(from 2007, slight edit)
the boy had screamed without wanting to. had scared the ghost his mother would not believe he had seen. the ghost which was not a ghost but to which he had called anyway with ghost, ghost. his mother had a sentence, and she used it. patted his head, sighed a cigarette from her bra, then went. the boy waited all night. once or twice thought he saw what might be a hand, white and waving; its broomstraw fingers sweeping the many floored dark.
his former scream stayed the morning. his father, he saw him put down a razor then pick it up. his mother was blowing balloons. tying them and ******* her finger.
eleven years ago, for three minutes now, the boy was born sad. but it’s not something to be sad about because he is not very bright. when he speaks, it is only so his parents will also speak. they will come from any room, out of any aisle, to speak second. they will fall over each other somehow without touching. when this happens, the boy must remember he is not bright.
there is a cake, a birthday hat, and a storm. the boy is not sure which came first, but they are here, now, at the same time. a candle is lit, then another. if he slits his eyes, it seems the same candle is being lit eleven times by his one handed mother. his father steps in when all the candles don’t go out but he is too eager and his breath seems to have in it a crying baby. the baby goes silent. the boy sits in the dark. a dark so heavily settled the boy forgets he is wearing a hat. that when he slips under the table the hat in some final nod of a scarecrow goes unaccounted and the boy thinks he is being pulled by the hand of the ghost that is not a ghost backward into some happy and useless chore.
under the table, taskless, the boy is humming into the cone of his hat. for so long it is the only sound. it takes a single frog outside to mention its locale for the boy to know he has stopped. he puts the hat down tent atop a toy truck he cannot see. far off, an engine idles then turns off. it is dumbly comforting to know that in the real world there are miles between hands doing hand-like things; turning keys, toppling hats that shouldn’t be there. hands that curse as puppets curse; by not.
it is by this thought of hands the boy is stilled. he has not spoken; his parents are waiting. are duo and separately tread their aphotic mimicry. he can feel his father’s thumb puddle the air above his head; his mother’s elbow cotton closer the black to his eye. his wish: to see a ghost after seeing a ghost- the boy wonders what he has done. what had marked the world in all its heaving inaccuracy was an exhale; now, an exhale dismissed.
he had once cut with his thumbnail the tip of a red crayon into an empty bra he’d never seen his mother put on. when she later dressed it became a drop of blood and she screamed and went on to birth a stone that it not be the center of a dark balloon.