Little Ghost

She wakes to a moan. At three in the morning she had been lying in bed, between the red sheets, beneath the white quilt, limbs floating loose and hair streaming under that dreaming black sea with a book asleep on the pillow beside her. She hears it. Wakes blind and waits for the shifting tilt of the real. What had she been dreaming.

She does not believe in ghosts. She believes in the dead and in secrets and in the way truth gathers more thickly around anchors to the unknown when she is looking left instead of right.


She holds her breath. The air moans again above her, soft but unboundaried, and travels through the dust that is trapped in that secret space between floors, between the neighbour’s suite above and her ceiling below, over eighty-year-old plaster and nails and joists still smelling of sawdust, and out into her room, spilling spirit.

Her sheets were once white, but she has had visions in the bedding aisle of a crowded super store and changed the flat and fitted ones to red, imagining, in the folding back of the white quilt, the peeling of a fruit to a soft warm centre like a burst pod, or a surgeon’s knife drawn along tight skin to a popped bright wounding. She wanted cinnamon, but they only came in red. So she is lying between her red sheets with the book beside her, when she wakes to this ghost in the groaning air. A climbing, unclothed little sound.

In the hall, in her room, up above and beside her bed, against her neck and in her hair the moan and moan and the moan. Her throat still full of her dream, her lungs, busy exchanging visions for wakened air, push up against the quickening lub dub. The book on the pillow sleeps on unaware, a loud boozy snore from its opened mouth, even when then, the ghost pulls back the quilt and slips in beside her, and she sees that she knows that she knows her dead face. And is pinned to the sheets by it.

But such a sweet, unpretentious little soul, warm and singing, carving out a sacred hollow in the air with her breathing, no rattling chains, or banshee screaming, just an unadorned ascending. And the mountains, wherever they say they are, do not move in their places, and the earth’s crust still solid as always. But there is sweat and maybe love, she decides from the red sheets below. But if not love then at least a gentle exposure, which is something in itself for the dead.