Ghosts in the Back Acre

At age nine, the headboard of my bed was chipped wood backed up to a window.

At age nine, I looked for ghosts crossing the dead-grass hill beneath it. I was less scared of them

than of you.

At age nine, a book told me that ghosts could fall in love with revenge. The words stitched

themselves around my heart and held it together.

At age nine, I hadn’t yet thought of myself as one of those ghosts, as a dead thing that went

outside and played on a rusted swing set and tore up grass between my fingers.

At age nine, it hadn’t yet occurred to me that revenge fit nicely in the hollow of my palm. I was a

shadow in family photographs. I haunted the back forty acres of a broken home with a

foundation too compromised to survive acknowledging its past.

At age nine, I was the skeleton in the bedroom closet. I hung between cliff edges, mid leap, with

all the trauma of abuse held on pause until I could safely land.

At age ten, I landed. I crossed the dead-grass hill. I watched my bones peek out from beneath my

skin. I went to school on a Monday, and I lied. I waited. I understood life as a concept, but it tore

between my teeth. You took it from me, but I became the ghost I was looking for.

At some age, you’ll be more afraid of me than I am of you. I don’t know when, but I’ve walked

enough miles to know every question has an answer— I’ve haunted enough hallways, kitchens,

bedrooms, and roads to know how good I am at finding them.

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Isabel J. Wallace is a queer writer and registered nurse working in the wilds of North Florida. The Swamp has left her predisposed towards ghost stories and the certainty that something is always lurking just out of sight. She recently celebrated her first publication in Malaise: a Horror Anthology from Jessamine Press.