Meghann Blackman | fiction | Interview

  
  
  
Interview


Ghost hunters interview me and ask why I’m in the kitchen. I show them my translucent hands, then coat them in flour. These hands are fluid in motion; ethereal smudges of plasm hang in their wake. They conduct an order across the top cabinets, dark wood serves as dramatic backdrop to a dusty follow me etched on two front panels. The men grunt, an audible eye roll, as they gather their gear and hunt through the house, guided by a handheld device measuring the temperature of my path. Blue and red and green make up the map and I am blue, blue and cold. Cold as the day I drowned in the lake; cold when the world was white snow dissolving into the water and blue and ice and muted green seaweed tied my ankles to the bed.

I use my medium to paint one pale print on my husband’s portrait, run a fingertip over his name, pause and listen for a sense he is here. Relieved, I exhale an unnecessary breath. He isn’t.

We continue; four lines dragged along the hall I papered and painted, and papered again; the c of a palm and lines of fingers mark my grip on the threshold between this quiet, mildewed place and the place where the air was warm and bright and the soft murmurs of mother to child lingered. I don’t go inside. Each faltering attempt has left evidence on the door frame like the lines we drew to congratulate ourselves on our young boy’s growth, but instead of pencil marks; cracks delineate the boundary between this life and the past.

The hunters are impatient, they interrupt me: why are you here? What do you want?

I notice my hands and through them, my dress, white and thin and remember: I have
 company! I smooth my hands down my hair and make sure the strands are in place, confirm the tail of my braid is still neatly tied, and that’s when I see I’m not wearing shoes. I remember: my feet don’t touch the floor.

We continue the well-worn path into the bedroom with striped wallpaper and two dressers and a tattered marriage certificate in a broken-glass frame. Missing: a stuffed bear, a crystal goblet, a pair of gold-rimmed eyeglasses, and fidelity. I am there, lost at the foot of the bed, reliving that day, John’s strong arms wrapped around my waist clutch me before loosening and I am falling into the lake. I reach for my son watching in the window, but my fingers tighten around air then water as I sink. Fat flakes fall and melt on the surface, and I think of how much he will love playing in the snow.

The closet door creaks above a siren emitting from the device, an echo of a wail I no longer remember comes from me and the hunters find my hands resting on a soaking wet letter, but they don’t seem to notice. Finally, a moment of clarity, I see two powdery thumbprints over the signature; one man wipes them away and reads: Yours for eternity, Edith, and I'm back in the kitchen under rosy light with her hand on my arm, the touch resonating through my body.