He found me picking up the shards from the shattered stained glass window in Anna’s old room. It was dark; the moon was just a bare sliver, its light pushed weakly along by the cool breeze that coasted into the room, and the lightbulb had blown out again. All the different pieces looked the same, color washed away by the night.
“You could do this in the morning,” he said. My father was a large man, russet beard trimmed carefully around his face and clothes wound tightly around his belly.
“You could get me some gloves. I couldn’t find any.” I put a particularly large piece into the small trash can by my side.
“Yeah,” he said, and didn’t move.
In the fourteen years since I’d left home, nothing much had changed. The bronze plaque above the door still proclaimed in rusted letters Ashton Funeral Home!!, which meant that Anna had never gotten around to hammering off the tacky exclamation points like she always said she would. The display area was still a soft place, with wall-to-wall beige carpeting and thick drapes cascading down the walls. There were about a dozen different types of coffins lined up like dominoes in the middle, and shelves scattered about, seemingly randomly, which held urns. The minimalist living space of my father, on the floor above the public areas, was still as grim and undisturbed as it was the day I left.
My father, too, was the same. It had been more than a decade since I had seen him, but I couldn’t find a single new wrinkle or gray hair. I suppose that made sense, he spent so much time beautifying the bodies of the dead. Maybe the embalming fluid seeped through his skin and replaced his blood.
All of us were never exactly hostile, me and my father and Anna. We talked on the phone, sometimes, cordial conversations where we related new events in our lives with calm detachment. Our moments of connection were few and far between, and by the time I graduated, I was ready to leave Ashton and never go anywhere with a population less than five thousand again.
But then Anna lost her job and went home to stay with our father. But then the window shattered.
Remnant glass glittered in razor shards around the edges of the frame and scattered across the floor. There had never been a pattern in the window, just pieces shoved together awkwardly, each one a different color and size. Anna and I fought over it as kids. For two hours every day, the sun would come through at the perfect angle to cast rainbow hues over the entire room. We were vicious in our quest to get the best spot, our backs against the green triangle off to the side. From there, we could watch as the colors lazily stalked across the walls.
“Maybe the ghosts got her,” I mumbled, laughing for no other reason than the awkwardness that always comes when I am in the same room as my father. I fumbled one shard as I grabbed it, and as it fell it cut across my palm.
“Maybe.” He pulled a first-aid kit from the drawer by the door. He tore open the little packet of neosporin and pressed a band-aid across my cut. The thing was decades old and started peeling off my hand immediately, but I still smiled at him.
We were never told about ghosts, Anna and I. Our father had far too many ordinary tales of fear and horror to bother with the supernatural. He told us about the woman whose organs and bones had been pulverized by the car that killed her, and how her skin wobbled as she was arranged. He compared her to a water balloon, and then lept straight into another story about the child who was presumed dead and autopsied, only to sit up in the middle of it. We were told that the child had to wear a corset while he recovered, or else his intestines would slither out of his cuts. We were left quivering from everyday evils.
Maybe that’s why we were so cavalier about the paraphernalia of death that adorned our house. We would play hide-and-seek often, slipping past the occasional corpse to hide in the crawl space, or in the little nook underneath the viewing platform, or in the cabinet where my father kept his tools. We got a new shipment of coffins, one day. They took up the whole storage room, and spilled out the door too. I hid in the one at the very back, listened as Anna slammed open the door of each of the others. The wood smelled of paint. A day later, that same coffin held an old woman who had died of heart failure.
But sometimes there would be gentle thumps, like footsteps, going down the hall. Or there would be a rattle outside the window that was probably the tree thwacking against the house but sounded like clacking bones. Or the kitchen light would explode again, leaving glass in my hair and floating in my cereal bowl. Then we would think of the stories, and they would twist into monsters in our minds.
Once our father had left us alone in bed, we would whisper across the room to each other, changing the ordinary tales of death into harrowing supernatural adventures. Our characters always died at the end, and there was always a reason for it that made it into a noble sacrifice. They didn’t just waste away from cancer or get in a car crash or crash through a second story window and land head-first on the pavement below.
She was home alone when it happened. My father insisted that the window must have given out. It is very old, after all. It’s a satisfying image, Anna sitting with her back to the window, watching the lights like we did as kids, until the brittle glass gave a last heave and she tumbled down with a shocked expression on her face.
Except it was sunset when it happened. The sun wouldn’t have shone through the window and she’d be looking at nothing but blank walls. Except she texted me I love you an hour before it happened, the first time she’d spoken to me in almost a year. I’m sure that’s what the cop noticed, with the knowing looks they went over my fathers head as he repeated over and over that glass wasn’t supposed to be that fragile.
Maybe it was something else, though. Maybe the ghosts whose coffins we hid in came back. Maybe it was the fault of the heart-attack victim and the woman who crashed her car and the woman who was hit by a car and the man who fell down the stairs, and all the others too.
I like that version the best. It’s got gravity to it, spectors looming invisibly around Anna, the tension racheticing higher and higher until it’s over. The window shatters. Anna falls with colored glass haloing around her, the dying sunset glimmering off of each shard and turning the air around her into a kaleidoscope. The ghosts watch grimly as she hits the ground.
“Yeah,” I said. “I bet it was ghosts.”
I dropped the last piece of glass into the wastebasket and carried it out of the room, the window frame empty behind me.