Homewood

The house was new then, and newness itself was a kind of promise nobody had yet learned to distrust. Homewood, they called it, a new neighborhood on the far end of South Lorain, which was itself an old neighborhood. The sort of name meant to reassure, and perhaps it did. Joey was thirteen and his sister was younger, and the rooms smelled of fresh plaster and things not yet lived in.

It began as a shimmer at the edge of a room, a presence that retreated before it could be named. They were not frightened. Children rarely are by the things that should frighten them.

Now he is eighty-nine, and the coffee grows cold in his hand. Below him, Oakwood Park spreads itself in that particular green that belongs to well-tended civic things, and beyond it Homewood crouches in its ruin—the weeds ascending, the old automobiles returning slowly to the earth from which everything, eventually, returns.

He thinks: what if it was me.

Not a ghost in any gothic sense. Simply himself, old and coffee-warmed and full of the particular longing of those who have outlived the places that made them, slipping backward along the current of years to stand briefly in a room that smelled of plaster and promise, to be glimpsed by two children who did not yet know what waiting felt like.