I.  Ghost Life

I dream I’m a ghost but it isn’t so clear. I lose track of pretty much everything. Who I was. Where I am. What I’m supposed to be doing. There are two situations in ghost life: off and on. When I’m off, it’s like I am the nothing sound in the intergalactic blackness. When I’m on, it’s like okay, wait. I can see by getting a feeling in my mind of what is around me. Now, for instance: we swarm. There are others like me. We turn ourselves in place, to the left, which is our way of passing through walls. So yeah: etc. Without a beginning, can there really be an end? We’re off. We’re on. We stay away from you. We teem. Some life expresses itself without knowing, for sure, what it is.

II. The Disintegrations

Once upon a time there was a person, who was me. They had in the mush of their brain some number of experiences, which would rise on their own, like headlights sweeping walls.

For example, golf tees. They used to find them and place them in tins that still smelled of tobacco.

For example, an alcove; the shape of a restroom code; a highway with elms on one side.

If there is a theory of memory—something about learning, or maybe identity—my brain would probably serve as an exception. Outlier case.

For example, autumn: someone handing dried-up flowers to a bonfire. Someone calling ha in the dark, and another responding, ha—like music: different pitches, notes. I was there. Who knows why. I have this memory. Little bit of scribble in a long and vanished line.

III. Emotional Architecture

For years I’ve had dreams of a series of rooms and halls that expand like a city. The same rooms. The same city. Each time I dream of it, I recall that I’ve done so before, many times. I’m not sure how I could have forgotten. One room: a dark passage, ascending, with a carven stone door at the top, through which you can edge and make a right turn. Another: a flat, with mullioned windows, sky-high, giving on a courtyard with fountains. I proceed. I come into each space in succession. The route is perfect mystery; and yet it is basic, more concrete than all of the waking months and years that move around it in oblivion.

Scott Garson is the author of Is That You, John Wayne?—a collection of stories. His work has appeared via Story, Electric Literature, American Short Fiction, Threepenny Review, Conjunctions, Kenyon Review, and many others. He edits Wigleaf.