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The world churned... The world was water, darkness rippled with light against suspended shadows and...

Stillness.

White-crest waves

dried grass

gum-speckled asphalt.

John stood. Blinked. He found himself on the pavement of a palm-tree-lined street, surrounded by big-signed shops, scores

of cars and long buses with short California plates. No sign of the ocean, of his beloved House. He felt a pang, a hollowing

out, as if a great part of him had been torn away. He bent and placed his hands on his knees, squeezed his eyes shut. His

House was here, of course it was here, somewhere, he’d only just left it, been ousted from it. But how had he gotten to this

bright-skied, oppressively booming place? The Grey House felt hopelessly distant.

A gasp sent John spinning to his left. Barely a half meter away stood a sunburned, shoeless man in a torn sweatshirt and ragged

pants. The man reached for his shopping cart, which was filled with everything from empty plastic bottles to mud-spattered

party hats.

A stack of late notices on a kitchen table, mostly doctor bills that will remain unpaid, just as his treatment at Resnick

Neuropsychiatric will remain unfinished. The man, not in rags but denim jeans and a t-shirt, puts his head in his hands.

John shuddered at the... was it a memory, a vision?

The man leaned away, one shoulder raised high as if to protect himself.

John looked down at his black leather trainers, at his black, slim-fit jeans, at his black, leather-jacketed arms, his hands.

There had never been shade in the House as there had never been sunlight, but now he was half in and out of it. His shaded

half looked nearly as solid as everything around him, but the side basking in sunlight was transparent, his very dark brown,

nearly black skin hardly more than bent beams of golden light and flecked through with what looked like hundreds of swirling

dust motes.

The man in rags said, “How the hell you get right there?” and John answered the only way he knew:

“I fell into the light.”

5

There were a few things John discovered quickly:

One: his Grey House had disappeared without a trace.

Two: he had the ability to know certain things about a person’s past without being told, like the moment with the man in rags.

Such a glimpse happened a second time, minutes after leaving the man, when John passed an elderly Asian woman wearing an oversized

visor (in the glimpse, she was several decades younger and trying to understand why her unmarried thirty-two-year-old daughter

didn’t want to live at home with her parents). This so discombobulated John that he stumbled into and through a wall (during

which the sensation was akin to taking a sledgehammer to the gut), which at once brought him to the third, and perhaps most

important, thing:

John was dead.

Probably the most surprising thing about all of this was that most of the living didn’t seem to know he was a ghost right

off. He’d passed several people without a second glance, and only twice did someone realize something was amiss. But then

their heads dipped back down and they were lost in their mobiles.

Four: when he walked, a perpetual vibration hummed up from the ground. Curious, he bent forward and heard a faint drone, similar

to what he’d experienced near the windows in the Grey House, and when he tried to step through the ground, he was met with a familiar buffer of energy.

There was a fifth thing. He discovered it as he stood before a McDonald’s plate-glass window, where he watched boys with ketchupped fingers and girls with bows and mothers with wrapped hair stuff their mouths.

John caught a whiff of fried potato and started.

Potato and salt and oil... He rubbed his thumb against his forefinger and remembered the roughness of salt granules against his skin.

Remnants of his existence in this old world were returning, whispers of his existence in it.

His desire to eat was more demanding, more immediate than any hunger he’d felt previously in his House.

But this was swiftly replaced by something significantly stronger: dread.

6

The sky grew quickly overcast and John ducked self-consciously through less-populated streets, unsure of where to go, what

to do. He was becoming accustomed to the ever-present hum beneath his feet. Leaves rustled in trees and he recalled vaguely

the heat of the sun against his skin, wind rushing against his face, but he only wanted his House. He read a street sign:

Abbot Kinney Boulevard. At a storefront, colorful t-shirts on rotating racks boasted muscle beach and hot mama and venice beach . Venice Beach. He moved through its unfamiliar streets with ease, and it continued to surprise him that no one noted his

ghostly presence. But then the feeling settled into an acute familiarity; a Black man moving through the streets of the United

States would be, to an extent, moving through extremes: either in stark relief or entirely invisible, for a Black man was

rarely seen for himself. As he began to remember the world, or rather, his relationship with it, he wondered if he preferred

to not recall such things at all, for now he felt yet another layer separated.

As people passed, bits and pieces of their lives stuck to him like wet seaweed. The wiry man blowing cigarette smoke into

the wind longed for someone who’d forgotten about him... Last night, that woman was stood up for a blind date... That

girl was pummeled by her boyfriend yesterday and she was angry, humiliated, but he was abused as a child and so he never meant

it... Their inner lives enveloped him in clinging, suffocating strands. So many people. There could never be peace with

humans, and yet they were everywhere.

He knew he had no heart but still it was as if he could feel it pounding; he swallowed and, though he had no physical tongue, thought he tasted the metallic tang of terror.

He jogged now, as if speed alone could shed him of his fear, of these people and their private burdens.

He’d been in this world for only a half hour’s worth of moments and already he knew he wanted nothing to do with it.

Yet it stood to reason that, since he’d been unceremoniously ousted from his House in the first place, returning home would require force.

And this would, unfortunately, require assistance.

7

The sign proclaimed

divination readings!

first 3 min. free!!

It sat in the middle of a weedy, brown and yellow-green patched lawn in front of a tiny yellow house, one with dark bars across

the windows and bars before the mesh screen before the white front door. The sign’s first E was crooked and on the verge of falling but probably had been clinging there for a while. Despite all the exclamation points,

or perhaps because of them, there was something sad about the sign, something desperate. And yet just what John was looking

for. If one’s car needed fixing, one went to a mechanic; if one’s afterlife was out of sorts, well, here he was.

But when he tried to press the doorbell, he realized it was like stumbling into the wall earlier: he couldn’t make contact.

There was the option of walking literally through the door, but he was dead, not dense; he’d managed to maintain some sense of decorum. Besides, he didn’t want to feel sick.

So he simply stood there, shaded and looking as close to flesh-and-blood as possible, glaring at the white button and wondering

if touching it might be a matter of willpower.

“You OK? Did you want a reading?”

The voice came from the nearest window on the right. Peering from behind the bars and the mesh screen, a brown face. A teenaged

boy.

“First three minutes free,” the boy said. “Might as well, right?” Without waiting for a reply, he said, “Hold up, I’ll be

right back.”

Moments later, the front door swung open. The boy was unusually tall and lanky; his head was shaved on both sides and wavy

jet hair fell from the top of his head to one cheekbone. John stepped back and the boy pushed the door open farther to reveal

spindly brown arms covered in tattoos.

“Come on in.” The boy was already walking back into the house.

John crossed the threshold and was enveloped in one of the boy’s memories:

Eleven years old, scrawny, with tearstained cheeks, reaching down for a crumpled piece of paper, the penciled edges of a sketched

masked superhero—a child hero, a figment of his imagination—peeking from the crinkled folds. A tanker of a sneaker crushes

the paper flat before his fingertips can save it. Your mom’s a freak devil-worshipper and so are you! My dad says so! A hard shove and he’s on the ground, pebbles of gravel digging into his palms. No one helps him to his feet. When the bell

rings and everyone hurries back into the building, he is alone with his shredded hands, alone with his ruined self-portrait.

John winced at the memory’s intimacy. He really must see about dodging this phenomenon.

They entered a small, bare room. A narrow cabinet filled with crystals, cards, saint-decorated candles, small bundles of dried herbs, and other talismans sat before five red lacquered chairs pressed against a wall—some kind of waiting area.

That there were several chairs was promising; perhaps the psychic was good.

They walked past the chairs and through a door, through a heavy velvet curtain that hung just beyond it.

The room was dark and tiny and smelled of equal parts incense and closet.

There was, along with the slightly stale scent, an otherworldly stillness, as if here, the air were older.

Ancient. A circular, cloth-covered table sat in the room’s center and there were two chairs, one of which was draped with a silk throw.

The cliché of it tempered John’s expectations by at least a quarter, for which he was grateful.

He made to sit in the chair nearest the room’s entrance only to realize he couldn’t, but before the boy noticed, John straightened.