“Ghost Story”

They tore down her house. She disappeared for a wink and when she returned, it was gone. An empty lot, littered with wreckage from the home she had known, welcomed her like the gap in a grin left by a knocked out tooth.

So many years, so many memories. Shades of those who had gone before, of lives intertwined by blood and circumstance, bonds formed over decades—all destroyed in a day.

She recalled neighbours in the suite below her attic penthouse: the tech boys hauling their big screen TV into the yard for playoff barbeques; university students burning the midnight oil while cramming for exams. She had banged on the floor when the stereo got too loud and slammed her closet doors to let them know they weren’t alone in their space. Her favourite had been the brown-haired girl who had shyly smiled but never said a word as she passed in the stairwell.

Gone; all gone, and now where would she go?

Time has a funny way of passing. Too soon, she came back for a visit and found the gap in the street’s housing smile filled by a new construct, out of character with its neighbours and occupied by a family of immigrants, her attic penthouse replaced by a little boy’s bedroom, blue with sailboats painted on one wall.

She sat in the armchair near the window and watched over him while he slept. One night he woke up and looked straight at her. She smiled. He blinked twice, accepted her presence, and went back to sleep.

It’s not the house, she decided. It’s the people within it that make it a home.