We were never more than a dream

I went tonight to the house where I grew up. As of last Halloween, the woman who had been our landlady still lived downstairs; my mother had spoken with her less than six months ago and although she was planning to sell the upstairs apartments, I had heard no reason not to trick-or-treat at her door as in past years, at least to say hello. But all the windows were dark, no porch lights, a garbage-bagged dumpster in the driveway, and when I peered through the front window, there was a piece of paper in a stranger's name tacked up inside the pane. The rooms behind were shadowy and bare. I had never been able to see the walls or the floor in that apartment before; she had always had curtains, carpets, shelves full of icons and photographs, everything closely crowded and bright and smelled of incense. When her husband was alive and we still lived upstairs, he would give me squares of chocolate with almonds every time I wandered downstairs. My father fixed their phone once, and their washing machine. Sometimes she made us tabouli. On the back porch, there was a spool of wire and a piece of furniture so broken, in the deep-sea glow from my cellphone I couldn't tell what it had been. The glass slides on the door were covered with dust. The slates of the back walkway had been dug up, so that I had to half-leap a trench and a pile of loose soil and stones to get into the back yard. The small, bristly pines were hissing in the wind, but the garage shed was locked. The grape arbor was still standing, brittle with brown vines, but underneath there was no untidy herb garden, no pads of moss, only dead weeds. When I walked back around the dumpster, the neighbor's security lights came on, which had been dark the first time I crossed the driveway; there were some trick-or-treaters, nine or ten years old, at their well-lit door. I have never quite so obviously been my own ghost before. Mostly I want her not to be one.

My poem "The Night Boat" was accepted by Strange Horizons. It is a soul-guide sonnet for watermelontail. This is the season. Still.

The cover art showed porch steps in a flashlight fan of brightness, warped and paint-cracked, casualties of wind and autumn rain, and someone's foot propped on the top stair where a pumpkin's Halloween grin had long since filled with water. Nobody's Home.
—"Chez Vous Soon"