New England’s ghosts return bound in swirls of humidity, pushed by hurricane winds. Sea captains who went to the briny deep instead of to their corseted lovers, colonial toddlers who plunged through open windows. The Pequots, Mohegans, and Narragansetts who fell to smallpox and genocide as their descendants fought and survived. Ghosts of indentured servants and others who died with their bodies enslaved. New England, an early advocate of America’s original sins. 

The swirling tempest contains the ghosts of people we knew in high school, killed in grimly ordinary traffic accidents. Kids who died of obscure diseases, whose fundraising bumper stickers outlasted them. Domestic violence victims, and plenty of them. Cabin boys, welders, and the clattering dead of the textile mills, woolen lint still in their lungs. All the deaths we couldn’t have prevented and all the deaths we should’ve but didn’t. Our recent pandemic dead. There is no waiting period to become a New England ghost, and they are legion.

We take down the hummingbird feeders, confusing the tiny birds who zoom by in distress, jeweled green feathers glittering. We flip over tables, close umbrellas, tidy lawn toys and weedwhackers. The windchimes clang as we place them in the shed, where they join the stained terracotta pots of petunias and impatiens. We pull the floating docks, scraping our palms on the jagged rims of barnacles. We pull boats. We pull swim rafts. We pull and pull until our muscles ache, and we debate if this storm is the big one.

We fill bathtubs with water in case the power goes. We run to the grocery store, bake the last eggs into cookies and banana bread. 

The thermometer is wrong, stuck at 130 degrees. A lifeguard blows a whistle at some risk-taking soul in the rising surf. The day shimmers in the heat of the sun, salt-crystalline. The leading edge of the surge has arrived, and the energy rolls across the long fetch of ocean until it shoals and builds and crashes.

While we fill gas cans and take down décor shaped like black bass, one last juvenile gull patrols the beach, filling his stomach with crab, not considering why he is alone. He nips another sweet piece of flesh from an emptying claw and tips his head back to swallow. Behind him the ocean moves with fluid ease, a ghost-maker, a ghost-taker. What’s possessed by the sea is only given back according to its whims. It spits up a shining blue mussel shell and an ellipsis of tiny moon jellies, perfectly round and clear.

On suburban lawns beneath broad oak canopies, lawnmowers drone, chainsaws are tested, generators revved. The smaller boats are lined up on trailers like a parade, hauled inland by worried pickup trucks.

Then all we can do is pass around the phrases of warning gifted to us by shrill alarms on our phones. Devastating to catastrophic, we whisper as we put our babies down to sleep. Damage greatly accentuated by large airborne projectiles, we murmur as we sip our gin and tonics. Locations may be uninhabitable for weeks or months, we say as we call worried relatives faraway. Failure to take action will likely result in serious injury or loss of life, we shout as we come, tangled in sticky bedsheets. It doesn’t kill the mood like you might think.

We sleep as the barometer drops, as the monster grumbles ever nearer. We sleep as the first wind bends the tops of the trees, as the first waves’ crests are blown off in a confusion of dark and salt and air. The wind shifts to moan. 

With fingers of fury, the ghosts pry at the corners of saltbox shingle and vinyl imitation clapboard. They desire nothing more than to rip it all open so that they can come back inside, where they belong. This is our home, they say. We’ve lived it more thoroughly than you can imagine and here is the swirling gray mist of our essence. Let us in. Give us back what is ours or we will tear it all down and start again. How can you continue living without us, who made this land great? You will always be a cod-pale imitation, will never meet the demands of this blood-drenched land.

All we hear is shriek and howl, drumming of rain and rattling of a latched screen door. The sickening rip of a course of shingles torn from the roof, the crack of an old maple splitting on that weak spot like we always said it would, the raw-throated roar of surf as it breaches the dunes. We don’t hear the curses of the mill workers, or the whispered secrets of our great-great-great grandfathers. 

All we see is wind and rain, the gutters gushing onto the lawn, the leaves stripped from the trees. We see the rush of foam over the backside of the dune, the trickle of water down a basement wall. We see the creek rising over the road, carrying along tree trunks and bicycle tires, tumbled rocks and a yellow flip-flop. We don’t see ship-ribs on rocks, mangled limbs tugged into industrial machinery, or factories aflame. We don’t see the intubated, still trailing their wires and tubes. 

We see what we want to see and hear what we want to hear. The ghosts do what damage they can before the tempest moves out over the Atlantic. The storm dissipates and the ghosts sink into deep water, awaiting the next gust of tropical air. Their patience is infinite, their eventual victory assured.

+++

Sarah Starr Murphy’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Threepenny Review, Ep;phany, Baltimore Review, and elsewhere.  She’s co-managing editor for The Forge Literary Magazine and eternally at work on a novel.  She’s a marathoner with epilepsy and two very stinky dogs.