By Jade Braden
So the first mistake I made was telling my boyfriend that a ghost lived in his kitchen, but the first mistake made was probably that he had moved into such an unassuming run-of-the-mill apartment complex that just so happened to have ghosts walking through it; yet the trouble didn’t start until I told him about the kitchen ghost (there were other ghosts before that, but either he didn’t believe it or didn’t mind them so much) because when I told him about the kitchen ghost we were incidentally in the middle of a Paranormal Survivor marathon (which he later confessed put him more on edge than I thought) so I casually mentioned that there’s a ghost who likes to sit on his sink and he said “don’t tell me that” but by then the veil had been cast back and we couldn’t exactly un-acknowledge that there’s an incorporeal roommate who, more likely than not, just monitors the steady leak in the kitchen sink and pays no mind to the cat, who I am actually more grateful for now since we can just blame any bumps-in-the-night or disorder on twelve pounds of grey fluff instead of a floating hunk of shadow who may or may not have moved my keys last Wednesday (yes, I choose to blame the cat), but all this is to say that the real problem was when the bedroom wall started bleeding, and of course we tried to blame the cat, and by blame the cat, I mean I hoisted him up onto the bedside table and tried to coax him to bat the wall to prove to myself that he had been on the table and had killed a bug, dragging it downward and leaving a perfect streak with a dried blood-bead at the bottom; however, this fantasy was dispelled when my boyfriend caught me trying to recreate the scene of the crime and suggested that it couldn’t have been the cat because the line was perfectly up-and-down (suggesting gravity rather than a cat’s paw as the moving force) and that there were no bug guts at the top of the streak which really ruled out bug-gore entirely and left us with a curious bleeding wall which I mocked as “a half-assery of spectership”, causing my boyfriend to go quiet and tell me “don’t say that, it might hear you” before going to bed and falling quickly asleep, leaving me (and the cat, I suppose) alone in the quiet apartment, waiting for a face to materialize out of the darkness, or a hand to grasp me when I got up to get water, or possibly—and this is the best case scenario—a shadow-thing to apparate out of the wall, turn (out of courtesy) when it sneezes, sneeze, and accidentally leave another perfect bloodstain on the wall before looking back at me—petrified in bed and clutching the blanket—to say “sorry about that; allergies, you know?”
Jade Braden is an author and artist based in southeast Ohio who once won an award for poetry, is now working toward a degree in fiction, and often writes about ghosts, gals, and God.
Photo by Jade Braden.