Trick-or-Treating with Granny Ghost

Flash Fiction by Nina Kiriki Hoffman

I lived in a house with a lot of people. Everyone there was dead except me.

I found Carrington House when I was twelve, after running away from my third foster family. I was the only one out of four foster kids in my last house who could see and hear the ghosts of the three kids who had died before we got there. I tried to tell the other kids what had killed the ghost kids; we already knew the foster parents were bad. The rest of them were too scared to run away when I did. I ran farther that time than I had before. I didn’t want Child Protective Services to catch me again.

Carrington House was full of ghosts, and some of them were friendly. One of them, Uncle Jake, asked me to tell his wife where he’d hidden some important papers before he died. I told him people never believed me when I talked about ghost business. He said please try anyway.

I’d only been in the house a day or two, and I wanted to stay. Uncle Jake could help me with that. So I went to the cemetery next door, all shaggy green grass and gravestones and leaning ancient trees, with little gravel roads winding through, and not many live people. Jake showed me where to find his grave. He said his wife visited most Saturdays to talk to him, even though she couldn’t hear him when he answered her.

That was how I met Mrs. Cherry.

She believed me when I told her what Uncle Jake said, and she believed me when I told her about my last foster care house. She said I could come live with her, and I said I didn’t want to. She worried about me, but she said okay. She pretended to be my mother and got me into the neighborhood school, where she was a fifth grade teacher. She also helped me sell some old Indian-head pennies I found under a floorboard where Grandpa Charlie hid them a long time ago. A couple were worth more than a thousand dollars, and one was worth six thousand. After that, Mrs. Cherry helped me set up a bank account. I had enough money for an ice chest, a camp stove, and food and ice for several years, plus what I could scrounge.

Holidays were weird in Carrington House. The nicer ghosts wanted to make them special for me, and the meaner ghosts, the ones who maybe hated their kids and I reminded them of them, wanted to ruin them.

On Halloween, Granny Melly, one of my favorite members of my new ghost family, decided to take me trick-or-treating. She helped me with my homework, if it was something she’d learned when she went to school a hundred years ago, and she told great bedtime stories after I turned out the Coleman lantern to go to sleep.

“Let’s go check the trunks in the attic,” she said on Halloween evening, after I’d gotten home from school, made myself a cheese sandwich, and eaten it.

I’d been to the attic a lot. It was musty and dusty and smelled kind of mildewy. I got all my clothes there as I outgrew the ones I arrived in. Luckily, a lot of people who used to live in the house were ancient hoarders. The other kids at the school looked at my clothes and thought I was super weird. So what else was new?

“Try this trunk, Tisha.” Granny pointed to a big steamer trunk.

“It was locked last time I checked,” I said.

Granny smiled and tapped her fingertips together in front of her mouth. “Try it now.”

I jiggled the handle. It clicked and opened. Inside lay a bunch of colored, ruffled fabrics. I pulled out a satin one. It was a long-sleeved orange dress with a poofy, pumpkin-shaped skirt decorated with black cat silhouettes. It looked too big for me. Besides. Dress. Ugh.

“Try this one.” Granny pointed to something dark and cobwebby. I pulled it out, and it spread into a cape that opened into moth wings, with frilly edges, and dark, dusty spots like skulls against a creamy background. I was dressed in a black shirt and black pants. I had my black high-tops on, too. I draped the wings over my shoulders. They came down to the floor. I wrapped them around me and felt warm for the first time in a while. The ghosts carried cold with them, so I had gotten used to being chilled.

“There’s a tiara,” she said. “Oh, we used to have such delightful parties.”

I reached down and found a crown with two feathery antennae on it. I put it on my head. It felt tight, and then it didn’t.

“We’re set,” said Granny Melly. I checked myself out in the dusty mirror by the stairway door. My face was meh, like always. My curly, carroty hair looked good with the moth antennae tiara on top—there was a blue jewel in the middle right above my nose, and filigree holding it and the antennae. I raised my wings. There were loops at the ends, and I slid my hands through them so I could open my arms and flap my wings.

It was the best costume I’d ever had.

“I don’t look scary,” I said.

“I’ll take care of that,” said Granny Melly.

Downstairs, everybody looked more solid than usual. Halloween did that to ghosts. I couldn’t even see through most of them. Granny Melly looked like a solid old woman shaped like a pigeon. She wore a black hat with a red flower on it. The flower had an eyeball in the middle. Her hair was usually pale, but tonight it looked bright red. Her dress was dark blue, with wide lapels, and she had on black shoes and stockings. She looked like a normal old lady. How scary was that?

Some of the ghosts hooted at us. My favorite Auntie, Jenny, said I looked fantastic.

“Don’t forget a sack,” said Gloomy Uncle Gus, pointing toward the little pantry where I kept my ice chest and my food. I got a plastic garbage bag from the box on a shelf.

“So ugly,” said Auntie Jenny, who had died about thirty years earlier. “We used to have special bags just for trick-or-treating.”

I felt a tearing inside. Two years ago, my parents had been alive, and they’d walked me and my best friend Lily through our old neighborhood, in my real home town. We had cloth sacks with pumpkins on them. I was dressed as Spider-Man, and Lily was a Walmart witch. We had so much candy by the time we finished we ate ourselves sick at our slumber party.

“It’s not what it looks like, but what’s inside that counts,” said Uncle Jake. “And right now, that’s a great big zilch, zero, nothing! Get out there and get goodies, Tish!”

“You’re good to go,” said Grandpa Charlie, maybe the oldest ghost in the house. He actually used to live there. A lot of the others had come here because it was close to the cemetery, or it kind of pulled them somehow. Grandpa Charlie said it was a ghost refuge. He hadn’t wanted me to stay when I first got there, but he got used to me.

Granny Melly and I went out into the starbright night. Woodsmoke flavored the air, and the pine trees that lived in the cemetery sent out that good pine-needle smell. It was cold until I pulled my wings in tight.

There weren’t any other houses on our block, but around the corner, away from the cemetery, there was a neighborhood. I’d been spying on those houses every time I walked to school. I tracked which kids in my grade lived where, and thought about people I might like to make friends with if I only knew how. Sometimes I talked to Granny Melly about that. She and I walked around the neighborhood after dark, looking at the warm lights behind the curtains, or the flickers TVs made, smelling dinner cooking when it was warm enough for windows to be open. Watching cars come home from work, and me hiding from headlights. Granny didn’t have to hide. Most nights, nobody saw her but me.

A lot of the houses had pumpkins and ghost and goblin decorations in their yards, light-up inflatables, witch hats hanging from porch roofs. People pretending to know ghosts.

Costumed kids with grownups ranged up and down the street. A mom bundled up in a winter coat followed two girls up to a front porch. One of the girls was a witch, with the same kind of pale hair my friend Lily had. I hadn’t seen Lily since I lost my parents. Something twisted in my chest. The other girl was a dark-haired elf, and tall. Not short like me.

Not me.

I rubbed my eyes and felt a hand on my shoulder. I looked up. Granny Melly. How was she touching me? Oh. Halloween was different. She gave me such a sweet smile. I sighed and let go of my memories. I had a Now now, with other people in it.

I went to the first house. I knew the two kids who lived there, though I’d never spoken to either of them. There were three pumpkins on the porch railing, with light coming out of their eyes, noses, and mouths. Granny walked with me up to the lighted front door. I pressed the doorbell. The door opened with a loud cackling witch-laugh noise, and a teenager in a witch costume stood there holding a big bowl of candy. It was Shelley. She was three years older than I was. She was a jock. Basketball, volleyball, softball. I so didn’t care about sports, despite Uncle Jake trying to get me interested in playing catch. He was pretty good at throwing balls, even though he wasn’t solid. I was terrible at catching them.

“Trick me,” Shelley said in a bored voice.

I opened my wings and flapped them.

“Okay, cool, but you’ll have to try harder.”

Granny smiled at her. “How’s this?” she asked, and her head turned into this giant thing with tentacles and teeth. She laughed a much scarier laugh than the doorbell witch laugh.

Shelley screamed, dropped the candy bowl, and ran into the house.

I stuffed my sack. If every house was like this, I was SO going to score.