a february ghost story

nobody's perfect

She saw them the first time she stepped through the door: the ex-girlfriends. They slid down the walls of his home, leaving trails of—what? ectoplasm, was that it?—behind them. They smiled at her with translucent gelatinous smiles. They were not jealous. They welcomed her as a sister. She was not jealous either—that was impossible, frankly, after all, they were dead and she was alive—but it was hard not to lift up her shoes with each step and shake them out, as if there were gummy traces of ex-girlfriend stuck onto the soles.

She let him take off her coat, hang it up, uncork the bottle of white wine she’d brought with her. It was plain she’d made the wrong choice, but he was going to be a good sport about it, even if the ex-girlfriends were not. He likes a nice Merlot, gurgled one of the ex-girlfriends, crawling down the refrigerator. You should remember that.

Really, said another, burbling at her feet, a white wine? Terrible choice.

One thing that was hard to ignore about the ex-girlfri…