This House is Ours, Chapter 1 (Patreon)

(Table of contents)

Chapter 1.

I don't want to believe in ghosts.

I used to.

I mean, I used to want to. My father was dying, and I wasn't done with him yet. So, I collected the ingredients. The memories. Recordings of his voice. His love. His fear. The spooky echoing laughter at his own dumb jokes. My little brother Simon and I, we collected the ingredients, and we tried our best to make a ghost of him.

I wanted to hold onto my father even after the cancer took him. I wanted there to be rituals or magic to keep him alive. To catch his voice in a bottle. But there wasn't. In the end it was just a collection of recordings. I loved to listen. Simon loved to listen. But there was no ghost there. Just the memory of a joke about chickens.

I was disappointed at first. But the more I thought about it, the more it scared me, what we had tried to do. I could imagine him sitting somewhere in the dark, by himself. What if he was still dying in the afterlife. What if they were still bruising his arms with needles? Freezing his blood with poison? What if angels had been doing their jobs so long they turned cruel? What if their empathy was a colorful pin on a uniform they had worn too long.

I think about that a lot. What we almost did to our father.

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