He
Said He was Drunk When He
Dropped the Candle
That
Set the House on Fire
Juleigh
Howard-Hobson
We were burned
alive right here, before we
turned into
ghosts. We haunted the ashes,
haunted the burned
beams and the charred stone, then
we haunted
nothing. This place came to be
a tangled patch of
bushes and grasses
over time. Nobody
remembers when
we were children
here. There used to be more
to our world than
rain and wind. We weren’t
wanted, we
children, our father hated
us—well, he
wasn’t
our real father, our
real father was
dead, although he didn’t
come to meet us
when we died. We waited,
thin shadows in
the smokey waste of where
we used to live,
but our father never
came. He must have
found a way to not be
a ghost. We
didn’t. We haven’t. Despair
is all we can do.
We can’t get over
the shock of dying
or the agony
of the process. It
hurt. Bad. We burned in
our nightclothes,
screaming into hot brightness
that consumed
everything. When we woke, there
was silence, no
pain… no house… that was when
we found out we
were ghosts, our graveless.
spirits
forever
haunting empty air.
