The ghosts in the streets don’t bother me now as they once did. Though the stare of the dead is a cold and empty one, it hints at a deepness behind those transparent facades. Their solemn faces are so youthful despite their lifelessness and wispy abstractions, bodies shimmering as if underwater and standing perfectly still in the gusting breeze. They wander without care or aim or purpose like horses over the endless plains, and in a way I long for it. Their freeness is innocent as days long come to pass. Some days, when the ache of the world hangs heavy, I whisper to them at the edge of sleep in the nighttime. Their eyes glimmer in the closing darkness but betray little feeling. Then in a sideways glance they’re gone, and all that’s left behind is the living.

My father was a strong man and a good man, and never deserved to die curled over in bed as the worn-out husk he became. I remember just a month before when we sat on the porch together and watched the deer run wild over the hills. He lay just so with his feet up on the railing and his hat tilted on his head, an easy smile on his face as he rolled a cigarette with his leathered fingers. He was loose with drink and his movements were slow and heavy but soft. Often, I was so entranced by the way he glided through the world that I missed what he had to say, but I remember the way he whispered then that the howls of the coyotes were only lullabies to their pups in the nighttime. As we sat there in that perfect world, the sun fell below the horizon and all the endlessness crumbled away.

Only soon after, as my father lay so skinny in his sickbed I watched him in rapture, desperate for the education in his ways never fully to come. Mother wept for the man, but to me he was more than that. My father couldn’t say much before he passed, but his will and testament spoke for him. Take care of mother. His horse. The cattle, the peeling walls of the old house, the crumbling fence line. Hang his portrait among the many on the walls of the dining room and be a good old boy. Simple words and yet he might as well have said carry the world on your shoulders. The eyes of his portrait studied me at every turn. When the last breath passed the lips of the strong man turned to bone, I was still not ready.

In the time after death, the cattle grew thin and the horses uneasy and all the fence posts could not be repaired by myself alone. The ghosts arrived for the first time, and though I tried so dearly I could not spy my father among them. Mother withdrew as I spent days in the hills with the horses with all I knew and all I should know. Out on the plains, the setting sun always painted the sky the deepest magentas as it fizzled out. I liked to watch the ends of cigarettes burn red in the nighttime, watch the silhouettes of the horses slowly disappear. In the stillness and the silence I dreamt, and sometimes realized only then just how much it all burned.

The day the roof came in and the first cattle died for lack of feed, mother packed a bag and instructed I do the same. She had her dreams and I had mine, and though we never shouted when we fought, she became like an enemy. My father’s grave and his father’s and his father’s before him lay on this land, and I would not be the boy to leave it. And yet the testament bore instructions and her name was on them. All we had were the hills and the cattle and yet they were not enough for her and so she wept at the sight of me in the ten-gallon hat of my grandfather. In my love or my weakness, I said yes for the dead as the ghosts became clearer, the sky fuzzier, all the colors duller.

On the last night in the old house, I went out and saw the cattle, so thin and brittle my father’s reflection floated in their watery eyes. They held a quiet wisdom, almost comforting in their solemnity. Father used to say they were born old souls. I wept for them as old friends and in the tall grasses I knelt and leaned against the fenceposts for the last time. I could not bear to look at mother. The ghosts clouded my vision so greatly I could hardly see beyond them. The stars bled and the land ached, and the old house creaked as it crumbled to dust on the final night in the forgotten paradise.

The men in suits came in a shining new car and collected the deed and handed mother a sum in an envelope. We rode off in a truck with the horses in tow to the town in the distance, a place of rust and forgotten dreams, a place you are born in or escape from. As the house shrank away into oblivion, I could recall only the cattle in the fading sun. The lights of the town chopped jagged through the night sky as we arrived. Men and dogs prowled the streets and drunks spilled from the bars and sleepwalkers stood waiting on the street corners. Rusted cars groaned by and filled the streets with great black clouds like weather from the underworld as their brake lights shone in the hollow eyes of those too afraid to die. The ghosts were so heavy, and they hung their heads. They did not speak and stood unmoving in their ten-gallon hats, with their silver revolvers and calloused hands, just shadows in a city of walking dead living.

​

Teen Ink Editor's Choice