The Ghost of Us is a literary speculative novel in progress. I plan to query in the first half of 2025. Feel free to get in touch if you’d like to know more. For now, here’s a brief impression from the first chapter:
Me and Ryan went digging through piles of stuff in the house of a dead family. The back half of the house had been crushed by a tree fallen in a storm, but that’s not what killed them. People just died sometimes.
It was morning and darker than it should have been when we got there. Gloomy with rain clouds getting heavier like gray sponges, making me sweat.
Ryan creaked open the door and dust poured out. I coughed. He pushed his head in, peered around. His long hair flipped dark across his eyes when he looked back at me with his tongue poking through the two-tooth gap in his smile like he always did. “You ready?” he asked, and I nodded.
It was dim in the house with no lanterns on. Messy and it smelled like chalk and piss. An old carpet in the big front room stained with dry, coughed-up blood. A stuffed bear toy propped on the yellow couch, like it was waiting for something. Ryan tossed a blanket over the bear because the eyes were too real.
The dead family had framed drawings of themselves hung on the walls. A busted, useless television in the corner. Plaster painted fresh white but only halfway done, old paint cans lined up orderly along an unfinished wall. There was a table where they must’ve sat each night for dinner. I hadn’t known them. Aside from Ryan and his family, I mostly stayed clear of the settlement people. But there was no mistaking it: this house was one of the clingy ones. Clingy because the people tried to hang on to the before-times. To the deadworld. Families like that could be dangerous. They were jumpy and quick to defend something that was already gone.
I took the house in slowly, adjusting myself to the shadows of the family. A warmth rushed through me as I ran my fingertips along the frayed edge of a quilt slung over a chair. Ryan was up the stairs, zipping around from room to room yelling noises like bam pow zoom and knocking stuff over.
“Hey, Ryan,” I yelled. “Anything good up there?”
“Just trash,” he said. A door slammed and metal clanged. “These people were boring as hell.”
It was true. It had been abandoned for months. Most people who were going to scavenge it had done so already, so we wouldn’t get stuck with competition. Once, a few years before, a whole family died in the house behind Ryan’s. We had gotten there first but weren’t alone for long. The living room was stacked floor to ceiling with hospital equipment. From a closet, we listened to two guys stab each other’s guts over a box of expired painkillers.
“Careful up there,” I said to Ryan. “You don’t know what the tree did to the floors.”
Ryan didn’t answer.
My steps left footprints in the dust across the creaking floorboards. The back of the house was darker, quieter. From somewhere came a dull buzzing. The buzz dug itself into my ears and I followed it down the hallway. The room I stepped into looked to be a bedroom. The toppled oak took up half the room now. One wall was busted open where the massive tree trunk leaned through at an angle from a knot of ripped-up roots in the backyard. The ceiling had collapsed, the roof above it too. A little sunlight broke through the clouds and splashed the purple flowers of the moldy wallpaper. On the warped floor lay three straw beds matted with rainwater and crawling with shiny little beetles.
The buzzing sound came from a drawer of a pink wooden dresser, tilting on three stubby legs in the corner of the room. Pink paint chips crumbled to the floor when I pulled the shelf open slowly, blood throbbing in my fingertips. A wasp flitted out, then another, then a hundred. They swarmed into a cloud with me in the middle, my lips sealed to keep them from piercing down my throat.
“Ghostly hell!” A few of the stingy fuckers got me before I shut the dresser drawer on them. Itchy little stings swelled on my neck and my wrist. I ran out, slammed the bedroom door closed. It snapped from its hinges and hit the floor with a dusty thud.
“You good?” Ryan yelled down.
“No,” I said. “Nope, nope, nope. This house is cursed.”
Glass broke and Ryan ran down the stairs. He grinned wide, dimples forming on his dirt-smeared cheeks, and didn’t bother to ask why I was hopping up and down, scratching my neck. He held a hand behind his back and stood with one leg pretzeled around the other. Whenever he stood like that, tangled up and swaying, he seemed so much younger than his actual fourteen years. Despite everything he’d gone through, he remained warm and glowing, and in that moment I felt pulled into his irresistible orbit.
“Got something,” he said, all giggly. “But you gotta promise you won’t laugh.”
“I can’t promise that.”
“Trevor, I’m serious. Don’t make fun of me again.”
“Okay, okay,” I said, forcing my face not to give me away.
From behind his back, he passed something plastic between his hands. A toy space helmet, probably from an old deadworld kid’s costume. It was filthy and cracked but I had to admit it did look like the real ones I’d seen in my books.
“Cool, right?”
I reached for it and he jerked it back, ducking into the bedroom through the empty doorframe. I followed and checked for stray wasps. Ryan had always had this fixation with outer space. He really thought he could go up there one day. After all, he would say, there’s still space stations floating around, and I just gotta get up there somehow. And I would say, Ryan, the farthest from home you’ve ever been is Michigan, so how are you gonna get all the way higher than the clouds?
“Just let me look,” I said. He handed the helmet to me slowly. It was heavier than I’d expected. I took it and tossed it up as high as I could and it got stuck on a piece of wood in the busted roof. Ryan’s jaw jutted out in disbelief. “Come on, spaceman,” I said. “Fly up there and get it.”
He pushed me. Not hard, but hard enough I fell on my back, my head right next to the wasps. Next thing I knew, he was climbing the fallen tree, which was tilted, so Ryan scrambled up pretty easy and almost reached the roof. The leaves had all died off. Jagged branches hung broken from strips of bark. Ryan made it to the highest point possible, where the oak tree came to rest against the intact part of the roof at the edge of the bedroom. He stretched an arm up and lifted onto tiptoes. His back foot scrambled against the bark.
“Get down, dumbass.”
He got himself balanced, holding onto a wiry branch. Then he jumped, reached for the helmet.
“I said get down. Please.”
He snapped off a piece of the branch and reached it up to wiggle the helmet. The helmet shook loose and tumbled down. So did Ryan.
The branches slowed his fall. He grabbed hold of one on his way down and hung there, panting and sweating, then dropped the rest of the way and made it all look casual. We both stood there quiet for a moment, just looking at each other. Then he picked up the helmet, put it on, and stuck a middle finger in my face. His own face was squished into the helmet and scratched from the branches.
He limped out of the bedroom and winced in pain. His pants were ripped where a branch had pierced through. A thin ribbon of blood glistened but I couldn’t see how bad it was.
“Does it hurt?” I asked.
“I’m fine,” Ryan said.
“I’m really sorry.”
“I’m fine.”
“Stop,” I said. “We gotta get you cleaned up right away.” He turned around to glare at me. Squeezed into the too-small helmet, his face was scrunched up and annoyed. “You want to search this house or not?”
I followed Ryan into the kitchen, where he wrapped a dirty old towel around his leg. He opened up all the cabinets. I didn’t know what to say, so I did the same thing.
It felt good in the cool, dark kitchen after being out in the hot morning. I’d slept awfully the night before, all tangled up in sweaty nightmares and mosquitos. I watched Ryan scramble onto the countertops, scanning the shapes of his shoulders for tiny signs of forgiveness or resentment. Seeing nothing, I pulled myself up to his level.
With my head in a musky cupboard, I asked Ryan if he was looking for anything special. My voice echoed in the dark space. I strained my eyes to check the faded labels of spice jars.
“Vinegar would be nice,” he said. “Dad uses it for everything.”
“That’s it?”
“Maybe some candy.”
“Wouldn’t that be great,” I said.
Swirls of dust ghosted from the cupboards while I waited for Ryan to speak.
“What about you?” he finally asked.
“Anything. Me and Sarah are running out of everything we can’t grow or kill.”
“Don’t you have stuff to trade?” He shut a cabinet and hopped down from the countertop.
I shrugged. Our meat was running low, and that was all we had to offer in the trade district. I scooched over on the black and white swirls of the marble countertop and tried a new cabinet. Empty again. “I’m trying to find a battery for Sarah’s music machine. Last time we found one that worked was years ago.”
I tried one final cabinet. The handle was busted off and I had to pry the wood ajar with my hunting knife. It splintered open. “Bingo,” I said.