Ghost Laugh by Melissa Wiley
Associate editor Julia Kooi Talen on today’s bonus essay: Wiley’s eerie nonfiction piece felt like a ghost story when I first read it. The sentences linger and interrogate, fostering a slow burn, pinned with sharp, bright details. This excellent story mindfully speculates about the many perceptions and illusions that can haunt a woman’s laugh.
Ghost Laugh
Remember when we stopped at a convenience store for water as we were driving through Oregon? You assumed, like me, the man behind the cash register was lucid, which he may have been otherwise, had I not confused him. Like most people living in small towns I’ve come in contact with, he was also loquacious, assuming we wanted to keep listening to whatever he was saying, assuming we were in no kind of hurry, which we weren’t then. Standing with his hands inside his pockets, the man looked and sounded more like most of the people I’ve grown up with in rural Indiana than those living only an hour outside Portland.
As he kept talking, his bright blue eyes further brightened, and there was something fresh about him despite him looking well into his sixties. At first, I regarded him almost as an emblem of all that seemed right and invigorating about this part of the country. I no longer remember what he relayed, what sequence of events or what story. We were his only customers, however, and may have been the first in some time, in a place this isolated. How he even started telling his story to begin with don’t ask me, though you have a gift for eliciting long, elaborate tales from people we have only met, eliciting more color than I imagine most people realize this world has to offer on a quotidian basis. For all I now forget about what he’d been saying, I know he was in the midst of his narrative when I laughed a bit, at something he said that was only slightly funny. I remember the man stopping mid-sentence. Because he paused so suddenly, I hoped I hadn’t offended him by laughing.
You asked him what was the matter, when he held up his index finger, signaling us to both keep quiet. He took a few deep breaths, and I could see his ribs expanding and contracting behind his flannel shirt. He kept still as he told us, this time in a whisper, to listen. All I could hear was a low buzzing from the cooler where we’d gotten our bottles of water. We were still the only three people in the store, our car the only one in the lot outside the door. As the man relaxed after the silence yielded no new information, his voice returned to its old volume as he insisted he’d heard a little girl in here. Though I hadn’t yet put together what he was thinking and why he was thinking it, I also couldn’t keep myself from laughing at this statement. Again he told us to stay still, not to say anything. He turned his head and looked out the window above a tower of beer cases. Once more he lowered his voice to a murmur, claiming that he’d heard the same child for a second time.
I must have been thirty-six or thirty-seven, more than old enough to have a child myself of the age he was convinced had entered his store invisibly without a parent or guardian. Growing tired of waiting for him to come to his senses, we never gave him a chance to finish the story he had been sharing before my laughter disturbed and interrupted. I also don’t believe either of us considered imparting the obvious. However pleasant he may have been before, however casual and contented, he was now bewitched, possessed by his own illusion. However unintentionally, I left him wary and wondering whether a ghost child was playing around the cooler or rack of gossip magazines.
For a few moments, between handing him our money and us walking out the door, he looked me full in the face. He stared into my brown eyes with his sapphire starlight. I thought he must have realized his mistake then, but he only asked if I’d heard the child as clearly as he had himself. I shook my head no, wanting him to forget it, wanting to move past all this and continue down the coast toward Oregon’s most pristine beaches. I’m still not sure whether I should have minded the fact he stared directly into my adult features as well as heard my speaking voice and still could not associate me with the sound that escapes my mouth every day. Despite my tendencies toward melancholy, laughter too has always come freely.
Once in a while, in the midst of doing next to nothing, you will freeze and tell me to be quiet. In a whisper, you’ll insist there’s a little girl in here, hiding somewhere in this apartment. You’ll freeze and pretend you’re filling with a mixture of wonderment and apprehension, the same as he did. I always laugh when you do this, but I also cannot help asking myself whether and to what extent my development has been arrested. Other people I have met at different times and under different circumstances may not have made this same mistake. But other people, yourself included, have observed that I sound like a little girl when I’m laughing.
I wish other parts of me remained ageless. My laughter, though, is all that seems to stay untouched, locked in a period before we even knew each other. Maybe this is merely stubbornness—an internal island of stasis amid a sea of mutability, a resting place that I can return to whenever anything delights or amuses. For all the changes in our bodies and our lives, I want you to live on this island with me. There is nothing to know here, nothing to accomplish. There is also nowhere else to go when surrounded by all the waves that come crashing.
Melissa Wiley won the 2019 Autumn House Press Nonfiction Contest for her book Skull Cathedral, interweaving discussion of the body's vestigial organs and reflexes with autobiographical fragments. She is also author of the personal essay collection Antlers in Space and Other Common Phenomena (Split/Lip Press 2017), and her fiction and essays have appeared in places like American Literary Review, Terrain.org, The Rumpus, Entropy, DIAGRAM, Phoebe, Waxwing, The Offing, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and PANK.
