She couldn’t sleep last night. She turns on the kitchen sink, let’s the water run, tests its temperature with the back of her hand. Her hands are cracked at the seams, blood dried and caked around her nails and between her fingers like tattoos.
The dishes are everywhere. She walks around the room collecting them in a shallow yellow bucket that she bought at a thrift store a few years ago. The kind busboys carry around restaurants. The kitchen sink runs in the background like a white noise app. It’s almost soothing. Stained coffee mugs lie half empty on the end tables, buttery popcorn bowls on the floor, plates of chicken bones on the coffee table. Every surface has some kind of dirty dish on it. The whole first floor is a Home Alone trap of dirty dishes.
It used to only happen on New Year’s Day. She’d go to bed and wake up in a dinner party graveyard. Now, it’s most mornings. The dishes have multiplied like a plague or mice.
She plucks a pie-sticky fork from between two couch cushions.
She’s tried everything to escape. Staying up all night. Throwing away all her dishes. Just refusing to wash them. Nothing worked. Any evasive action and they’d arrive each morning with greater ferocity.
She finds a juice glass rolled beneath the ottoman and has to wipe up the thin yellowy liquid puddled on the hardwood.
It’s been a difficult few years since the arrival of the dishes. Her longtime boyfriend left her, followed by a smattering of men she met online who wouldn’t even stick around to help her start the soaking process. She missed out on a round of promotions at her law firm, then missed out on another round of promotions. Now, she barely even works there, just consults clients from her home office. She’s moved twice. About a year ago, she joined a support group for the haunted. She stopped moving after that. Everyone there will tell you: houses aren’t haunted, people are.
She finishes the dish round-up by collecting a particularly soy-sauce saturated set of ivory chopsticks from the ceiling fan and heads back into the kitchen.
The support group met on Wednesday nights at a pre-school. They sat in a tiny rainbow of chairs, telling stories about things you couldn’t believe. The walls were lined with cotton ball clouds glue-sticked to blue construction paper, little kid’s names misspelled in glitter in their corners. The woman who ran it, Marcy, a pre-school teacher obviously, gave the flu to anyone she emailed. Marcy had had the flu herself for about a decade, vague fever, chills, runny nose. She kept a box of lotion infused tissues by her side at all times and drank Pedialyte from a thermos. She often said, “We’re not here to figure out why us; we’re here to figure out why we deserve happiness anyway. Although, if I never found out that Pediatrician was married, I doubt I’d still have a mild fever.”
She sets the bucket of dishes down with a clatter on the marble island in the kitchen and pushes up her sleeves, like prepare-for-war, dishes. Despite her career setbacks, she has found significant time to day trade while working from home and has done quite well. In a year, barring tragedy or acts of God, she’ll own her house (and it’s a nice fucking house). In five, she’ll be able to semi-retire from the law firm.
At her support group, it’s only women. Men are rarely haunted or rarely notice. One woman, her name is Brenda or Barbara, something mean that starts with a b. She’s a medical rep who travels a lot for work and is followed by birds of prey. Hawks and owls and falcons. They drop small dead animals around her all day and poop on her car. She found a vole in her purse once. A gold finch landed in her Starbucks with a splash before an all-division video conference. She tries to think of them as her protectors, that they’d eat the eyes or livers of any men who tried anything. They couldn’t stop her girlfriend from leaving while she was in Vancouver peddling plastic arteries. Her girlfriend took her records and her bird-watching binoculars, which felt like a particularly vile betrayal.
She starts washing with a coffee mug. Something simple. The kind of dish where you know what you’re getting. No surprises. She digs the green sponge into the heart of the coffee mug, lets the dish soap and warm water sting the cracks in her fingers.
At her support group, a man did come once. He didn’t share. She caught up with him afterwards, asked why he’d come to a thing like that if he didn’t have anything to say. He said, “Mine didn’t seem as bad, after hearing everyone else’s.” She gave him a look like tell me. He shrugged, said, “Sometimes, I wake up and all my food is gone.” They’re linked somehow. Her with the dishes. Him with the food. It’s so obvious it hurt her heart. She didn’t tell him though. He heard her story when she shared, when she stood up from her little rainbow chair and announced her ghosts to the room. He heard everything and he didn’t notice. So she just told him, “It’s probably a homeless person.”
She stopped going to group after that. She doesn’t need anyone else. She has her ghosts. She likes to imagine the party they threw. The laughter. Loud music. Wine and appetizers and flirtations reciprocated. Maybe even a few rounds of charades. She likes to think the ghosts are happy, wild, free. She likes to imagine this other life happening parallel to hers. She likes to imagine how alive her house could be.
MJ McGinn received his MFA from Adelphi University and was a VCCA resident in 2019. His work has been named to the Wigleaf 50 best very short stories and has previously appeared in the Guernica/PEN flash series, New Flash Fiction Review, Firewords, Bridge Eight, Lost Balloon, and elsewhere. He lives and teaches in Philadelphia.
