A Vocabulary for the Haunted
by Kathryn Kulpa
Carte Blanche
When the man with the white sneakers comes to inspect our house, he is given carte blanche. That means white card, but I don’t see any cards, only a tape recorder and microphone and lights and a boxy, old-fashioned camera. He walks through our house, looking for ghosts. His tape recorder crackles. He carries a pencil and a yellow legal pad. Every so often a needle on his recorder will quiver and he’ll point like a hunting dog, motioning all of us to be quiet.
Tiptoeing around here like a damned gumshoe, Grandpa says. He says that’s what they used to call detectives, because they wore shoes with rubber soles.
He is a detective, in a way, Mother says. A psychic detective.
Grandpa pours himself a bourbon and snorts, but he can’t do anything. The house is in Mother’s name.
Sibilant
The man in white sneakers walks softly, quietly, so he won’t scare the ghosts away. When he speaks it’s a whisper, the way I imagine ghosts would speak. How long, he asks, have we felt the presence? The last syllable drawn out, sibilant,like the sound of a snake, or the way my father used to do Lord Voldemort’s voice when he read to me at bedtime, and Mother would say stop, you’ll give her nightmares, but I would beg for him to keep going.
If he could still read to me at night I know I’d fall asleep. But he can’t, and sleep runs away from me, harder to hold than a ghost.
Genius
Grandpa gets mad when he sees Sneaker Man pulling books from the shelves and opening up desk drawers that aren’t his to open, but Mother says the man is a Sensitive and we must trust his methods. He is thorough and he is a genius and do not interfere with him, she says. A genius means someone with exceptional intellectual ability but the man didn’t know you had to switch on the power strip to boot up the computer so I’m not sure that’s really true.
Anticipation
Mother talks about slave-trading ancestors and stolen tribal lands but I don’t think we need to look that far back for our ghosts.
Once before my father died I saw a thin, white figure walking from window to window. The ghost was peering through the cream-colored curtain sheers, like my mother in her stylized wedding photo, one gloved finger drawing the curtain aside. Anticipation, that photo was labeled. A state of hopeful waiting. I thought the ghost was waiting too. I must be quiet, I thought, or the ghost will hear.
Then the figure turned around, and the chiseled skull resolved itself into my father’s face.
What was he waiting for? He never said. I wish I hadn’t been afraid to ask.
Sublimated
The man in white sneakers walks into my room when I’m doing homework, which is just rude.
It is important for him to have full access, my mother says.
I say, it is also important for me to not have a creepy guy walk in on me when I’m undressing.
Have you even found any ghosts yet, I ask Sneaker Man.
He says it is difficult, sometimes, to identify the presence in a house. He says a house can be haunted by spirits of the departed, or by a poltergeist.
A poltergeist, he says, when I don’t ask, is a mischievous, non-embodied being that draws upon the energy of living beings. Often, he says, upon adolescents. Their vibrations are particularly strong, he says. Their sublimated sexual energy.
The ceiling fan in my room turns on and spins all on its own, the way it does. The light flickers and the fan spins faster, faster. The pull chain bangs against the glass light fixture. Clink, clink, clink. The fan shakes, the way it does.
Stay out of my room, I tell him.
Vibrational Frequency
The man in the white sneakers has a light that never goes out. He says ghosts could be standing right next to us, but we wouldn’t see them. He says they could be shouting in our ears, but we wouldn’t hear. He says this has to do with vibrational frequencies and the visible light spectrum.
Our upstairs hallway throbs with a blood-red light that makes all of us look like ghosts. I tack a sheet of black felt cloth on the back of my door so the light won’t find me. So I won’t hear sounds I don’t want to hear.
Sometimes I hear them anyway.
Aquarium
My mother tells me a story about vibrations. She says dogs bark at some people and not others because they can sense people’s vibrations. They can tell if someone has evil intentions.
I’ve heard this story before.
I want a dog more than anything. A dog would protect me from evil intentions. A dog would curl up at the foot of my bed and growl to keep the ghosts away. Instead of the clink, clink, clink of the fan I would hear the thumping of my good dog’s tail.
But Mother won’t let me have a dog, or a cat, or a white ferret named Draco. All I have is a tank of fish.
At night the dim green light from my aquarium spreads like mist through my room. The fish take no notice of me, but I imagine myself in their translucent bodies, swimming through fake plastic reefs, darting in and out of the fake plastic sunken ship, searching for the body of Leonardo DiCaprio, lying eternally on the ocean floor.
If ghosts in houses walk hallways at night, do ghosts in the ocean swim?
I lie silent as a fish and listen to padding, gum-shoed footsteps in the hall, the creak of my mother’s door. My fan comes on and spins, the way it does. The fan sways. My bed sways. A crack waltzes its way across the ceiling. The pull chain swings like a noose.
Kathryn Kulpa is a New England-based writer with stories in Flash Frog, Monkeybicycle, New World Writing, and Wigleaf. Her work was selected for Best Microfiction 2020 and 2021. Find her at kathrynkulpa.com /@KathrynKulpa.
