Page 2 of Phantom

My mother always told me I was different. She would spit the word at me like it was rotten fruit on her tongue.

I thought it was because of my deep love for gothic literature. She had trouble getting my nose out of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein , or my favorite Edgar Allan Poe stories.

As a child, I told her I wanted to live in a house that was built to look like the inside of their brains. Gothic. Dark. Spooky, I’d even say. My mother recoiled at that and called me crazy. She called me many other despicable names, but I won’t give her the satisfaction of repeating them, even in ink.

But what would she think now?

She passed away when I was twenty-three, but even from the grave, I can feel her judgment.

Letting a man into my home, and kissing him. A man who isn’t my husband.

A man who stood outside my window for weeks, watching me from afar.

There is something wrong with him.

Clearly there is something wrong with me, too.