for the shoebox first. I sifted through shitty digital printouts from an old home computer, the rectangular glossy prints of drugstore-developed disposables, even some hazy Polaroids. This must’ve been a work in progress - it was mostly old photos of me and Evie. I pried up one from a Christmas morning that was now almost two decades gone. I was already reaching for the tissues, and when I could take no more, I flipped the photo over.
In the corner on the back was written the year, along with Mom's name, mine, and...Evie's. Her old name was scribbled out, ‘ Evie’ written above it in my mom's neat handwriting. I sobbed, a rough, ugly sound, as one hand flew to my mouth and the other held the photo like it was made of glass. I sat like that for a long time.
I put it delicately back into the box, setting it all aside. I would tell Evie about that later. I think she would like to see that.
I moved onto the albums, finding the earliest one - but it turned out that one didn’t have me or Evie in it at all. It was just my mom, decades younger, in spectacularly dated hairstyles and clothes. It was jarring; it felt awful to say it, but I’d simply not thought of my mother’s life before me. She’d had her memories of her mother, and her mother had the same before her.
I flipped through, admiring her precise papercrafting. I had always been crafty too, but her work was something else. Funny little vintage-style patterns and cliche quips pasted about over her aging photos, and yet always put together with the precision and planning of a surgeon.
Finally, a few pages in, I found it. A picture of my mom reclining on a couch with a pattern so loud it practically shouted. Next to her, there was a large, fluffy black dog. I delicately extracted it from its protective laminate, studying it intensely.
It was definitely the same dog - a big fluffy vaguely shepherd looking thing, the same expression of mild confusion on its face. I flipped it over, searching for her label.
Nina and Odie, 1986.
Years before either of us were born. Before she even met our father, I think - although I didn’t know enough about him to be sure. There were few photos of him at all, and even these I knew my mom kept more out of a historian’s respect for accuracy than fondness for the man himself.
I slid the photo back, flipping through the next few pages. More photos of Odie were scattered throughout intermittently, always plastered to my mom’s side, always looking either dumbly happy or mildly confused. Most of the time her arm was looped around him, or he sat between her legs, or he simply was sprawled out at her feet. What’s really funny is, I didn’t think my mom liked dogs. We’d never had one growing up, she’d never let us have any pet at all beyond the odd fish.
Finally, on the last page, I came to a photo of just Odie, panting happily over a clearly overly-loved stuffed toy. I could see gray around his muzzle, his nose faded to a liver-spotted grey instead of thick black. It was the last photo in the album, smack in the middle of the page, and I couldn’t figure out why - there were always themes to the album, either a person or a vacation or a vague ‘period’ of our lives. But this wasn’t just photos of Odie, a dog I’d never even heard her talk of before, so why was he the finale?
The page was covered in dog-themed stickers and patterns and some miscellaneous eighties-themed things, too. I had to work to get the photo out from under a few sticker corners with minimal damage, but when I finally pried it up, I flipped it over immediately, hoping desperately for some kind of explanation.
Odie. 1976-1988. My guardian angel.
When I looked up, he was sitting a few feet away. He thumped his tail slowly as I looked at him, his odd blue color leaving afterimages as he moved.
I thought of the past year, of how dark it had been. How lost I’d felt. And then, of how I eventually stopped drinking - how I cleaned the house, and learned to wake up early, and go outside, and start learning to be a person again. How I put myself back together with each weird, scary, incomprehensible nudge.
Odie. My guardian angel.