Haunting Your Own House

a postcard story for all the ghosts out there

Is anyone else starting to feel like a stimulation-starved ghost haunting their own house, scratching at the walls with a worry that never quite touches them, but still leaves paint and plaster under the fingernails of your brain?

Is anyone else confused that things that once were effortless now require the kind of energy that makes lights flicker and cupboards rattle? That time works differently here, where a week can pass through you like a cold gust but “today” can drag on so long you begin to worry the sun has broken down?

Does anyone else feel uneasy crossing the threshold to the outside world, as if to transgress the boundaries of your haunting would be to unravel into dust motes and spider webs?

Does anyone else feel like they’re talking to portraits on the wall? You knew them as people once, but now they are just a head and shoulders cropped into a frame, flattened onto a screen, and compressed into a window of time too small for the people you’re becoming to fully pass through?

Does anyone else have a hunger, deep and wraith-like and ravenous, to be alive again in the way we used to be alive, in the soul-sating clamour of a house full of warm bodies who wish us well?

Then allow me to be the first to say, “Well met, fellow ghost. I do not know when this will end, but I do know that even in our solitude, we are many. even in this weightless desolation, we are solid enough to assure each other that one day, you will be free to walk up to the boarded-up porch of yourself, pick up a crowbar, and the light back in.”

I rewrote this based on a weird TikTok I made last month.

Short story written by Peter Chiykowski

Story prompt taken from a photo by Jan Canty