Prologue

Ghosts

The first time I see the ghost I am on some back road heading home from a garage sale.

Immediately I think it’s a farmer inspecting his hedgerow, but as I pass and look back in the rearview, there’s nobody there. I then turn my head over my shoulder in disbelief but my eyes do not decieve me.

I realize this happens in stories where the narrator hallucinates some vision and calls it a ghost, but this is not that story and I am not that narrator.

I really should have brought it about, whipped a U-ey at the fishing pulloff by the creek, but for some reason, I keep driving.

When I get home, I grab a Hector Logger from the fridge, but I don’t open it immediately. I sit for a long time on the couch with the fan blowing on me. The cold can causes a fair amount of condensation, and this makes me wonder if the humidity didn’t cause some sort of mirage, like a will o’wisp in a swamp, except up the hill near the hedgerow. I think about this for an inordinately long time until Troy starts whimpering and wagging his furry tail. His peepee dance. I let him out, still not sure.

I think for a while about spectrographs. What if something near that hedgerow acted as a virtual prism of some sort and the angle of the sunlight created a phantom that my mind read as a person? I doze off with visions 19th Century spectacles like the Spectographia, scaring Victorian women and children.