KIY POZZI

GHOST STORY

Wood sighs a certain way under the pressure of a footstep. At night, you can tell the sound apart from the tremble of the house settling.

“A spirit,” said my mother.

“Wild animal,” said my father.

I lay in their bed between them. We listened out into the hall and identified each noise we could. The soulless pour of air conditioning. The hum of the unit outdoors. Separated and defined. It’s wind that beat against the house: hard wind that blew shrill through gaps in the window seal and moaned across the top of the chimney. Another step. We squinted at the ceiling.

“Guardian angel,” said my mother.

“Intruder,” said my father.

And then it was morning. My mother handed me a pail, and we walked across the lawn to Mark’s house. Winter had bleached his grass, and the only thing that grew this early in the spring were dandelions, hundreds of them dotting his yard. But Mark waved to us with both arms over his head because that was what the buckets were for.

“Rosecrance ad in the paper said they’re looking to hire a new receptionist,” he called to my mother as we approached.

“And check you in once a month?” she asked.

He tilted his head back laughing and hugged us hello. Together we picked dandelions in clumps and spent the afternoon cutting off their stems on the back porch. We dropped the flowers into pots they boiled over the stove with cups of sugar and lemons and oranges squeezed by hand. Just the aroma would knock you back, sweet enough to almost forget how they bickered like siblings while they brewed.

“Like this,” she said. “Look,” pushing Mark aside.

“No,” he said, shoving back. “You don’t understand.”

But they didn’t always fight. Once, when my mother was in the bathroom, Mark made a watch this gesture to me. He grabbed some extra dandelions off the counter and bit down on the underside so the flowers popped out of his teeth. He closed his mouth and put a finger to his lips. My mother walked in unassuming, drying her hands on her jeans, but I couldn’t hold it in, spilling off the side of my chair, giggling. “What’s going on?” she asked. Then he looked at her and just beamed.

Mark always made sure my mother had a jug of his wine. I think she made him feel less lonely. He lived by himself. But on nights when our house was still, I would look out my window into his and see him in an argument, throwing his arms around, red in the face, yelling at the walls.

OKAY, BUT HAVE YOU ACTUALLY SEEN ONE?

In the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, on a road trip. I bought a stack of self-help books and drove as far north as I could, hollow-eyed, sleeping in the parking lots of casinos, Walmarts, and under the municipal light of public buildings. I spent the days touring state parks and staring at mountains and lakes until even the teem and release of nature was thick with grief.

Near Marquette, the website I used to navigate ranked the KI Sawyer Museum as the safest place to park and sleep and provided me with directions. The only problem was that the KI Sawyer Museum did not exist. However, the KI Sawyer Air Force Base did, abandoned since the 90s.

The weather scattered storms in the half-light, on and off all day. Trees bowled over the road from the wind, rippling uncertainty. The base itself wasn’t much. Miles of identical gray and white buildings lived alongside a few short runways. Everything off the road was behind a chain link fence that was kicked over in several places. There wasn’t a single other person out there, but the base had long been combed over by teenagers: burnt-out piles of trash, liquor bottles and crushed beer cans stacked in heaps, graffiti covering every stretch of brick, no window left unbroken…

I parked at the end of the base and began Googling directions to the closest casino. Service was spotty (OF COURSE) so it took way longer than it should’ve. After a couple of minutes, I noticed in my periphery, off to the right, in the woods, something moving. I looked up from my phone as a horse and its rider emerged. They were pristine, not a mark of mud or rain on them, and their appearance was made all the more strange by the rider’s clothing. He wore the most authentic cowboy outfit I’ve ever seen: a vest the color of dirt and work, with the fringe, white handkerchief around his neck, and a hat hung real low. He and his horse walked right in front of my car and passed without so much as a glance at me. As if there wasn’t a car there, or a road, just a dirt path through the woods and a cabin nearby.

THAT DOESN’T SOUND PLAUSIBLE.

I was the only person for thirty miles, there ten minutes; a prank is out of the question. It couldn’t have been someone dressed up because whose cowboy fantasy involves an air force base? If he was embarrassed, I would’ve noticed. He didn’t even acknowledge that I existed.

THERE WAS NO INTERACTION.

Ivy wrote her ghost notes. Sleet hissed against the windows of her apartment, and the power flickered a few times before deciding on night. We lit tea lights on every shelf and in a circle around us, cross-legged on the floor. How old are you? she read. She folded the note and placed it back in the hole in the drywall where she hid it.

“Last week, I was in the bath, and one of the candles blew out. I checked my phone, and it was six o’clock. The boy is six.” Ivy said.

“How do you know it’s a boy?” I asked.

She took me into her kitchen and showed me the gap where the floor separated from the wall, the piece of paper tucked into it.

“Lunch Poems fell from my bookshelf. I think his name is Frank.”

She handed me the book to inspect.

“So what’s his deal?”

I could tell you Ivy said he died there, roamed her halls, kept her up with his crying, looking for his parents, but then we’d be talking about a movie. The truth is there was no story. Each note asked a simple question. She moved to a nicer apartment before she found out. But that night, when she read “Poem” out loud, I felt a memory like an apparition pass through me. Ah daddy I wanna stay drunk for many days.

The slamming and yelling and breaking of things. My mother scrabbled at my father’s chest, shouting, pushing him back, and he yelled too, brows furrowed, the vein in his forehead popping. The distinct shatter of a wine glass against the wall. But then the image warps into my mother holding the glass cool to her cheek. She stared off the back rail of the porch into the night. “Listen,” she said. From the katydids’ shriek to the electrified whip-poor-wills and coyotes' squall of feedback, everything came alive in a wall of noise, and I heard the terror inside it. Even from my bedroom, with a blanket pulled over my head, every crash, break, and scream pulsed through me. Really, these halls were never empty. Hear the wood cry out from all the movement, echoing across our house, off the wall, off the ceiling.

“Like this,” my mother said. She lifted her legs from the bed as high as she could and began cycling them in the air. “Look. I’m walking on the ceiling.” I copied, and from our view laying down, it really did look like we were. I giggled and swayed left to right, walking around. The popcorn ceiling crunched under my feet like gravel. “It works on walls too.” She dropped her legs a little, still cycling. Together, we walked all around that room, out and down the hall, and into the darkest corners of the house, haunting, and when I looked at her laying next to me, she faded into the white sheets. So I moved on, out the front door, up streets, 5th with Ivy, drifting, never quite touching the ground… But you probably want me to get to the point.

GET TO THE POINT.

It’s all real. The dripping shadow and unexplainable noise. The face in the black of the vanilla extract bottle. The rush in your spine when a grave speaks back. Or when Ivy and I stay out too late. How I come back to my apartment, swaying in the elevator, keying the sides of the lock, and I end up in the bathroom, hands on both sides of the toilet. How I throw up dandelions.

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KIY POZZI IS A WRITER CURRENTLY BASED OUT OF NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE. YOU CAN FIND MORE OF KIY’S WORK ON SUBSTACK THROUGH HIS BLOG OPEN INVITATION OR ON TWITTER: @KIYKIYKIYKIY_