I love my ghosts. I bought this house as a wreck to save them, like my clowder of cats who needed a good home. No clearing with sage: I don’t want to force them out. I hunt through the attic for photos and treasures, building altars at the four corners of every room. Crystals and windchimes help me welcome gentle souls who choose to remain, or soothe those who are ready to drift on.

The ghosts are my favorite part of this old Victorian. With so many rooms, all cats could have their own, but they prefer to pile together, curling up in the sun. The ghosts love cats: their petting fingers stir fur like static. Ghosts drape cats like blankets, smiling as the cats purr back.

I’m restoring, healing this house, keeping the objects and structure I can save, wanting the ghosts to feel at home. While I work, they communicate their pleasure. Behind me, a drop cloth slips to reveal a portrait; with a scrape, a threadbare settee shifts, the clawed foot pointing out a golden locket holding a curl of raven hair. In the dusty, smudged mirror, handwritten names appear: I investigate, and report on their lives. The seemingly empty room breathes a long sigh.

Faint voices sing distant requests to crank the Victrola and dance. I learn the musical tastes of each ghost, filling the rooms with mood music. Some ghosts flutter away, their hearts fulfilled. Others stay to listen.

I fall asleep to their rustling and snores. Cuddling cats comfort us. This old house, the cats, the ghosts, me: we belong together. I hope I get to stick around when it’s my turn. I love tending our forever home.

It’s not home so much
As the sense you never left.
I’ll stay here with you.

[Adele Gardner (they/them, “Max,”) has a poetry collection, Halloween Hearts, released by Jackanapes Press and over 500 stories, poems, art, and articles published under various bylines in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, PodCastle, Flash Fiction Online, Daily Science Fiction, forthcoming in Asimov’s, and more. A graduate of the Clarion West Writers Workshop, Adele coedited SFPA’s short poetry anthology Dwarf Stars 2022 with Greer Woodward and guest-edited the Arthuriana issue of SFPA’s poetry journal Eye to the Telescope (Issue 27, January 2018, ). Adele serves as literary executor for father, mentor, and namesake Delbert R. Gardner.]