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The dinner table is set for four, but Henry isn’t coming over tonight.
Natalie doesn’t believe in the supernatural, but she knows that a ghost lives in this house.
She doesn’t know what it - what he - looks like, can’t even fathom what he would look like if he had actually made it this long like her mother believes.
But that doesn’t mean she hasn’t spent long thinking about it.
Every time she thinks about the ghost, she imagines a miniature version of her father. Perhaps this is because she (much to her disgust) looks a lot like her mother. It’s a fact that haunts her brain every time she looks in the mirror, every time she sees the identical, wild wisps and waves and curls of blonde. Sometimes when she stares directly into the wide, manic eyes, she struggles to remember who they belong to.
The ghost had curly hair, too, but that was when he’d simply lived in these four walls instead of plaguing them. It had been a light brown sort of colour, and the coils of soft hair had, admittedly, been adorable; or, at least, that’s how it looks in the photographs.
The photographs in the sickeningly empty cyan baby book, which she’d found by pure accident a long time ago.
He had blue eyes too.
The same colour of the Valium that she lets slide down her throat each night.
Despite her incessant rumination, she can’t quite place exactly what the ghost would look like if he were to somehow materialise into a living, breathing human. Perhaps he’d have those curls. Maybe he’d have the face shape of her father. He could even possibly have the eyes sparkling with insanity that appear to run in the family.
Maybe he’d be a total asshole and she’d spend her days wishing he never existed.
Worrying about looks is a pointless feat anyway; she doesn’t need to see him to know that he exists. He lives in the walls and floors and ceilings and windows and doors and chairs and shelves and curtains and knives and, worst of all, minds.
Something heavy placed in a mind is very unlikely to drop out.
The ghost has been persistent in her synapses ever since she was a small child and had been told that she had a brother who couldn’t come down to earth.
Bullshit.
He’s here, no matter how much any of them try to deny it.
He doesn’t come to her in visions like he does her mother.
He creeps in when she’s just about managed to keep him out for more than five minutes.
Like now.
The plate and the cutlery on either side of it stare up at her, mocking her. A reminder that instead of getting a third of the meal, she’ll get a quarter, because it needs to be shared equally, just so the ghost can sit there and let it go cold.
Her mother likes to believe he wouldn’t eat much anyways.
On the days she forgets to take her pills to keep him at bay, she prompts him to eat, because it’s what growing boys need.
Her father will always pretend he’s looking at work-related shit on his phone.
He’s a bad actor.
Then again, isn't she, too?
She’s doing a bad job of it right this second, as she takes her place at the table and tries to ignore the ghost to her right.