The last of our resident rats scurried along the attic’s rafters while lime green thread floated through flecks of unsettled dust and slipped through the eye of the needle. It was as if the filament were compelled by a sorcerer’s spell, but it wasn’t magic; it was only me—a fierce young seamstress with serious skill and an iron will. Or at least I was young when I died anyway, and age is a state of mind, so they say.
Swaying back and forth in my mother’s rickety old rocking chair, the same chair in which she darned my father’s socks and sewed my white baptismal dress, I sang a tune I learned in primary school more than a century ago—
“Dare to do right! Dare to be true!
You have a work no other can do;
Do it so bravely, so kindly, so well,
Angels will hasten the story to tell.”
I tied off the thread, and the silvery needle dipped down to the trousers’ waistband, which hovered over the space my lap once occupied. With great focus I stabbed into the green polyester fabric and pulled the needle through, stretching the thread taut.
“Dare, dare, dare to do right;
Dare, dare, dare to be true,
Dare to be true, dare to be true.”
After a few more loops, a pair of black-handled shears fluttered over from the small round table next to me and snipped the thread, leaving only a tiny tail poking out the fresh seam in the back. It was the umpteenth alteration in as many years for the old pants.
“That should hold Brother Pratt until next year,” I said to Slim.
The scrawny rodent scrambled down the wall and found the meager piece of cheese I’d left on his “plate”—a large brown button from an old trench coat. It sat atop a scrap of white linen and an empty spool I fashioned into a Parisian bistro table.
“Honestly though, it wouldn’t kill the man to update his wardrobe by a few decades.”
Slim, his cheeks bulging with cheddar, nodded in agreement.
I rose from the chair and glided to the clothes rack. There I hung the trousers and grabbed the blouse hanging beside them. The garment’s hem had come unraveled.
I searched through my many jars of spooled thread for the perfect shade to match the lustrous ivory charmeuse. The silk material is notoriously slippery and difficult to handle, even with fingers. Seams tend to pull and pucker, but a fine thread and a light touch make all the difference.
With the blouse and a bobbin I sat at the sewing machine in front of the attic window. It was my favorite spot in the house. The sunlight filtering through decades of dirt and grime provided the perfect illumination for my work, and enough concealment to keep from spooking passersby, not that we got many of those anymore.
Once there were a dozen or so picturesque homes on our cozy block, all in the Queen Anne style popular at the beginning of the 20th Century. There were manicured lawns and cheery gardens, happy children playing kickball in the street.
They were all gone now—the houses, the lawns, the children—replaced by empty lots and old refrigerators people dumped in the night. All that was left of the old neighborhood were three stories of rotting clapboard cladding held together by peeling paint and obstinance.
Located between the Utah Lake and the Wasatch Mountain Range, our view of Happy Valley consisted mainly of a sprawling railroad junction to the west and the Greenfield Cemetery to the north.
The graveyard’s owner—a breather by the name of Buzz Haglund—had been trying to get his porkulant fingers on our property for years, hoping to expand what must have been a lucrative operation. As Ben Franklin said, nothing is certain but death and taxes.
If I’d scraped away enough of the dirt, I could have seen the dismal place lurking outside the window, beckoning to me. Some nights I even thought I heard woebegone hymns such as the sirens would sing to lure sailors to their watery graves. Mother was always admonishing me never to get too close lest the boneyard claim me for its own.
Keeping Mr. Haglund at bay hadn’t been easy. So far I’d been able to communicate with him through email using the computer at the public library, though I feared he would show up on our doorstep any day and demand a face-to-face conference. Since I had no face, the thought haunted me.
I slipped the bobbin onto the spool pin and pulled the fine ivory thread through the guides, wending it over the tension disks and the take-up lever. Some machines had built-in threaders that made the process a snap, but I had to do it all by hand, so to speak.
The sewing machine was a 1917 Singer Model 66, its ebony enamel decorated with gold filigree and oblong crimson decals, the reason that particular model was known as the “red eye.“ Slender and curvaceous, the machine sat on a sturdy wooden cabinet with a heavy cast iron base and treadle—the foot pedal that drove the belt and needle. The rest of the world may have been electrified, but rocking the pedal back and forth allowed me maximum control over the stitching. It took a good deal of concentration, but I found the motion a comforting one.
“Daisy!” father yelled from downstairs. “My program’s about to start. Be a love, will you?”
“In a moment,” I called back in a singsong voice, trying to keep my irritation from bleeding through.
People who think life is only for the living have never met my family. Their limited definitions of life show just how small their own lives are. I say life is what you make of it, even if you’re bereft of it.
I perished in 1918 on my not-so-sweet 16th birthday, but I wasn’t going to let that get in the way of what I wanted. And what did I want? Apart from a trip to Paris, the most romantic city in the world, not to mention the center of the fashion world, what I wanted more than anything else in creation was to be loved and to love with all my heart, such as it was; to join the ranks of immortals like Abelard & Heloise, Tristan & Isolde, Romeo & Juliet, Scott & Zelda—the early years before she went mad.
Most people think the dearly departed are incapable of love, or indeed of anything, but you’d be surprised what we ghosts can do when we set our minds to it.
“DAISY!”
On the other hand, some of us would rather spend eternity watching endless hours of mindless television. Just don’t hold your breath if you expect most of them to be able to change the channel without help. That’s where I come in. I’m what you’d call a level 5 poltergeist. Poltergeist is German for noisy ghost, a term I resent by the way. As if I have nothing better to do than moan and wail or clank pots and pans together for no good reason. Honestly, people have the most peculiar notions about the dead.
For one thing, there aren’t as many ghosts as you’d think considering how many souls have passed through the world. I’ve heard tell there are now more than seven billion breathers on the planet, their numbers growing every minute. Each and every one of them is going to die someday, and yet only a small number become ghosts.
I couldn’t say with any certainty why some do and some don’t stick around after they’ve bid adieu to their bodies, but popular belief holds there are four primary reasons.
The first, as you might have suspected, is suicide, especially when accompanied by despair, which is usually the case with suicide. Though I suppose there might be an exception for cases of terminal illness. In any event, those who’ve taken their own lives are usually no fun to be around, as tortured in death as I suspect they were in life. Imagine how miserable it would be to learn that what you thought would be a release from your pain was in fact an indefinite prolonging of it. Ghastly.
The second reason someone might become a ghost is in the case of a violent death, especially murder, though any act of violence could be enough to tear a soul away from its intended course. I once met a man who died of a heart attack while watching a scary movie. He was a sensitive soul. Jumpy too.
The third ghostly group is comprised those who’ve committed especially heinous, sinister, or otherwise diabolical deeds, especially when they’ve harmed others. These are the murderers, the kidnappers, the puppy snatchers, the politicians, and other ne’er-do-wells. Whether it’s by divine fiat, an angelic judge and jury, or simply a sentence passed down by one’s own guilty conscience I couldn’t say. As the common refrain went, all will be revealed beyond the veil.
The fourth class of Earth-bound ghost is the spirit with unfinished business. And I know what you’re thinking—doesn’t everybody have unfinished business? No one gets to the natural or unnatural end of their life without feeling there was more to do or taste or touch or kiss. The difference is that those who become ghosts are quite obsessed with their loose ends. They can’t move on until they’ve righted the wrong or completed whatever task it is that’s keeping them here.
So where did that leave my family and me? That’s where the controversial fifth class of ghosts comes into play—the remainders who were forgotten or left behind due to a clerical error. I said it was controversial. The fact is, I didn’t know why we were still around, yet there we were, all together under the same roof for a century.
“I’m going to miss the beginning, Daisy!”
Quel dommage.
“You know, if you put a little effort into it,” I shouted back, “I’m sure you could manage on your own.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. We didn’t all die with your gifts.”
“Is that what he thinks? That I was gifted with these abilities?” Slim sniffed around my chair for more tasty morsels. He wouldn’t find any in our house. “I have half a mind to set him straight.” But I bit my tongue, such as it was. “Right now I’m working to keep the electricity flowing so you can continue to watch that infernal contraption.” I know I shouldn’t have taken it out on him, but all I did was work, and all they did was ask for more. I suppose that’s what I got for being clever.
I should explain that ghosts have different levels of abilities. A level 1 poltergeist, for instance, might do no more than go bump in the night. People often chalk them up to creaky floorboards or the house settling. A level 2 can brush against the hairs on your arm as it passes, or tickle the back of your neck, but that’s about as far as they go. If you’re a level 3, you should be able to push a penny across the floor without much of a problem, while a level 4 can manipulate heavier objects like a broom or a cat. My father spent years perfecting the bended spoon, but after we got our first television in 1955 he gave up silverware for the couch. Whatever ghostly craft he once acquired he’d long since forgotten.
As a level 5, the limits of my abilities are defined more by what I can’t do than what I can, and I’ve found there’s precious little I can’t accomplish when I set my mind to the task.
My mother liked to say that I could sew before I could walk. It was a skill that served me well in life, and well enough in death. Dresses, pants, vests, sweaters, shirts, shorts, skirts and skorts—whatever the customer needed, I could make them all. All I was missing were the customers.
As you might imagine, measuring someone for a gown when you don’t have a body can get awkward. But I had plenty of mending and darning work, thanks to our local drycleaner.
Mr. Kim’s hands had begun to tremble in his old age, and he couldn’t keep up with the workload. The man was remarkably open-minded for a breather, and didn’t seem to mind that my body was taking a dirt nap. Mrs. Kim, on the other hand, was far more superstitious about such things, and so my status as a non-living seamstress remained a secret between her husband and me.
In the beginning he would leave a basket of clothes on the front porch in the morning and pick it up the following evening. Things got considerably more complicated when he could no longer drive. That meant I had to wrap myself in a pile of laundry—long heavy coat, hat, gloves, boots, and a scarf wrapped around where a human face should be—and take two busses to Mr. Kim’s shop in the neighboring town of Orem. That was fine during the frigid winter, but I garnered more than a few sticky glances when it was 98 degrees and humid.
The work didn’t pay much, but we got by. After all, a ghost’s needs are few.
“I’m begging you, Daisy!”
Though some are needier than others.
Ignoring my father, I gently bit down on my phantom tongue and concentrated on threading the needle. Just when I almost had it—
“Ruth Specter, you come down here and help your father at once.”
My mother’s shrill voice and her use of my given name—which she only used when especially cross with me—forced the thread several inches wide of its mark and spurred Slim to scamper off into hiding.
If I knew death was going to be so trying, I would’ve tried to stay alive a lot longer. Not that I had much say in the matter.
“C’est la mort,” I said to myself. “C’est la mort.”
#
To look at our living room, you might have thought we were a perfectly ordinary family of breathers. Thanks to my obsessive-compulsive level 4 mother, the place looked practically unlived in. All three bedrooms on the second floor were another story. Each one was chockablock with boxes of food, water, medical supplies, and other preparations for the end of the world. A Latter-Day-Saint, or Mormon, is nothing if not prepared for the end of days. I just wished somebody had told mother the end of days had already come for us.
She wasn’t delusional or anything. Mother simply didn’t care to dwell on her obsolescence, which was why we had no mirrors in the house, save for the full-length mirror in the attic, which I needed for my work. Nothing reminded a person of the departure from their flesh so much as their lack of reflection.
I glided down the stairs past the assemblage of family portraits that began with my great grandparents, who lived in Holland, and sloped all the way down to mother and father. The only portrait conspicuously absent was mine. Back in the 1930s some misguided hooligan had burgled the house, oddly enough stealing nothing but my photograph. The portrait was taken when I was 14, a time I referred to as my larval stage. Must’ve been some pervert, I told my parents. They, being a naturally paranoid people, believed me.
“That’s a good girl, Daisy,” said father. Though I couldn’t see him, I sensed his presence, and always tried to picture him as he was when he was alive—thick around the waist, with a bushy red beard and bare upper lip, a look that was old-fashioned even at the beginning of the Twentieth Century.
“What channel?” I lifted the remote control from the coffee table.
“Five,” he said. “Judge Rolando.”
My father was obsessed with reality television, maybe because his own reality was so dreary. He often said life was wasted on the living.
“But wait,” I said, confused. “Judge Rolando isn’t on until five—“
The dustless grandfather clock chose that exact moment to chime five times.
“Oh no,” I said. “I’m late.”
Father chuckled. “We’re all late, my dear.”
“I have to go.”
No sooner did I drop the remote and turn toward the front door than a strident voice speared me from the kitchen: “Just where do you think you’re going?”
The kitchen door swung open, and my mother floated through, our living cat Puss dangling listlessly over her invisible arm. The folded calico, the last in a long line of feline companions to share the name over the years, appeared to levitate in the doorway. Nearly seventeen years old, Puss was thankfully past his ratting prime, allowing Slim to live out his golden years in peace.
“I don’t understand why you spend so much time among all those dusty old books.”
“To get away from your nagging, I suspect,” father muttered under his breath.
I smiled, though mother wasn’t amused. The air around her was all prickly, something only a ghost could see.
“I do hope it’s not some boy,” she said.
“Boy? What boy? There’s no boy,” I said unconvincingly.
“It wouldn’t do to go chasing after boys, Daisy. We’re Specters, after all. We have reputations to uphold.”
“Yes, I know—the oh-so respectable Specters. But I told you, I’m not seeing any boy.” Technically it wasn’t a lie. “And besides,” I said, “who gives a fig about our reputation? Whoever you might’ve been trying to impress is long gone, and the ones sticking around aren’t worth impressing anyhow. Now if you’ll excuse me.”
I would have liked nothing more than to yank open the door and slam it behind me as an exclamation point, but I reminded myself that not everyone in town was as accepting of ghosts as Puss or Mr. Kim.
“Just be careful,” said mother. “We hear such diabolical things on the news these days.”
“What are you worried is going to befall me out there? The worst has already happened.”
“Don’t sass your mother, Young Lady. She brought you into this world.”
“Yes, but she can’t take me out of it, now can she? No. I’m stuck here with you lot.”
I could feel mother wagging her head. “We must look after one another, Daisy. After all, we’re all we have in this death.”
If I had eyes to roll or a tongue to stick out I would have made use of them, but instead I threw caution to the wind and threw open the door just so I’d have something to slam on my way out.
But as I did, there standing on our front porch with his fleshy knuckles ready to knock was none other than Buzz Haglund.