April 2026 - Vol. 23, Issue 2

I came back to knock on your door, call you by a name you would recognize. You didn’t answer. You did not recognize your own voice, deepened by years waiting ahead of you. You were huddled up between gold, silk sheets and a scratchy blanket, ears covered by the hunch of your shoulders, breath held because you tried to hide yourself under those blankets.

You couldn’t sleep. Laying in blankets that provided a kind of inhuman warmth, the kind that cannot soothe a haunted child. You would spend hours closed in by purple, pomegranate walls dipped in shadows while you stared through that window. Eyes reaching past the weeping willow that loomed over it and into the stars. You didn’t like what it took to put you to sleep. Funny how nightmares can be soothing, how trauma has become your lullaby. 

My fingers do not slip through the painted wood the way ghosts do in movies. Maybe she was right — a friend you would make here in a couple years — that ghosts must be welcomed in. If you would open the door, I would drift to your bedside, toes barely tickling the floor. “It’s okay, little Jui, it’s just me. Who else but ghosts comes to visit at this time of night?” That is all that has visited for a while now.

I would run my hands through the soft red strands on your head and tuck the blankets in for you. I’d organize the choir of stuffies along the head of your bed into the cracks. A worn brown bunny in one arm and a penguin whose nose has been chewed up in the other. Memento’s of home around your pillow made up of a plush Kwebbel, Diddl, and what are now nameless friends you have taken across countries with you. The only friends who knew about your ghosts. Maybe the only ones who would believe you in their plush silence.

I’d kiss your forehead: a brief touch of cold, gentle enough you could pass it off as the AC. I’d run my thumb over your fingers, let you latch your arms onto me. And when you still couldn’t sleep I’d ask you, sweet child, “How was school? Mrs. Brubaker told me you won’t play with the other kids.” You would have nothing to say, maybe just that it was good. “Did you draw anything new today?”

We’d flip through that sketchbook of yours, your misshaped fairies and disproportionate goblins and your fictional monsters. You would tell me a story you're working on, it’s always horror. There was just something so homey about murders and ghosts and monsters. You skip the parts you had deemed were too gory or too gross for me, because you did not think I would be able to handle them. Or maybe because something told you you were not supposed to think about those things, and telling anyone would mean that you did think about those things. You would fall asleep to those stories you knew you were not allowed to draw or tell, at least to anyone who wasn’t a ghost.

I want to ask you, “How was school today? I heard what you told your classmates, do you want to talk about it?”

You tried to tell them, they laughed, their faces scrunched in disgust. That’s gross, they said. Besides, something in you already knew — or at least believed — that no one would ever believe you. You would just shake your head, tears staining that freckled, rosy face and snot flowing frictionlessly. Tell me you were joking. It was just a joke.

But I know you’re thinking there’s something wrong with you. I know you’re thinking you’re disgusting. I know you want to tell me. I’d lie there, arm wrapped around you, fingers slipping through your hair. I’d listen to quiet breaths and the soft thump of a young heart, finding a new pace in the unfamiliarity of safety.

It is a feeling you would rarely meet. A feeling I could not bear to say was more than a decade away. And so, I don’t ask you. Because you’re seven. And you don’t need to fall asleep thinking about it tonight.

But I didn’t ask you. And you didn’t open the door. So after lingering a while longer, I pull away. I watched your door, the stairs, your home fade into the distance as I returned to the

present. Knowing tomorrow, you will tell your friends, not of the horrors you dream about every night, but of the ghost. The one who knocked on your door, but you were afraid to answer.