Here is something I am reluctant to admit about myself: At sixty-eight I am truly an old man. Here is something else I am reluctant to admit: I have finally gone completely insane. It happened a little bit when my wife and daughters died, and I thought it felt good so I let myself sink all the way into it. And it does feel good. Ever have something feel good? That's what this feels like.   

Right now, I'm sitting on the couch in front of the fire place. I'm really warm but I can't pull myself away from the fire. I've got the photo album out. There's this photo of my old dog Spencer laying under the kitchen table. Sitting in a chair next to him is a ghost. She's an elderly woman. This photo is far from a mystery to me. If I wanted to see this woman in person, I could walk to my bedroom and there she's be, brushing her hair. I might just do that. She is a beautiful woman. I enjoy looking at beautiful women, ghost or not. I wrote a poem about her once. It went something like this:

I want to watch you
run a brush
through your
hair,
several times,
while you look in
the mirror,
not at me

She is not the only ghost in this house. She has two daughters that wander around here with her. An obvious thought might be that I've created these images to deal with my loss. Personally, I don't think I've got a clever enough brain to conjure up something like that; I think it's pure luck that the ghosts that roam around my house so closely resemble the things I miss so much. Here's another poem I wrote about the old woman:

Your soft hand
would feel good
on this old man's
chest tonight

Short and sweet, is how I like my poems. Right now, I've just discovered another ghostly picture. I've never seen this one before. The picture is of me giving my youngest daughter a bath in the kitchen sink. This was taken probably thirty or forty years ago. It's hard to believe I was ever such a young man. There in the corner is the old woman again. The photograph is old and weathered, so it's difficult to make out the expression on her face. She looks bored, though.

My friend Kurtly who I've known for a very long time is the only person I've ever told about these ghosts. He is a strange man. Stranger than me, if you can believe that. He has claimed to have has several supernatural encounters, even one with the devil himself. He's suggested that I attempt to communicate with these ghostly ladies. So far it hasn't happened. I'm too nervous to talk to them. Kurtly wants me to ask them things like, "Why are you here?" and "What do you want?" I can't imagine saying something rude like that to any of them. I even once caught myself holding a door open for the youngest of the three. She gave me a shy little smile. I'll be goddamned if I'm going to go up and ask them, "Why are you here?" or any of that other rude shit Kurtly wants me to say to them.

Before the ghosts and everything, I was seeing this shrink. She was a kind and smart woman. I would talk to her about being sad. I liked talking to her, but I also didn't like talking to her, if you know what I mean. I remember every week when I came into the office for my appointment, she would say, "I'm proud  of you for not killing yourself." She would say this because I told her about a nasty habit of mine to write suicide notes. I wrote about one every night, thinking that the one I had written the night before wasn't good enough or whatever. I didn't really plan on killing myself, but I wanted a good suicide note handy because I knew if I didn't, I would have calmed down by the time I was able to write one. They were always really short, and almost came across like a telegram. An example would be: If you are reading this then that means I am dead. I killed myself. Sorry about that. Another example would be: If you are reading this then that means I am dead. Give all my things to Kurtly; even the things he doesn't want, give them to him anyway. I haven't kept these notes; I burned them all last month because I didn't want my ghostly ladies to find them and think I was some kind of lunatic. They were all pretty stupid and I'm glad they're gone. Another example would be, Hey, I'm dead. Surprise sur-fucking-prise.

I can see the oldest of the daughters now, walking through the kitchen and into the hallway. She's moving her hips along with the music I've got on the record player. Her hair's full of these broad curls that might be mistaken for tangles if seen from a distance by someone who didn't know how pretty she was. You wouldn't imagine a girl as pretty as her letting her hair get all tangled up. She's got a little pink beret pinned up. It reminds me of a little ship, being tossed to and fro in the raging sea of her curls. Right now, she just went down the hallway and out of my view.

I'm getting an idea. This is a good one, too. I'm taking the two pictures of the ghosts out of the album and taking them into the kitchen. I'm taping them to the refrigerator. I'm opening the junk drawer and grabbing a highlighting marker and circling the old woman in both pictures. Confused? That makes two of us. That was about as far as my idea went. I'm going to go back into the living room in front of the fire, try to go to sleep, and hope something interesting happens. I feel like I should say now that I have never before talked to any of the ladies. I'm currently about as nervous as someone watching a little girl run across a busy highway. It'll be no problem for me to get to sleep, though, as warm as that fire is.

I have to give myself something to think about while I'm laying on the couch, so I think about the first date I've ever been on. It seems like a strangely appropriate thought. I was eighteen years old, and you wanna talk about handsome. Actually, that's not true. I was a nerd. I had a pretty girl though. I took her to this restaurant that older people were known to go to. I'm not sure why I had taken her there, but I bet I was scared of some young buck whisking her away from me. We had a fine time, though. The old wit was a little sharper back then than it is now. I made her laugh quite a few times, and she me.  She wasn't the least bit nervous around me, and that kind of broke my heart a little bit. I'm going to make up a poem about her right here on the spot, without even thinking about it. Here goes:

You ate up a lot
of me
with your hungry, hungry
beauty

Would it be weird if I said I still think about that girl from time to time? I guess it would be. She could be dead now for all I know. It's true, though; I do think about her. I think about all the girls who've visited me throughout my lifetime, shining their lighthouse light for my ship to come back to shore. Sometimes I sort of think of all the girls in my life as one big girl, as if every girl is represented by one, with qualities borrowed from each of them. I think about that girl all the goddamn time.

I can feel myself falling asleep now. In my state of altered consciousness I become suddenly aware that I despise and hate myself. It's a terrible feeling. What are you supposed to do with yourself in such a situation? Nothing, really. There's nothing you can do. You just have to wade in it.

I'm being woken up now by the old woman ghost, who is doing so by flipping the light switch up and down. I was probably asleep for about forty-five minutes. I can usually tell how long I've been asleep just by the way I feel when I wake up. I imagine most older people, who, of course, have had a lot of experience with sleeping and waking up as a result of being alive so long, can do the same thing. I'm squinting at the ghost who is holding the photographs in her hand. I'd love to see the expression on her face, but I've got forty-five minutes worth of sleep in my eyes. She's now starting to walk towards me, and I once again would like to compare my feelings to those of a person watching a little girl run across a busy highway.

I'm disappointed when she finally speaks. She's got the voice of a smoker. It's like every word she says goes through wax paper or a kazoo. It kind of makes my fingertips itch, the way she speaks. She's so goddamn pretty, though. I can see she has a little yellow flower in her hair. You can't beat that. And here's what this woman says in a voice that I wish better matched her face: "You're sweating. Why don't you go put that fire out?"

"I don't know," is all the response I can manage. I'm an old fool.

"Come on," she says. "It's too hot in here. Get up and stir those coals around." She's not the least bit nervous around me, and it kind of breaks my heart a little bit.

I grab the poker and stir the coals around a little bit so the fire dies down before closing the glass doors. I can see my knees in the reflection of the glass, spotted with white hair and matted down with sweat. Who could love a man with knees such as this?

Right now, she's patting the spot on the couch next to her. I oblige. She takes the flower out of her hair, twirls it around in her fingertips nonchalantly and puts it back. She's saying in her frog voice which is coming out of her beautiful face, "You're not the happiest camper in the woods, are you?"

"No," I say, "but I'm fine."

"You're a little less than fine, sweetheart," she says.

I look down at my hands. They're shaking so bad. "It's true," I say.

"How could you have done that to your wife while she was in the hospital?" she says. I can't act like I don't know what she's talking about. "That girl you brought over wasn't even pretty," she says.

My hands are shaking so bad I feel like my bones are about to break. She puts her hands over mine to steady them. Her ghostly palms are cool and soft. They hurt.

And right now, the youngest ghost, with her dark wavy hair that could never be mistaken for tangles if you've seen that face of hers, is coming into the room. My heart is beating so hard that I feel the beat of it in my fingertips. She sits on the couch beside her mother and asks her what we're talking about. Her mother says, "Nothing, baby."

The oldest of the two daughters just walked into the room, flipping through one of my books. I can't make out which one it is. Momentarily I am distracted by her beauty. She's inhaling stray hairs whenever she breathes in. When she breathed out, just now, some of the hair blew up against the tip of her nose and tickled her. Just now, she scratched her nose and then tucked her hair behind her ears. It's so goddamn adorable I feel like I'm about to grind my teeth into chalk.

I'm looking at all three of them now, and they're just standing there or sitting there, looking around the room, doing next to nothing, but they're all so goddamn innocent and pretty, and my heart is beating on my ribs like a desperate prisoner, and I can feel my face fill with blood and my head lighten. My body feels weightless and I recognize a dull sensation that could very well be my body hitting the floor. And now, I don't really feel anything.

Waking up, roughly an hour and a half later, I'm by myself. I'm not sure what a heart attack is supposed to feel like. It's ridiculous, being sixty-two and not knowing any information about heart attacks, especially when I live by myself like this. I feel fine now, though, just a little dim-witted. I can see the pictures in front of me, laying on the floor. The fire has gone completely out.

And now, I'm walking towards the front door, where I tentatively plan to explore the lawn with my eyes. I'm not there yet, so I can guess what time of day it is. I'm guessing that it's early evening, the sky being a dark blue. I'm wrong. It's completely black outside. It must be three o'clock in the morning. I can see a squirrel in the yard by some shrubberies that the wife planted. She planted those shrubberies in order to cover up a black mark I made on the side of our house several years ago during a July fourth fireworks extravaganza. I can't seem to be able to look at anything around here without wanting to start crying.

I'm sitting down on my stoop. A small black spider immediately tries to run up my ankle. I kill it, and leave it lying there on the stoop, dead, as a warning to all other spiders.

"Where did my ladies go?" I ask the squirrel.

I make up a response that the squirrel might say if he could, and if he had any information. "You didn't deserve them," he says.

"They sure were pretty things," I tell the squirrel.

"Yes, I know," he says.

The squirrel leaves, running back up his tree, but I still talk to him. I pretend we have walkie-talkies. "What's it like up there?" I ask him.

"I've got it pretty good up here in my tree house," he says, "but it's gotten lonely since the wife and daughters died."

"Hm," I say.

"They were ravaged by dogs," he says.

"Hm," I say. After a minute or two of strained silence, I tell him goodnight and walk back into the house.