Show Notes
From the author: “For as universal as it is, I find it weirdly difficult to explain grief in a way that feels satisfying. It’s a slippery, nebulous thing. It can hide from you or disguise itself, look like one thing on the surface while growing into something else underneath. It can reach out for the people around you, blending with their grief, cross pollinating and mutually mutating—and that process isn’t always a balanced one. There’s an ugly economics to grief. Some people are more vulnerable to it, while others have the means to withstand it better, find support more easily, or at least express it louder. Your background, personality, and a million other things you can’t even see all flavor a manifestation of grief that’s unique to you. But whatever form it takes, it’s such a vast, amorphous thing that attempts to describe it always seem to miss some crucial aspect. I’ve carried some of my own for a while now, and I’m still trying to figure out how best to describe it. This story is an attempt at that.”
The House That Stands Over Your Grave
by Kyle Piper
The first time the topic of the old house on Gray Street comes up, Lew and Kennedy are working on their math homework on the floor of Lew’s bedroom. It’s the first time Kennedy has been over, and when she calls Lew’s little two-bedroom rambler a nice house, he thinks it’s a mean joke until she tells him how bad the place she just moved out of was. That brings up the topic of crappy houses, (Kennedy’s old apartment was infested with bees, Lew’s older brother lost part of a finger helping their dad repair rot in the crawlspace here), and eventually Kennedy mentions the total wreck her dad had driven them past on Gray Street, behind the cemetery. That brings it out of Lew without so much as a thought to the credibility of the claim: just, “Oh, yeah, the haunted one?” Now Kennedy looks like she’s trying to stare a hole through his head so she can determine approximately how much bullshit it houses.
“Did you…” she starts cautiously. “Have you seen any ghosts there?”“Oh, I’ve never been inside. But I mean, I walk pretty close by it all the time. It’s super creepy.” As he says this, Lew realizes how completely stupid it sounds, but he can’t figure out how to express what he feels when he looks at that house through the jagged chain-link fence that separates its backyard from the cemetery where he so often stands. That crumbling stack of ivy-crowded wood looms over the back end of the cemetery, keeping watch over the little eroding rectangles that Lew doesn’t think even count as gravestones. Unkempt vines and brush and pale, pinkish mushrooms poke out through its backyard fence into the graveyard as though the house itself is reaching out to claw at the world around it. He’s sure it’s why the back end of the cemetery is the cheap end. Anyone who can afford the big fancy headstones puts them up front where you can barely see the house and don’t have to look at it when you visit. Lew knows that when he dies, his family and friends will have to stare at that decaying pile just like he does.
“I can definitely tell that it’s creepy,” Kennedy says, “but my gym teacher is creepy. That doesn’t mean he’s a ghost.”
“Okay, that’s not what I meant. Literally everyone who’s gone in there has seen something weird. You can ask anyone who’s done it.” (Continue Reading…)
