What It Means to Be Haunted

At a party, as others sip beer around a campfire, you tell your friend he’s going to die on his motorcycle.

And then he does.

You can’t make the funeral because you’re in grad school hundreds of miles away, studying Education. It’s orientation week and you’re already exquisitely lost. You plead with your advisor, but the things you’ll miss will steer the direction for the rest of your semester, and, in some ways, the rest of your life, so you tell yourself he’s dead, and he won’t notice you aren’t there, at the funeral, besides the grave, tossing flowers and dirt on his casket.

But he does.

You’re standing in front of a class of eleventh grade students, trying to get them to understand the metaphor of bloody hands in Macbeth, when he shows up, sitting in the back of the room, motorcycle helmet under one arm, free hand tapping on the countertop in time with your explanation of iambic pentameter.

The angle of his neck isn’t right.

You stifle a scream. It comes out as a wheeze, morphing into a cough, and that makes all the kids laugh at you.

You aren’t a very good teacher. Authoritarian is not a word that comes to mind when people think of you. You laugh when the kids make dick jokes, and that is never going to earn you their respect, but you doubt you want respect if it means you can’t laugh at dick jokes anymore.

There are already so few joys left in life.

But your friend is gone, his apparition sucked back into whatever void he escaped from. You dab the corners of your eyes and hope the kids don’t notice.

***

The next day, when you’re doing a really terrible and minorly offensive Scottish accent, explaining how the play would have been produced at the Globe, you hear the screech of tires, of a body thrown into the forest, a sudden stop, then silence. You look around, searching to see if anyone noticed, but the kids are just doodling along, half scratching notes, half writing impressionist graffiti that might end up on the cafeteria wall later.

“You okay, mister?” Xavier asks, apparently the only one to catch your reverie.

“Yeah, just contemplating what it means to be haunted,” you reply.

“Word,” Xavier says.

***

Your friend is there, at the end of the day, after you’ve locked your classroom door and are crying behind your desk, every shade pulled low.

You’re not crying because of your friend. No, you’re crying because you only slept four hours last night and had to teach six classes today and will have to drive an hour to the university to take two night classes for your course credit and then it’s back to your small apartment to sleep and get up at four and start the process over again, alone and depressed and eating cheap cereal because, even though you’re carrying a full-time teaching load, they only pay you a small stipend because of the degree thing and that stipend doesn’t stretch very far. You already spent a chunk of that to pay for a first date with someone you met online that didn’t morph into a second date, and now your phone only vibrates reminders for the times your classes meet, and you wish you could silence them, but you also can’t afford to forget.

“You missed my funeral for this?” your friend asks, leaning on your desk, placing his helmet on top of your stack of uncorrected essays. He cracks his shoulders, tries to adjust his neck. It doesn’t help.

“Not for this. For the life this is supposed to lead to,” you reply, backing away on your ancient rolly chair. You collide with the wall and stop, images of a Muppets Christmas Carol playing in your head.

“This doesn’t look like a life I’d want to live,” he replies.

“Ironic.”

You both laugh. Ghosts don’t lose their sense of humor, despite what Dickens might say.

“A long life. A short life. Doesn’t really matter. This sucks.”

“It does,” you reply. “I can’t even laugh at dick jokes anymore.”

“That’s the final nail in the coffin,” he replies. “The door’s right there.”

He points with one finger to the exit.

He’s that specter, that sign you told yourself you were waiting for to adjust your life in a way that actually made sense, not giving in to your dread and anxiety about what the future holds.

“But I can’t. Tuition’s already paid. They practically guarantee you a job when you get your degree, and you know the job market right now. I really need…” you stammer.

“Need and fear are very different things,” your friend says before he evaporates, helmet and all.

And you don’t see him for the rest of the semester. Or at graduation. Or for the rest of your life in fact. He said his piece and left you alone. His words are always there, floating around your ears like tiny powdery moth wings.

You try not to listen.

You’ve been teaching for eight years. Early retirement starts at sixty.

Thirty years isn’t that long, you tell yourself, sitting behind a different desk, still crying, still with the curtains pulled. You try not to think about all the days. All the hours. All the minutes.

There’s the sound of a body flung into a forest once more, and you look up, hoping for another answer, another apparition begging you to change, but it’s just one moment caught in time, and it’s not your moment, though it might as well be. And you still don’t know how to listen to the dead.

Historically speaking, most people don’t either.

COREY FARRENKOPF lives on Cape Cod and works as a librarian. His work has been published in Electric Literature, The Southwest Review, Nightmare, The Deadlands, SmokeLong Quarterly, Catapult, and elsewhere. His debut novel, Living in Cemeteries, was released from JournalStone in April of 2024. He is the Fiction Editor for The Cape Cod Poetry Review. To learn more, follow him on twitter @CoreyFarrenkopf or on the web at CoreyFarrenkopf.com

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