Rough Draft: Old Ghosts

(Hey, I’m feeling a little sick. I’ve been working on this story for a few days, but it still isn’t finished. Please enjoy another excerpt. Original post)

I pause at a window. The excavation sleeps. The workers are home in bed like their red-faced foreman. What once was the old family grave is now the resting place of ugly yellow tractors, and where once there were cold stone markers flimsy canvas lies.

I suspect the ghosts of the house are unhappy with me, but I couldn’t stop the workers from coming. Standing at the window, I try not to imagine the horrid eventuality. Soon the preparations will be over, and this very old house will be felled. It is too irregular a place for the buyers. There will shortly rise over these precious ruins fat, little boxes for people to squeeze themselves into. Perfectly straight streets. Uniform lines of mailboxes. There is no place for the strange corridors of my home and its ancient whispers, no place for hidden passages or dark cellars.

My eyes adjust and I see a ghost, my own faint reflection in the window glass. I start a moment, for the image was terrible. Shadows covered my eyes, and the pale visage there seemed more a skull than a face, a skull with black, empty sockets. Yet not a skull. Skulls are marked by that sardonic grin. My reflection never grins at me, darkly or otherwise.