Laura Nagle

Listen to Laura read her story

Ashley spent half her childhood in the house she is now destroying for profit. She’s painting most of the walls millennial gray and tearing down a few others “to open up the floor plan” – a nice euphemism for her surgical excision of the home’s Victorian charm. It’s the same playbook she’s used to flip a dozen other properties. She feels no remorse when renovating a stranger’s house, but it’s no surprise she’s haunted by memories in every room here. She just never imagined there would be a literal ghost too.

He must have been there all along, she thinks. But her grandparents never mentioned anything, and she wasn’t aware of him as a kid. Maybe the house was never quiet enough for her to notice him. She wonders how long he’s been around, how many occupants he’s observed coming and going. New occupants soon, once she’s done making the place aesthetically neutral.

At first, Ashley mistakes the ghost for a toddler. It’s sad but cute, a little ghost boy inviting her to play hide-and-go-seek. In her head, she calls him Edwin. He shuts himself into the closets, slamming the doors only to scratch, scratch, scratch for her to let him out again. She opens the doors for him without a word. It would be rude not to. Edwin must be too little to reach the doorknobs, she thinks. Or maybe ghosts lack the strength to turn them.

It seems that Edwin is restless at night. Ashley finds plastic shrink-wrap from her supplies on the floor in the mornings, torn to bits. She tries to keep him active during the day so he won’t have so much pent-up energy at night. She buys tiny paint brushes for him to use. Most days, he picks up his brush and carries it to the other side of the room to do some touch-ups around the baseboards. He’s sloppy, but he means well. When they work in the formal living room, where Ashley took her music lessons as a child, the brush dances in mid-air as he hops over nothing, right where the piano bench used to be.

One morning, when the job is just about finished, Ashley comes around to take photos of the empty rooms for the listing. She smells it before she sees it: a mouse, mostly dead, hovering in mid-air, resting at the height of the piano bench.

The offering is unwelcome, but she acknowledges the ghost’s good intentions. And it’s nicer to think the place is haunted by a ghost cat than by an ancient toddler.

She stands at the front door and speaks to the ghost for the first time: “Edwin, take it outside!” She watches the unwanted gift bobble in the air, a few inches off the ground, past her feet and out into the hedges. And then she leaves the door open for Edwin to reclaim his home.

Laura’s prompts were: During a Building Remodel, a Ghost, an Unwanted Gift

Laura Nagle’s short fiction has recently appeared in North American Review, The Common, and Stanchion. She is the translator of Prosper Mérimée’s 1827 hoax, Songs for the Gusle, and of Confidences, a novel by the Bolivian poet Adela Zamudio forthcoming from Bucknell University Press. She lives in Indiana and shares her home with two cats of the non-trash variety.

Read more from Laura:

ANMLY – ‘The Chimera Pavilion‘ – Laura translates Monique Debruxelles
The Common – ‘Fallmore‘