The ghosts had to go. Mira had put it off far too long like she always did and now she was standing in her cabin, shivering on a summer night. Leaving a bowl of cold turnip soup and stony sourdough bread on the table, she walked to her study. She knelt to the keyhole and fished for the key in her blouse, forever lassoed around her neck on a silver chain.
Mira stepped inside. Everything was perfectly commonplace. A wide, oak desk. The plain, iron lamp with an ivory lampshade ruffled at the top, a pearly cord dangling down. Bookshelf dusty as ever with thick, upturned volumes full of coffee-stained dog-eared pages. And to the corner, beneath the boarded-up window, an ordinary glass cabinet lined with 332 little goat milk bottles encasing 332 wispy, smoky thumb-sized beings.
Ghost-collecting wasn’t much of a star career, but it’s one she’d ended up with after many failed attempts to try to be anything else. It’s not like they were rich and she could harbor great ambitions but perhaps she could have studied to be a librarian or at the very least a dentist. Her mother, though, would have none of it. Any time Mira indicated she’d like to perhaps not wind up a crazy old kook in a lonely cabin by a frothing river, her mother warned her that try as she might, life could only go one way.
But Mira had had enough. After all, 64 years of doing the same thing get’s tiresome. Today is the last time I’ll do this, she announced to the ghosts, who, of course, did not reply but gazed up at her, soft as newborns. Suspended in their silver half-lucid sleep, with varying degrees of distance from their human lives and memories, none of them could truly form any cohesive thoughts or sensible opinions. Not much different to regular people, Mira thought, reaching for a crystal bowl on her desk.
She placed it in the center of the room in a chalk-drawn circle on the floor, she poured bluish rosy water from a pitcher. Everyone retires, why should a ghost-collector be any different? In any case, she thought of herself as no more than mystical pest control in her heart. A thankless task that most didn’t even believe was needed but were pushed into by some overly persuasive relative who wasn’t religious enough to call an exorcist.
One by one, Mira took each of the milk bottles out and lined them up in concentric circles around the crystal bowl of blue water. She’d collected them over the last three or so years, traveling sometimes several hundred miles, and brought them all back right here. When she’d set one inside the cabinet, she’d whisper a mantra to bind them there so that none of them could even think to leave. Were she someday to come herself into misfortune, they’d stay there like that, unable to haunt another soul, and forgetting day by day who they once were.
As Mira lifted one bottle, and then the next, she whispered a mantra into each ghost’s face. It always bemused her, how the shape of their face and the way their eyes looked in particular were the last bits of form to dissolve into that cloudy mist the rest of their body took on. She did this a total of 331 times, each time uncapping the milk bottle, whispering the mantra, and watching the ghost float like a marionette off a stage, and swoop down into the crystal bowl as though being absorbed into a tornado.
When it came time for the 332nd bottle, however, the mantra didn’t seem to work. Mind you, this was a mantra she’d known before she knew any other nursery song. So, she said it again, louder this time. Still, nothing. The ghost wouldn’t budge. Mira put the bottle down and set the lid aside, something she’d normally never do. She rubbed her eyes and put on her glasses to get a better look at this suddenly stubborn ghost.
Ah, he was one of the ones she’d collected more recently, so most of his body still looked like that of a man. Mira remembered a little. He was somewhere in his eighties when he died, and she’d collected him wandering around his daughter’s childhood bedroom weeping in the corner like a hungry kitten.
“Why are you doing this?” she said, though she felt she might as well have asked how. No other ghost, after being collected like this and kept in a bottle for upwards of a year had ever refused nor had the power to refuse to be sent away.
“I’d just rather not,” he said. As a rule of thumb, Mira avoided conversing with the ghosts she collected. Usually, the last words she’d speak to them were when she was luring them into the goat milk bottles. Well, it wasn’t quite as crude a thing as luring, but in the end, they were being trapped even as their absence ultimately freed those they were haunting.
“But you’d no longer be trapped in a goat milk bottle,” Mira said. What she didn’t say was that hey, buddy, I’m done with this ghost-collecting business after you lot, and I’m going to try once again to live an ordinary life, and I can’t do that if I still have one thumb-sized ghost in a little goat milk bottle hanging around with me. One does not walk around seeking a common life with a ghost in their pocket—least of all a ghost as stubborn as you!
“Then tell me what’s next,” he said.
This stumped Mira. She fumbled at some words, but she could tell the man—the ghost—was unconvinced. She sighed and took her glasses off again, letting her neck and back slump down, even though she knew it would make it harder for her to stand up.
After a long pause, she said “I haven’t quite had to think about that part yet.”
The ghost, too, was silent. Mira felt a warm breeze snake through the slats of the boarded up window. She’d done the job herself, of nailing the slabs of plywood to the wall from the inside and outside both ever since the neighbours’s daughters had wandered over from their father’s farm to see if they could confirm whether the rumors were true. A thin, long moonbeam dazzled on the floor like a strand of fine hair. Mira felt the inexplicable urge to weep.
“Would you tell me my name?” the ghost said.
“I—,” Mira hesitated. Think, you foolish hag, she thought, but her memory truly wasn’t much good anymore. Not that it had ever been. Oh, she’d always loved to read and write and that sort of thing, but perhaps that had done her more disservice than good. If you can always look stuff up in books and notes, she’d thought, why memorize any of it? Seeing the forlorn look on the ghost’s face, she said, “Ash. Your name was Ash.”
Ash was a man Mira had been with in her 40s. At the time, she’d felt she might have children with him and perhaps they’d grow old together, but then one lazy afternoon while she napped in a pool of sunlight on the porch, he’d wandered into her study and though he’d been forbidden to, opened up the glass cabinet and taken a ghost out of the bottle, trying to inspect its little body. Of course, that had led to all sorts of problems, like momentary possession and repeated nightmares thereafter. And then, about a month after the incident, he got in his Volkswagen and drove off into the sunset, never to come back.
“Was I good man?” Not-Ash asked.
“I’m sorry,” Mira said.
“I was evil, then!”
“No, no I mean…,” Mira sighed. “I lied. About your name, just now. It wasn’t Ash. Ash was someone I knew. I’ve forgotten your name.”
Not-Ash was quiet.
“I could look it up in my journals,” Mira offered. “I keep a meticulous account of all my collecting, and I’m certain I brought you here last Fall.”
Not-Ash shook his head. “That’s alright, I wouldn’t want to trouble you like that.”
Well, Mira thought, you’re already troubling me by not going away. I’m putting off being able to close up this cabin once and for all and drive myself off into the sunset, or maybe to Chicago or get on a plane to Uruguay.
“Why did you say that name so quickly, though?”
“Ash was someone I was in love with long ago, and I guess you sort of look like him.”
“So, I still have a face?”
Mira put her glasses on again and nodded.
“How come you’ve never bothered to find out what comes next?”
Though Mira couldn’t see it in his eyes, she knew there was a bit of indignation brewing in his words. This made her feel snappy.
“I guess I’ll find out soon enough, and I won’t be scared like you!”
“But what if you end up like me and there’s no one to collect you like you did me?”
Mira swallowed hard and the tingly, wet sound bounced off the wooden cabin walls. She looked back at the window, at the crisscrossing wood and the wonky nails, and below that the glass cabinet which would now be filled with 331 empty goat milk bottles and locked up forever.
“It makes me very tired, what I do,” she said, slowly rising up “I think I’ll sleep for now, and in the morning, you can let me know what it is you’d like to do.” With that, she walked towards the door.
“Wait,” he said. “I think I’d like to look up at the sky one more time, before I can really decide, you know. Would you take me with you?”
Mira thought for a moment and then picked up the goat milk bottle with the thumb-sized ghost of a man whose name neither of them could remember, and together, they left the cabin to sit outside on that warm, summer night where the moon was as big as a coin put right up to the eye.
How lovely, and surprisingly, I am quiet happy to let the hook remain.
Lovely story. The prose in this one has a tight, consistent cadence that's a pleasure to read. Are there any techniques you're applying consciously or are you just doing it on instinct?