Ghost Story by Matt Dhillon After Victoria Chang I. Appetite died in the summer. News came through the phone. It was the middle of a meal. Then it was the end. Things were being put into boxes. And my father was one of them. He was going in a box like something left over. Which you could say is what each year had become for him. I labelled all the boxes Never with thick black sharpie. Still, I had to find space for them. I slid nevers between bones in my shoulder. They went in like blades. Something was closed that would stayed closed. Appetite died surrounded by teeth. The teeth survived. I thought a new set would grow in. But I remained the same. Small and lost kid I’d always been. Trays appeared next to relatives. Flames lit in the eyes of burners. Tupperware snapped shut. Beans followed bread. Bread followed rice. Curry followed yogurt and buttered chicken. Of all muscles it was the jaw that kept moving. After every thought had gone to sleep. The passage of night was a kind of chewing. Fat on the lips. It was grief. It was good. II. The lock died unwillingly sometime in the night. My father had attached it to the front door. A steel bar in a brass cylinder. It was part of his ongoing feud with all things outside of his wishes. Which is what I was. After that there was an inside and an outside to his anger. After that you could watch the deadbolt shut across his eyes. His thick brow. This is what a wall is: the invention of inside and outside. My father was built like one. Square and hard as a brick. A mind made for stacking until it was made up. But I think he was really the door. I passed through my own dark interiors. The plural of surprise is deer slipping away. Velvet shadows on the wet fields. I find their trails still in the woods. Grazing in the footprints of the old homesteads. Nothing now but a chimney in a ring of grass. At what point do the things around you become you? To be a house stripped for its wood. The roof gone. The floor removed. Is to be an idea. The deer visit for sleep.
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