When I came up from my sister’s basement, I might have been a ghost. Expired and void, curious and confused. Her baby’s, my niece’s toys, were rivaled on the floor, but nobody was around. The sliding glass door was open, screen still at attention interceding bugs from our living quarters, but everything was unlocked. It looked as though people had been there just seconds before and suddenly dispersed leaving it in ruin. Maybe I had died in my sleep, and can no longer see people, just the things they manipulate. Could people see me? In this strange quiet stillness?
I always think the worst when I can’t find people. Like they’re being held at gunpoint by some ski-masked kidnapper. Or that I’ll find them drowned in the bathtub after I am forced to break the door down following a few seconds of no response. Would this be reality today? I decided to wait around before abandoning the scene and going home. Swooning the mesh of the screen door aside, I squinted my eyes severely from the extraneous glint of the sun after I had been asleep for elven hours. My untidy bedhead flanged out behind me like a peacock’s feathers. I noticed this while rubbing my eyes, catching my reflection in the glass part of the door. The deck my sister’s husband built was a sunlit Mayan orange; you could smell how the wood had dried after the thunderstorm preceding my sleep in their basement. Still, not a peep of human interaction.
I trudged back down the stairs in the desolation of the lonesome and languid house. The pit of my stomach enjoyed the idea of being a ghost, feeling like I had just gone over the edge of the first obligatory drop of a rollercoaster. Wanting to gather my things, I turned the handle to the spare bedroom in which I spent last night. My body was still in bed, comatose in what I could only imagine as being Death.