No Ghosts Allowed
/Hannah Martin
The house at the end of the street is on fire. It reminds me of the fireworks the Russo’s next door are always setting off at night. Italian kids lighting Roman candles that hiss up like spacecraft taking off through my bedroom curtains. They cast shadows on my popcorn ceiling and make little faces that stretch and disappear. Mom says the people who live in the house at the end of the street cook amphetamines in their bathtub. When she says it, I see a bath filled with tang, choppy like someone’s just jumped in.
I’m standing in the middle of the street. The wind’s making all trees in the neighbors’ yards look like they’re working up the courage to step out into the road with me. It’s dark out but the asphalt is still warm from this afternoon. The summer has been all melted grape popsicles and sticky fingers and raw red feet from not walking in the shadows. The man on the news stands in front of a bunch of sweating suns and says hottest on record. Mom calls it an incinerator. We sleep with all the windows open and it sounds like the cicadas are inside our house.
Mom’s in our kitchen listening to the radio and cleaning the grout with powder bleach and no gloves again. She does this now that the boys are all gone. Ronnie, Jackie, and Dad, in that order. My big brother Jackie wasn’t looking, and my baby brother Ronnie fell in the pool without even splashing. We got him the deluxe infant casket with blue satin inside. Then two months later, Jackie died too. Mom said if his motorcycle hadn’t slid under that semi-truck, he probably would have drunk himself to death anyway. Dad left and now Mom says he’s as good as dead to us which makes me wonder what he is to other people.
A clown, Mom says.
And I imagine Dad slowly painting white over the pockmarks in his cheeks.
A dog, she says.
But I can’t imagine Dad as a dog, the image comes out wrong—he has the body of a German Shepherd, but his head stays the same.
Nobody’s noticed the glowing house yet. Everybody’s windows are dark except for a few, which are laughing and flickering blue. I’m not allowed out this late at night and it feels like I am at an amusement park after closing time, like I might see a neighbor in only half his costume. All the backs of the flamingos on Mrs. Carlisle’s lawn are glowing silver from the moon. They’re pointing toward the house at the end of the street, saying that way with their beaks. I hop one foot at a time down the cool yellow lines in the road.
At night, Mom talks to God. I hear them on the phone in the kitchen when she thinks I’m sleeping. She cries and plants her little wet seeds into the holes in the receiver. Says, God help us. I come down and tell her that my stomach hurts. It’s a lie I make up, so she’ll rub her tender red fingers and cracked knuckles over my belly. One time, she hung up the phone and pressed a finger inside my belly button. The song playing on the radio was singing about heaven and I couldn’t tell if she was laughing or crying.
Up close, the windows and front door of the house look like a palely drawn face winking at me in the flames. The trees behind it have all caught.
This Halloween will be exactly one year. Last year I was going to go as the little dipper. I glued those plastic glow-in-the-dark stars onto my clothes and laid on our kitchen table under the ceiling light during breakfast, so I’d really glow. But I never got the chance. Mom says this year I can dress up as anything I want except a ghost. No ghosts allowed.
Some dogs have escaped. They run past me with tongues hanging—their backs smoking.
Whenever I ask mom where Ronnie and Jackie are now, she says with God in heaven. When I ask her where that is and how to get there, she pulls my head to her chest and I can smell the Comet.
The lady singing on the radio says we make heaven a place on Earth.
I can feel the heat in my eyes. On my chapped lips. I am the color orange! My arms and legs are shimmering! The chain-link fence in front of the house is bending like a metal wave that’s going to break. The wind blows little embers that look like birds swooping across the cement and around my feet. I don’t hear any sirens and, even if I did, there’s nothing they can do. Even the cicadas have gone quiet. I look over my shoulder and I can see our house at the end of the street, dark except for our kitchen light. I can’t see her, but I know she’s there, with her knees on the tile and a scrub brush in her hand going back and forth. And the radio is playing Heaven, Heaven, Heaven.
Hannah Martin is a writer currently living in Los Angeles, California. She holds a master’s degree in creative writing from Otis College of Art and Design and is currently working on her first novel.
