BLACK PAINT SPAT ON the floorboards, speckling the aged, varnished wood like the outside of a child's Easter egg. I dragged the wet paintbrush against the mucky lip of the paint can. Relieving the thread-thin drizzles that followed my hand motion, I swiped a thick, black line across the mirror. My sneakered feet rocked with my shifting, eliciting a squeak as my weight tweaked the penny nails in their beds.

Funny. Anything could be normal if you did it long enough. From the outside, I imagined the scene: A guy, skinnier than a goddamn knife edge, half-hidden in a baggy red T-shirt, hunches in front of a large, ancient mirror. A pair of faded blue jeans grab at his bony hips. One ripped back pocket begs for someone to decide its fate to the tune of Should I Stay or Should I Go. From the side, he's stern-faced, but in frontal reflection, he looks much younger than his nineteen years. Vulnerable is the word. He looks vulnerable. Too many freckles chart his exposed skin. Even the fingers curling around the paintbrush have spots. Methodically, he dips and swipes, blacking out the two reflections in the mirror—

a nightly ritual.

As I said, funny how some stuff was considered normal to certain people. For instance, the idea of getting gussied up once a week—nice pants, button-downs, and sharp collars—to sit for the high side of an hour on a hardback bench, listening to a sweaty-faced-starch-collar rattle falsifiable rhetoric about sex, drugs, and rock n' roll like he knew his ass from his elbow boggled my mind. God wanted a miserable flock, I think. It made Heaven infinitely more desirable.

Sadly, shit only got worse after you died. These were the things people who liked sex, drugs, and rock n' roll were hip to. I knew this more intimately than most, except maybe my sister, but she'd shut that knowledge out to keep her frayed sanity intact for the both of us. I didn't blame her. I worried because I saw how the spirits trailed her and how tired they made her. Tired and torn up. The two weren't mutually exclusive, despite her denial. And ignoring the tangible or intangible didn't help you prepare for the inevitable. I should know.

I dipped the brush again and covered the last section of glass in paint, my eyes avoiding the reflection that watched me as I erased him. He (I guessed he was male, but I didn't know why) was a massive black shape that snagged light like a Venus flytrap, digesting it into nothingness. He had no facial features, no definitive limbs, only a vaguely human outline. He was a malignant shadow. Not my shadow. I already had one that slunk after me, folding dormant when the light shone too bright. This shadow was different. He stood over my left shoulder, unflinching, scaling my height by a foot or two. I was permanently numb on that side, thanks to him. My left shoulder and upper arm were pins and needles.

Sometimes, the cold crept to my neck. A quick, sentient finger-flick to remind me I wasn't alone. But the real kick in the nuts? Only I could see him.

The paintbrush dropped into the water bucket at my feet, released from my freckled grip. The brush broke the grey film on top, and the grimy wood handle settled cockeyed against the plastic side. Stepping back, I surveyed my handiwork for the thousandth time. The naked lightbulb dangling from the plaster ceiling overhead flickered as the fat body of a moth pip, pip, pipped against the hot glass with zero care, setting up the rest of the odd scene:

     The guy in red looks at the mirror. Fused to the wall, it's an obstacle he's tried to remove with no luck. Destroying it proves difficult as well. Once, he hit it with the toothy side of a hammer and blew out his bedroom window one wall over. Impossible, but true. Large and rectangular, the mirror itself is physically unimaginative. A plain wood frame, tiger-eye maple, maybe, beveled on the inside edge, set around a piece of flat glass. The old silver backing peels in places, and discolored liver spots pepper the surface, akin to the freckles he hates. However it came to be, the mirror is more affixed to the property than the hay barn outback.

The mirror was the only reflective surface I couldn't rightly control. A blanket didn't work. It continually fluttered off despite tacks. The paint stayed on the longest, but I found it in thin-skinned strips on the floor each morning, which meant I had to repaint the damn thing every night. It also meant The Rolling Stones could sue me for copyright if they ever had the mind.

I checked my wristwatch. The low-lit digital display read: 9:00 p.m. The chunky yellow rubber held my wrist about as well as my jeans kept up above my boxers. I twisted the band lightly to scratch an itch. Soon, I'd be awash in visitors and needed to knock off before they emerged.

After forcing the dented paint can lid back into place, I tossed one last glance at the coated mirror. It seemed harmless now, with nothing to see aside from drying bristle marks. The water-stained floral wallpaper behind the mirror launched to the forefront, bizarrely pristine compared to the rest of the room. There'd been a fire last year. The room still reeked of soot and burnt wood. Smoke damage wilted the surfaces, turning the ceiling grey in miraculous spin-art patterns. Charred walls. Fried curtains. Even the iron bedframe stuck to the floorboards; the mattress crusted in ash. We'd left it alone since that night, except for my visits. The smell wasn't the kind you appreciated—like a stank, wet dog, but way worse. But if I stared long enough at this wall, my eyes could forget what was behind me, at least.

An icy prick turned up the hairs at the nape of my neck.

"Yeah, I feel you," I said.

I turned to leave and switched off the humming lightbulb with the rough pull cord.

"Bastard," I muttered into the silence and locked the door after me.

The fire within those four walls did not affect the rest of the achy farmhouse. It should have. Really. We should be homeless, but we weren't. Despite the investigations, questions, and sleepless nights wondering who was at fault, no one could explain it. For reasons, I reckoned it was me. Amy refused that hypothesis as vehemently as she denied the ghosts that tapped her shoulders. But I owed Amy a lot, so I never argued when she said, "Enough was enough."  I ate my guilt in silence because I knew ghosts were real.

In the bathroom, I brushed my teeth. The puke-green of the tile, tub, and toilet mashed with the ugly yellow light from the wall sconces and changed my skin rotten. I could see the puss color on my hands as I dried them with a ragged towel—half sandpaper, half swiss-cheese—before popping the lid off an orange plastic bottle. Self-prescribing a flurazepam or two, I swallowed them raw.

A nightly ritual.

Natural sleep and I didn't live on the same block, never did. We weren't well acquainted when I was a baby, I think, and it showed.

My "normal" developed in diapers. Baby-me repelled at the sight of my reflection. My mother failed to make sense of it. The constant crying got to her, according to Amy. She'd leave me alone for hours in the crib or the canary Swyngomatic, rocking, rocking, rocking until the back of my head molded just a bit too flat. "Postpartum depression," Aunt Cindy said whenever she made interim visits to dust and stock the cupboards with shelf-stable food a nine-year-old could cook. P.P.D., a stilted acronym for a fancy word she'd memorized in a woman's magazine—the kind with bra-burning articles and titles like Spare Rib and Ms. In hindsight, I think Ma made a mockery of those words. Back then, I wasn't old enough to understand most kids got picked up when they cried, that other rear-ends didn't blister red from diaper rash, and that older sisters weren't responsible for tending formula bottles.

I was too young to understand there were two people inside every parent.

Life for me was unplanned (and has continued to follow that route). When she discovered I'd made an uninvited nest inside her womb, our Ma was finished having kids. But she pushed me out to spite her husband. I never met my dad. He wrote a way out of the story a few months into my gestation and left us all alone, so there was that.

(According to Amy, Ma drove him to it.)

Yeah, it was sad—the dick.

Amy kept me alive; this much I know for sure. She was the one who figured out my aversion to mirrors, too, even though it'd be years before I could fully articulate why, beyond sobbing "Uh oh!" with a shaky pointer finger. Amy started covering up shiny things, removing the mirrors (except the one in Ma's room), and pulling the window shades every evening. And it worked...sort of.

There was a bunch more to my behavior, you see. Mostly dead people and sometimes elementals. Demons I didn't mess with, although I often wondered if the black thing haunting me was a manifestation of one. There were misplaced things, too. The type who couldn't decide what they wanted to be in the afterlife: human or inhuman. Those babies liked the attic or the barn rafters, so I avoided both. 

I crawled into bed, drawing my quilt up to my chin. My chest was heavy, like bricks stacked on my lungs. At nighttime, they flocked in the spirits, the ghosts, crowding around in less of a line and more of an oppressive pile. The drugs helped me ignore the voices long enough to catch sleep. But as I dozed, I felt their bodies leaning over me, brushing my not-so-round head, whispering, "You're the one, Asa," "The one who can see," "Help me," in my ear as I passed out completely.

I STARTLED AWAKE TO the sound of bells ringing. The quilt twisted around my legs, and I kicked to free myself. My freckled chest was cold with sweat. Whenever I took the pills, I sweated. Bad  Fevers had nothing on sleeping pills, and I. Part of me thought it was from my other senses fighting off the hands that touched me at midnight while my brain was submissively unconscious.

Tin pings raked my eardrums with a long, drawn-out brrrriiinnggg—brrriiinnnggg—brrriiinnngg as the bells rang again, a floor below me. I reached for the bedside lamp and flipped it on.

My heart leaped backward into my throat and hid.

A little girl sat in the chair at the foot of my bed. She looked wrong. Half her face drifted away when she moved, rearranging into place a second or two after she settled. Her twin braids melted into a hint of shoulders. Her dress had a high collar and a skirt that creased the desk chair where her knees should've been. I fisted the blanket on either side of me, nails biting into the mattress.

Strange as it was, waking to half a stranger sitting unannounced in one's bedroom, that wasn't what befuddled my already fuzzy brain. Her eyes, or lack thereof, had my full attention doing backflips. Black pits stared at me. No curvature, no glint, nothing to suggest whoever sat across from me had ever been alive, but then she said: "Your sister is calling. She's in trouble," and I flipped across the bed to slam the second lamp on.

Artificial white light flooded my bedroom, washing the shadows away with fake warmth. I rolled back again to the sound of squeaky bed springs.

An empty chair half covered in discarded laundry sat unbothered in the corner. The little girl, if it was one, had vanished.

Brrriiinnnggg.

     Your sister is calling. She's in trouble.

"Shit!"

Ripping the quilt aside, I catapulted off the mattress. My bare feet pushed the shag accent rug beside the bed into ridges, and I stumbled, catching my balance on the tail end of a mean slide. My shoulder hit the door frame. I bounced into the hallway, and against the opposite wall, fibrous wallpaper brushed my palms as I steadied myself beneath a fading gallery of Shippy ancestors. None of them seemed happy in their frames. The Great Depression had taken more than their money.

Brrriiinnnggg.

I darted down the hall and hit the stairs, heels drumming the stair treads. Front door. Turn right. Quick left. Kitchen.

The pendant lamp suspended from the ceiling glowed amber through its stained glass shade, illuminating the round kitchen table like an off-color island. Behind the table, a brown phone rattled on the floral wall.

Breathless, I lifted the handset from the cradle. "Hello?"

"Asa, it's me." Amy's voice crackled into my ear. There was that tiredness. It traveled the wires and stuck to me.

I pinched the bridge of my nose between my thumb and forefinger, squeezing my eyes closed to clear my blurry vision. "What's wrong?"

Amy sighed, "You always know somehow."

"You never call otherwise," I said. I wasn't about to tell how I knew.

"Yeah..."

"Where are you?" I asked. The oven clock read 3:33. It was still dark out. Amy's shift was well over by this time.

"Police station."

"What? Why? Are you alright?"

"I'm fine. It's just something bad happened—"

"—What!—"

"—I found something bad."

She paused. I felt it through the phone, felt the discomfort. I wanted her to continue, to alleviate my imagination.

"I found a dead body."

A shock jolted through me. Smoke. Embers fall off fire-carved wood like fireflies in summer. The smell of cooked meat and the odd pinch of hunger that dutifully follows. And then, the sight of HER...

"Asa?"

"Do you want me to come and get you?" I asked, dazed. Then I remembered: "Fuck, I can't. I'm not on call. I don't have the van." The boss split night shifts between another Animal Control Officer named Wiseman and me. Tonight was Wiseman's turn to troll the streets when the raccoon calls came in. All I had was my six-speed on the front porch, Not a suitable ride for two on the empty stretches of the Salinas Valley 101.

"That's okay. Officer Lopez is gonna let me crash in holding till the seven a.m. bus. No one wants to waste the gas driving me home. That's fine. I wouldn't let 'em anyhow."

"Amy," I hesitated, "Amy, are you in trouble?"

She laughed, hollow and flat, "Naw, just tired."

"Okay."

"Go back to sleep. I'll be home in time for pancakes."

Click. The line hummed, vacant, a weirdly comforting noise until the operator signed on to scare the bejesus into you for lingering too long.

I hung the handset on the silver cradle and stood shirtless in the musty kitchen, listening to the steady tick from the metal clock atop the doorway. The quiet pressed on my nerves, and I took a deep breath to slow my racing heart.

A Libbey glass sat up-ended on the counter. I grabbed it, checked it was clean, and ran the sink faucet to COLD. After three gulps, I felt mildly better. The initial adrenaline rush faded, and suddenly, it felt like 3:40 in the morning.

Amy's cable knit cardigan draped over a kitchen chair, and I snagged it, plunging my wiry arms inside. The polyester blue/green hairs tickled my skin. I wrapped the loose sides around me, pretending the chill on my back was a drafty 1930s farmhouse and not the black mass I'd glimpsed in the chrome toaster while running the sink.

I tossed a tea towel over the toaster before I left.

Halfway to the staircase, the sound of footsteps stopped me short. Dirt crumbs on the worn runner prickled the soft bottoms of my soles as I listened. The footsteps were distant, but between my breaths and the nighttime protestations of the old house, someone—something—walked over my head. I trailed the low thuds by ear first to my bedroom, then several more shuffles to the burnt room, where the mirror lived.

I was alone. No one else lived here anymore, and Amy was still gone. There was no need to call out a tell-tale, "Who's there?" This was real life, not a B-movie with an audience craving a cheap set-up for a jump scare. And no part of me wanted to invite that possibility.

Burrowing further inside the thick sweater, I beelined for the living room. The sofa would make as good a bed as any.

I wouldn't be sleeping either way.

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