Preface

Every story is a ghost story.

Even the ones you tell about yourself.

When I was little I believed that the person I was today and the person I was yesterday and the person I would be tomorrow were three separate people.

I believed that I lived only one day. In the morning I was born and in the evening I died and the person who awoke in my bed the following morning was someone new.

I believed that this cycle continued day after day, the variances between iterations subtle enough as to be nearly imperceptible, but each iteration nonetheless distinct from its predecessors and descendants.

Like frames in a film, this succession of discrete individuals appeared from a distance to be continuous, but upon closer inspection was clearly divided by regular intervals of darkness, of nothingness, which most people mistakenly referred to as sleep.

This was a childish belief, of course.

The truth of it is that every single instant we are, all of us, obliterated and refreshed.

In the time it takes to blink or turn around, you have become someone new, separate from the originator of the action, who is gone now forever.

A brief conversation between yourself and a stranger is, in reality, a hundred some snippets of sound passed between a hundred some strangers and a hundred some versions of you.

And if, at a later point in time, you choose to relate this conversation to a third party, you are telling the story of people long gone. You are telling the story of ghosts.

These are mine.

The Bridge over the Abyss

We liked to throw pennies off it and then listen. You might think it would be boring, waiting for a sound that never came, but it wasn’t. I guess we never stopped believing that if we just waited long enough we’d hear a distant clink.

We were proud that a town as small as ours had an abyss of its own.

True, every now and then someone would jump off the bridge and then someone else would say, We’ve got to do something about the damn thing. Think of the children. And then everyone would think about us for a few days. We would think about ourselves, too, and about what it must feel like to fall forever. It didn’t seem so bad to us. Like my mother always said, there are worse ways to spend your time.

The people who went over the railings were missed, to be sure, but they were never truly mourned. There was too much uncertainty. It seemed possible that if we just waited long enough, we would hear them, calling up to us from a long way down, calling up to tell us what they’d found.

 

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Art Information

• All photographs are from the collection of Maria Romasco Moore and used with permission of the author and Rose Metal Press.