Fool

[first in a series of short fiction pieces based on lines from Scottywood's freestyle rapping -- video and transcript]

After our son died, she started getting real interested in ghosts. We live in a town with a lot of old houses and hotels, so she started reading about town history and identifying haunted houses and would get up in the middle of the night while I was sleeping and slip out of the house and investigate. She'd bring a blanket and sit in the middle of the floor with all the lights off and try to communicate. She'd bring home notebooks in which she'd catalogued everything she saw over the night. Her notes were cryptic, usually illegible (it being pitch black where she was writing at all). Occasionally you'd be able to piece together a line like this:

4:23. Cold spot. Asked presence to make self heard. Door rattling in absence of wind. Lamp fell off table. Floor slightly tilted. Threw loaf of bread into fireplace -- no response. Removed clothes -- no response. Consumed bread -- no response.

She denied she went anywhere until I followed her one night, followed her right through the front door. She let me sit on her blanket and stay the night. Very little happened. For the first couple hours I debunked every little sound until that got depressing so after that I got quiet. On the drive home she told me it had been a quiet night and I'd probably intimidated the spirits. I said ok, sure.

One day she told me a ghost had followed her home. She'd shake me awake in the middle of the night and told me to look and listen, but I never saw anything. For Christmas she asked for an electromagnetic field detector and a thermal camera. I got her a new printer. For Christmas I asked for a pair of blue pajamas. She got me a pair of yellow pajamas.

One day I came home and found her standing on the edge of the roof. She told me the ghost had chased her up there. I got the ladder out of the garage and coaxed her down after an hour or two.

That night she woke me up again. The room was bright like the sun was out. Eventually the light took the shape of a mildly cross-eyed man wearing a cowboy hat and a soiled hospital gown. He stood or floated there at the foot of the bed, looking off into the distance (really the wall above our bed). Nothing moved except some invisible breeze blowing the folds of his gown.

We both sat up. I couldn't tell if I was awake or asleep. I punched the headboard and it didn't make a sound -- it was only then that I noticed everything was dead quiet.

"You see?" she asked. "You see I'm not crazy?" I tried to answer but there was no air in my throat.

The cross-eyed man looked down at us. He waved his arms around something like an air traffic controller or a referee signaling "no good." He lifted his chin all the way up, then snapped his head back down and stared at us with his eyebrow cocked. We got the feeling he was trying to intimidate us. In life he might have weighed 115 pounds.

"What do you want?" I said, finally finding my voice. I wanted to make the ghost comfortable, let it know that we would let it stay here, if it had no place else to go. What does one say to a ghost? "We mean you no harm," I said. And then, "We only want what's best for you."

The ghost stared right into me. I saw a million things all at once in his face. He cocked his other eyebrow. CRASH, our dresser behind him collapsed, CRASH, the TV table crumpled in on itself like someone much larger had stomped on it. The windows shattered and the house made a horrible squealing sound like the wood was being ripped apart. He turned his head towards my wife.

"THE FOOL IN THE YELLOW SHIRT," he said, cocking his head at me without looking, "WHAT THE HELL IS HE DOING." There was an excruciating silence. Downstairs, the fridge slumped to the ground. The ghost looked at me, then at her, back and forth again. It felt like ten minutes. "WHO DO YOU THINK...WHO THE HELL DOES HE THINK HE'S FOOLING?"