when the ghosts crawl home, i will line the door with lamb’s blood and press my fingertips to the cross above the bedroom door. they will seep into the soil and when it rains, earthworms will burst through their diaphanous bodies like bullets. they will bleed into the trees and when the wind rises, their wails will resonate through the clatter of the birch leaves and the sway of the pale, watching branches.
i will look out the window and see their eyes in the flickering street light, in the wildfire fur of a fox, bones protruding as it lies dead on the side of the road. they will be everywhere, but they will not cross the door. *this is mine,* i say. *this is my house and this is my pain—see the way the lamps burn low and the music drifts between rooms. you have no place here.*
the ghosts will never know what it is to exist, how it aches like a piercing through cartilage, like a rotted tooth, like a stitched wound. they will never stand in the wind and feel it between their fingers, between each gossamer strand of hair, as the bones rot and the flowers grow and the laughter sings like church bells, like the rooster’s cry across the street as the clouds part for their golden maiden. i have risen and slept for seventeen years, made friends and lost them. i have known birdsong and i have known silence, the power outage, the snowstorm, the soft glow of christmas morning, the smell of elementary school gyms, the jingle of old cartoons, the crunch of cheap halloween candy. how beautiful it is to exist. how painful it is to live.
how the heartstrings tie themselves in gnarled bows and how the blood runs dry and how the strings weave themselves between graves. children laughing in the park, smelling of summer, scraped knees and fingers stained red with discounted fruit. it’s been a century since i was child. it was only yesterday. how cruel it is to remember and how tragic it is to forget. it will kill you but it will taste like the summer of 2012, when the sky was electric blue and the doves cooed like choirs in the morning haze of august. the ghosts whisper in the night and i let them.
i lean out the window, feel the wind and the dew and the starlight, their white eyes watching. *this, all of this, is mine,* i say. *what you will never have. see how the silence is warm and the noise is warmer and dinner is warming on the stove. see all of this and know it was not easy, but it is mine.*
Mia Romero
Grade: 12 / CEGEP I
Regiopolis-Notre-Dame Catholic High School
Kingston, ON
“There wasn't any specific trigger or definitive inspiration. It just came to me randomly. I was in the car, looking out the window on the drive home, and I think it might have been raining or at least cloudy. Out of nowhere, I just thought of the first few words: "when the ghosts crawl home." I was like, "wow, that's punchy," and I immediately wrote it down in my notes app. The rest of it came pretty naturally after that.”
Bio
Mia Romero is a grade 12 student from the small town of Sydenham. She will be attending Queen’s University for English in September, and hopes to become a published author in the near future. She focuses her writing on many things, including grief, love, and identity.