Check the clothes you're wearing. Be thankful it's not your tuxedo T-shirt (which you only ever wore ironically). Then, be thankful that you didn't die naked. Have you ever heard of a naked ghost? Try and see if that's where the sheet-ghost thing came from—from covering up naked ghosts. There's got to be someone who knows. The streets are full of you now, ghosts like you, wandering into restaurants to get a whiff of the food, sitting on the corners waiting to recognize someone living.

Remember that you were a sheet-ghost for Halloween when you were six, and Ethan from next-door who was the Red Power Ranger said your costume was stupid. You thought Ethan was stupid. Your costume was nuanced. Maybe you should haunt Ethan.

Learn that it's a myth that all ghosts haunt one specific place forever, or even have to haunt anyone at all. You can choose people and places and things to haunt, but you have to find them yourself, and you can't use your phone to do it because it's at your parents' house now, buried somewhere with your enamel pin collection and the Beat Poet posters you just know are going to be tossed because your parents never appreciated your desire to stick it to the man. It's okay to be annoyed even when you're dead. Blow over some garbage cans to make yourself feel better.

Don't haunt your parents, though, because it's sad that they never understood you but loved you anyway and had to scatter your ashes themselves at the rest stop halfway to the Pearl Jam Cover Band Hall of Fame. Let them continue without you.

After ten years of floating in the attic of your ex-girlfriend Nina's house, realize that you've run out of spite, and that it's boring when she blames all of the smashed belongings on the cat. Check her closet to see if she still has that Joy Division shirt of yours she used to sleep in (she doesn't). Crush her prized blown-glass vase into smithereens, and as you watch her nonchalantly sweep up the bits, spilling rainbows across the carpet in the afternoon light, finally understand why things didn't work out.

Work up the nerve to ask some of the other ghosts your questions. What day is today? Why are we here, anyway? What happens to us when the world ends?

Be disappointed in all the answers you receive.

Haunt the record store by your alma mater for six years because they play the Rage Against the Machine B-sides that the sheeple don't know about. Hope that the good stuff will last for eternity, because you don't want to out-exist the real classics.

Think about haunting Ethan again when you remember the time he told you that you were a Kurt Cobain wannabe. Wonder if you'll ever see Kurt Cobain around these parts. Wonder if you can get him to haunt Ethan with you.

When the record store closes because customers are too cold and freaked out by the random indoor winds to shop there anymore, take to the streets again. Finally learn the origins of the sheet-ghost concept. Have vivid flashbacks to serial killer documentaries and horror movies you watched in high school to pretend you were edgy and careless and brave. Try not to think about how mangled the translucent bodies might be underneath their sheets. Wish you could go back in time and unlearn what you know now.

Haunt Ethan. Be surprised that he's gotten so old. Leave after two weeks because he's wrinkled and frail and it isn't as satisfying or exciting as you thought it would be. Almost smash his wife's fine china before you go, but stop when his six-year-old granddaughter comes downstairs for a drink of water. You may be a ghost, but you're not a monster. Leave nothing behind but a slight chill.

Wait for a world that you do not recognize, that you do not have to feel sympathy for. Wait for what comes next. Roam the streets that grow fuller and fuller every day. Wait until this feels ordinary.


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Kyra Kondis has stories in or coming from Lost Balloon, matchbook, Craft and others. She's the Assistant EIC at So to Speak at GMU, where she's in the MFA program.

This story is a Finalist for the 2020 Mythic Picnic Prize in Fiction

Read Kyra's postcard.

Detail of photo on main page courtesy of Joana Coccarelli.





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