Haunt

The coroner said he shouldn’t be alive, but Josh Teller, age sixteen, Colorado native, chronic underperformer, and devout avoider of gym class, was. Alive. Smoking slightly. But alive.

No one really celebrates a miracle when your mom’s in the other body bag.

His father didn’t cry, didn’t scream, didn’t ask how the hell lightning hits a kid standing barefoot in a driveway holding a pack of Juicy Fruit and his mother’s keys. He just sort of . . . folded. Like a deck chair after a hurricane. That’s how grief worked in the Teller household—quietly, with bourbon.

Josh came home from the hospital with an EKG monitor, a mild tremor in his left hand, and a scar shaped like a branching tree scorched into his chest and down his ribs. The doctor had called it a Lichtenberg figure—something about electrical discharge and the path of least resistance. “It’ll fade in a few weeks,” he’d said too cheerfully. 

Weeks passed. It didn’t. Josh hated it. He hated how it pulsed in the mirror like a road map of failure, like proof that he’d lived when someone better hadn’t.

And along with it, he came home with a new hobby: ghost-watching.

***

At first, he thought they were migraines. The pale girl in the mirror while he brushed his teeth. The man with no feet floating by the refrigerator muttering something about kielbasa. The dog in the hallway chewing on its own disembodied tail.

“Are you real?” Josh asked the girl one morning.

She shrugged. “Are you?”

Fair point.

***

Ghosts weren’t what he expected. They didn’t rattle chains or scream in Latin. They were just . . . people. Annoying, needy, sometimes blurry people.

There was Ms. Evelyn from down the street, who kept yelling at the mailman even though she’d died during Reagan’s term. There was Darren, who’d drowned in the reservoir in ‘93 and still insisted he’d been murdered despite clear evidence he was just a bad swimmer.

And there was the woman in the blue dress who always stood outside the grocery store entrance, her mouth moving like she was humming.

Josh tried to help, at first. Played Ghost Therapist. Asked them what they wanted. Closure, mostly. Or snacks. Or someone to listen while they recited their worst moments on a loop.

But his mother never showed up.

Not once.

***

The thing is, he saw the way she died. Not just the gasping collapse or the way she gripped his wrist like it was a doorknob to the next life. But the look.

That look.

Like she was sorry he’d lived.

Josh didn’t tell anyone that part. Not the nurse with the rosary tattoo or the school counselor who called him “buddy” too often. Certainly not his father, who had taken to communicating via TV static and the occasional unwashed dish.

***

Sometimes, late at night, he stood in the hallway, staring at his bedroom ceiling, daring himself to ask.

“Why not her?”

He didn’t expect an answer.

But eventually, he got one.

It came in the form of a boy. Twelve, maybe. Wet hair, burned lips. Smelled like ozone and regret. Sitting cross-legged on Josh’s desk.

“You were the trade,” the boy said one night.

Josh blinked. “What?”

“She reached for you. Held on.” The boy swung his legs like a kid waiting at a bus stop. “That kind of thing has rules. And costs.”

Josh felt something sharp twist behind his ribs. “So she’s in . . . what? Heaven?”

The boy gave him a pitying look. “Not everything has a name.”

***

After that, the ghosts came less frequently. As if they’d all gotten the memo: Josh Teller was closed for business.

He started walking again. Around the reservoir. Through the trailer park. Once, he ended up at the chapel where they’d held the funeral. The same organist was playing. He sat in the back, listening to someone else’s grief.

It helped.

Not a lot. But a little.

***

The only ghost who stuck around was the girl from the mirror.

Her name was Wren. She’d died of something unspectacular—a peanut allergy or a bee sting, Josh couldn’t remember. She liked to talk about music. Said the dead were all just one bad song away from madness.

She didn’t flinch at his scar. Didn’t ask about the tremor or the dead look in his eyes. She only watched him like she already knew.

One afternoon, she asked him: “If you could go back and stop it, would you?”

Josh thought about the thunder. About how the house had smelled like whiskey and sweat and storm. His dad’s hands—calloused, shaking, and too damn quick. His mother’s bloodied lip. The raw, wet sound of her trying not to cry. How she’d screamed when Josh lunged. How his father’s skull hit the wooden stairs with a crack that still rang in his ears. How they both stood there, frozen, thinking he was dead.

How his mother, terrified, still tried to protect him. Rushed him outside into the storm, fumbling with the keys, as if they could outrun justice or guilt or lightning.

“No,” he said.

She nodded. “Good. That means it mattered.”

***

By the time fall came, his father had shaved. He still didn’t say much, but sometimes they sat in the living room together, watching reruns of Jeopardy! and pretending the world was simpler than it was.

Josh started keeping a notebook. Ghost names. Details. Snippets of their stories. None of them were her.

He still dreams of lightning sometimes. The way it split the sky like a cracked tooth. The way the air sizzled. The way his mother looked at him—not scared, not sad.

Just certain.

Like he was supposed to be here.

Like she’d made a choice.

And in the dreams, she’s never a ghost.

She’s just gone.

And he’s still alive.

***

It was almost spring when she appeared. Not in a mirror or a dream but on the shoulder of the road near Hollow Creek, where the guardrail was twisted like ribbon and the trees still bore the scrape marks of metal.

She looked about nineteen. Soft-featured. Dirt in her hair and the kind of stillness that didn’t belong to the living. Her eyes locked with Josh’s as he pedaled past on his bike—one of those old Schwinns with brakes that groaned like a haunted house.

He skidded to a stop, half-wondering if she’d vanish. But she didn’t.

She raised a hand. Not in greeting but in need.

“I was murdered,” she said.

There was no drama in it. No music cue. Just a quiet kind of devastation, like the sound of someone whispering their own name for the last time.

Josh got off his bike. Walked toward her.

“What’s your name?”

“Lacey.”

She told him about the man. The car. How no one ever found her body. How her mother still left porch lights on. Josh listened. Really listened. The way no one had listened when his mom said she was fine or when the neighbors turned their backs on the bruises.

When Lacey was done, she looked at him—not pleading but hopeful.

“I couldn’t help her,” Josh said, voice tight. “I was too late. I couldn’t save my mom.”

Lacey didn’t reply. She didn’t need to.

Josh inhaled. The air tasted like rust and pine and the ozone left behind by lightning.

“But I can help you.”

The words came like a promise. Heavy. Solid. Real.

She smiled—faint, like fog at dawn—and began to fade.

Josh stood alone on the side of the road. The wind moved through the trees. Far off, a dog barked. Somewhere, someone was turning on a light.

He got back on his bike.

And this time, he didn’t look back.