by Ella Gray Hickman
It’s not like ice cubes could go bad, she knew that, but when they sat in the bin too long, they started to turn in her head. The gentle cool mist that floated off the jostled cubes rumbling around the nearly empty plastic ice tray smelled like fridge. When she tossed them in the sink, she felt guilty like when she threw away the rotten green food waste cultivated by a too ambitious Sunday grocery shop. She half hoped the cold plinks of the rotten little cubes clattering in the metal sink basin were disturbing her roommate, who she could hear talking way too loud on a call in her room.
Erin could only hear her roommate’s side of the conversation, she must have been wearing headphones, but from what she could tell, she was talking to the host from that ghost podcast. Erin didn’t listen to him independently, she had a hard time with scary, but she’d heard his show from the other room enough to recognize the beats. Whenever Naomi did the dishes, which was not often, she’d blare the call-in show on her laptop over the din of the faucet right there on the countertop where her keyboard got all soapy. Naomi could be careless, which, in the grand scheme of faults a Facebook roommate could possess, seems minor but still digs under Erin’s skin.
The calls were rarely all that frightening, stuff that could creep you out on a walk home alone at night but not in your bedroom with the lights on and your roommate banging around in the kitchen. A shocking number of callers didn’t even seem scared themselves. They’d call in not with stories about ghouls stomping around in their attics, but with stories about what they thought to be loved ones reaching out from beyond the veil. The host was always so nice to them. He had a wonderful belly-deep fake laugh and a very midwestern candor. He’d say Well, huh, it sounds like blue jays were very important to your mother. The fact that you’ve seen so many this week could definitely be a message. and I mean, if that was his go-to lotto number, I’d certainly take that license plate as a sign from your dad. Erin found his generous credulity touching.
In her bedroom, Naomi was saying, Long time listener, first time caller, and all that kind of crap. Her voice sounded different than Erin had ever heard it, and she’d heard many iterations of Naomi’s voice: the work call formality, the barks on the phone with her mother, the high and sweet thing she adopts to give guys a pre-coital guided tour of her bookshelf and bedside table. It impressed Erin that Naomi never sounded scripted even though she said the same thing to every person she brought home. Naomi possessed the ability to impress upon others exactly how she’d like to be perceived. It reminded Erin of the practical yet conspicuously conspicuous way one holds a book while making their transfer between train lines, their thumb holding place in a NYRB Classic while their wrist twists to keep the cover facing outward.
This is the teddy bear my grandpa got me when I was a baby. It used to be more pink. I stole this copy of “Omensetter’s Luck” from my college boyfriend. The annotations are so corny. He underlined everytime it says the title, like, the same words. I mean- what’s the point of that? I didn’t dump him because of it or anything but, in hindsight, I think I did stop sucking his dick after I read them. My mother got me this snow globe on a business trip to Orlando. She sold pharmaceuticals. She’s alive, just retired. This is where I keep my Bupropion. I only take it when I need it because I like having a back stash just in case my insurance changes or something like that…
That evening, with the ghost podcast guy, she was putting on something a little darker and more dramatic than was natural to her speaking voice. She was telling him about a haunting she’d had, apparently, in college. Erin had never heard this story, so she strained her ears above the sound of her own dinner making puttering to listen in. The ghosts, because Naomi and her roommates eventually worked out that they were dealing with multiple entities, were the victim and perpetrator of a 1927 murder-suicide in the just-off-campus townhouse the co-eds were cramped up in. The husband, because obviously the killer had been the husband, was an inventor, which was something you could just be back then. Except, he wasn’t very good at inventing. A denied patent application for a new sort of wood glue was what sent him over the edge. He came home late from the patent office, a day’s travel by horse, and shot his wife where she slept in their bed. Then himself. Her mother, who had been living with them, or perhaps actually owned the house and had been letting them live with her, it was unclear just going off of newspaper reports from the time, was woken by the first shot but didn’t make it to their bedroom until both were dead as doornails. The college girls put all this together by combing through local newspaper records in the school library, horror movie style. The whole story felt cinematic, the way Naomi told it. At least, the portions Erin could make out over the sound of oil sputtering in her pan did.
When Naomi was done, Erin didn’t even pretend like she hadn’t been eavesdropping. It’s a tiny apartment, legally only a one bedroom since Naomi’s doesn’t have a window, and they both know they could hear the other so much as pick their nose. Any semblance of a charade at privacy had been long dropped. They didn’t really hide any annoyance or animosity anymore either, it was one of the nicer elements of their arrangement.
“Was that a real story?”
Erin was preparing her dinner, a sort of lazy rendition of a recipe her mom had linked to her via Instagram messages for a “Low Carb One Pan Egg Roll Bowl”. She was more or less frying coleslaw.
“You were being very loud for someone who could tell I was recording a call,” Naomi complained. She plunked two ice cubes into the sink basin rhythmically, clunk clunk. “It sounded like Law and Order out here.”
“Sorry. But was that real? The ghost story?”
“Real is the operative word, so I can say yes.”
“What do you mean?”
Naomi fixed herself a drink by delicately tipping some Aperol into a bottle of Miller that had been sitting capless in the fridge door since Sunday. No funnel or anything and barely any dripped onto the linoleum floor.
“You know how freak shows used to always market their hoax acts as “Alive” instead of claiming they were real because it was technically true? It’s like that. That story really happened, but not to me. There was a haunted house like that with the murder suicide inventor story, but it was at IU and my sister’s friends lived there.”
“Oh, I didn’t hear you mention your sister.”
“I didn’t. It was easier to just tell it like my own story.”
“You lied to the host? I thought you liked him.”
Naomi shrugged out of her sweatshirt, revealing in her tank top the little colorful stars tattooed on her right arm. Erin had complimented them once, somewhat disingenuously and more as a means of learning when and why Naomi pulled the trigger on the design. She told Erin that they were done years ago, inexpertly and freely, as a mutual favor. Some high school friend’s basement dwelling burn-out older brother had a DIY home-kit from Amazon and was willing to pay her in weed to be a canvas to practice on. They, the stars, were all totally blown out now, looking like when those vibrant specs of dust on the Doritos flake off into the chip dip and the dye bleeds a faint halo.
“It wasn’t a lie, the meat of the story is the same.”
“I think you mean bones. You changed the meat.”
“No, you can say meat. Like: meat and potatoes. I just changed the sides– the fixin’s. No one talks about a story having bones. You’re thinking of, like, fixer upper houses. Those have bones.”
“Sure. I always picture raw meat on a body when someone says ‘meat’ like that.”
The shredded cabbage and carrots in Erin’s pan were steaming up more than sizzling and nowhere near brown, overcrowded. She doused them in more oil. The plastic bottle they kept by the stove had a grimy, sticky quality to its entire exterior, no matter how many times Erin rinsed it under warm tap water.
“What sort of body? Human?”
“Just sort of ribs. Could be anything mammalian, I guess.” The oil simmered in the pan and Erin wondered if she should stop half heartedly moving the ingredients around so much with her spatula, give them a second to stick. “I don’t like that you lied to that guy, he seems really sweet.”
“Not a looker! I’d never seen his face before, but he had his camera on for the Zoom. Older than I always pictured him, you know?”
“Of course he’s old. He sounds old. I just meant it seems wrong to me.”
“When someone says, cheaper by the dozen, do you picture eggs or flowers?”
“I picture eggs.” Erin pictured donuts.
“Me too. When I hear ‘drop of the hat’, I always picture a page boy hat.”
“I picture a top hat, like a magician would wear. Abe Lincoln hat.”
“Mmm,” Naomi hummed absently, resting her ass against the cabinet Erin would need to pull tongs out of in a few moments and taking a swig of her Low Life. “Magicians are like idiom fodder. I bet presidents wish they could inspire idioms the way magicians do. I have a date tonight.”
“The apartment broker guy?” Erin motioned to the utensil drawer wordlessly with her plastic spatula and Naomi slunk away with no complaint, repositioning herself, folding her tipsy limbs into one of the kitchen table chairs.
“Yeah. You think he’ll bring me a dozen roses?”
“Oh, I see. Are you workshopping this idiom stuff on me to use later?”
“Maybe. It might come off like a personality quiz, though. I don’t want him to think I saw a TikTok telling me to vet guys who picture eggs cause they’ll never buy you flowers or some dumb shit like that. I’ll probably just re-use the ghost story.”
“Good luck. Don’t wake me up when you get home,” Erin jokingly chastised instead of telling Naomi to stop putting her shoes on in the kitchen. For one thing, it was gross to track in everything from the street level. That and the jumble of shoes that raked out from under the table whenever she pulled out a chair bothered her more than the traces of city grime, if she was being honest. Naomi laced up some boots with a little heel, leaving her tennis shoes and a pair of sandals sprawled between the table legs and the chair legs and her legs as she double checked her map app. The stacked wooden heels clicked across the apartment floor as she wandered back and forth to gather her jacket and bag in a way that grated Erin immensely. She wondered if the downstairs neighbors liked one of them more than the other, if they could differentiate Naomi’s shoed stomps from Erin’s socked shuffling, if they ever also heard Naomi’s pre-sex monologue.
“If I get home!”
That ambiguity didn’t bother Erin so much as it kept her awake. Her ears piqued like a dog at every set of steps down the hallway outside their apartment door, even though none sounded like Naomi’s. That’s something you don’t realize you’re learning until you know it instinctively. After a few years of living together, Erin can practically tell the number of drinks Naomi had that night by the clumsy sound of her footfalls up two flights of wooden stairs and down the communal hall to their railroad’s entrance. Erin registered ambiently that night, as neighbor and guest alike trudged up to and up past their floor, each person who audibly walked a bit faster or slower or less confidently than Naomi. So it shocked her out of half-registry when, around midnight, the sound of heavy steps made their way up to her third floor then ceased before ascending up to the fourth.
The neighbors could have a guest, is what she rationalized. Though the two guys in their late twenties in 3R were rarely known to entertain, it was a rational enough possibility to make the cold spike of fear creeping up Erin’s spine and goose pimpling the downy hair of her forearms distinctly irrational—the scaredy-cat somatic response of a grown woman who still left the theater at the third act of many a horror film to wait for her friends in the lobby. The neighbor’s door didn’t seem to open, or perhaps it had before Erin turned her fan off to strain her ears and listen for the faint sound of squeaking hinges across the building. Erin kept the fan off, kept listening. She moved from the dead center of her mattress to the edge, where she perched with weight balanced between sitting and standing, her feet planted firmly into her rug and her rear just barely compressing the mattress springs.
She was moving slow, as to avoid making a sound as she rose and crossed the room to her bedroom door, where she could press her ear up to the wood and listen more intently. Four steps from the bed, it occurred to Erin that she was keeping quiet so intensely both because she didn’t want to miss a single squeak or groan of wood from the hallway and because she herself didn’t want anyone in the hallway to be made aware of her own presence. Seven steps from the bed, right up on the firmer floorboards of her doorjam, where she’d brace herself in an earthquake though earthquakes don’t happen in New York very often, she heard the steps again.
They were louder this time and moving in the opposite direction, from the back of the building where the apartments’ front doors into the mirrored kitchens were down to the street-facing wall, where the bedrooms were situated. There used to be doors here too. Or, there are still doors at this side of the stairwell hallway, but they’ve been boarded up and out of use for years. The person was either stomping down the hallway with more force than before or, and this was impossible because Erin knew for a fact that the front door was locked and dead bolted and even that flimsy little chain that probably wouldn’t do anything if it came down to it was latched, the person walking down the hallway was closer this time. Then, with her ear pressed against the bare expanse of wood between where her work bag and rain jacket hung off of the over-the-door peg rack, Erin heard the knocks. Three, hard and firm. It was impossible to tell whether they were against the boarded up hallway door or, and again this was physically impossible, the door to Naomi’s room.
Erin had misused the word craven for a long time. For years, she’d thought it meant lacking in integrity, like unscrupulous or ignoble or furtive. But it actually just means cowardly. She knew she was cowardly, but the idea of being craven upset her. In this moment, she could put her hand on the doorknob and she could press her ear to the door, but when she went to twist the handle, she found that her body wouldn’t follow the course of action her brain laid out. Her wrist felt like jelly and, when she withdrew her hand from its loose grip on the door handle, she saw that her hand was shaking. The not-knowing, she realized, had become essential. Every cell in her body was colluding in order to preserve the stasis of not-knowing.
It was like when your tongue senses a taught, long hair in the wad of food you’re chewing up. Imagine it’s at a restaurant, too. You could, hypothetically, immediately determine whether the hair is food-borne or your own by swiping a finger down the side of your face and hoping to feel it catch on a stray strand. The little tug at your scalp could put the whole thing to rest. But you must also consider the alternative and, for that reason, you spit the whole wad of half-chewed food into a napkin before any hair forensics can take place. It was like that, only Erin couldn’t spit out the bile rising at the back of throat. She could only stand stock-still and listen until she got bored of it.
It was four steps away from her bedroom door when Erin heard the stomping again, so much faster this time. The rattling footfalls ran this time, first from the front of the building to the back, then in the opposite direction, undeniably closer. When the runner reached the streetside wall this time, at that very instant, Erin heard the loud slamming of a door. She startled and plunged back into her bed with three staccato hops like a scared of the dark child rushing back to bed after a latenight pee, heels never reaching the ground. Once under the covers, she couldn’t bring herself to reach even a finger out from under her blankets, which would have posed a problem if she’d had any intention of flicking off the lamp on her bedside table.
Erin didn’t realize she fell asleep until she woke up to the sound of Naomi steaming up the bathroom. Light was streaming into the kitchen. Something about the position of the apartment, where the front window pointed and how the other buildings on the street loomed over their own, always made it seem like the sun descended into the room in the morning instead of rising. Erin tried to wait it out, patiently shoveling cheerios down her throat which was a little sore with the beginnings of the sort of cold she got when she had too little rest. Then, after Erin dressed and wound her hair up in a bun that could conceal her unwashed roots, the absolute cut off time for leaving the apartment and still making it to work within a reasonable window of forgivable lateness was neigh. She pounded on the bathroom door but Naomi either could not hear her over the tinny reverberations of her iPhone speaker or she simply did not care that Erin had no access to her toothbrush and makeup bag.
The unbrushed teeth Erin dealt with on the way into the office with a shooter of Scope from the corner store she sloshed between her pearly whites with the kind of inner-mouth dexterity she should probably test out on a cherry stem. She’d never tried that but, leaning over the ashtray-like patch of tree stump and dirt outside the dive bar by her train stop to spit the mouthwash inconspicuously, she considered whether the cherry stem could be a good move. There was a sort of balance, she supposed, where you’d have to be certain that presenting the tied stem on your tongue would come off cool and sexy enough to offset the humiliation of ordering a mixed drink that comes with a maraschino.
The lack of makeup wasn’t a problem Erin had to deal with on her morning commute. Only a few people would be in the office, none of whom she minded offending with her chin pimples and eye bags. Her finger-oil smudged camera would take care of the rest.
She needed to put something on after work, though, before she met up with Vanessa. The trick at Ulta, which was the most convenient stop between the office and the wine bar Vanessa had suggested, is to only use the samples that come in pots or compacts and to stick to the disposable applicators. The second you start tapping your finger directly between the pressed mound of rosy powder and the high oily shine of your cheek bones, it’s all over. It is a slippery slope from there to the full abandon of swiping a sample tube of lipstick directly across your mouth like patient zero of the next global plague—Typhoid Maybelline.
Erin plucked a miniature spoolie and one of those lip gloss swabs, like Q-tips but fuzzier and angled, from the black plastic bins below an angled mirror at an aisle end cap, then palmed three or four fluffy cotton rounds. She kept the meager stash hidden in her hand as she moved about the crowded store, like she was shoplifting the freely offered applicators. A woman with cakey foundation on pockmarked cheeks and heavy handed eyebrows asked her if she needed a bag or any help finding products. Erin declined politely, feeling pleased with her own generosity with how convincingly she pretended like she could ever take this woman’s makeup advice.
She wore one earbud, so that she could hear if anyone needed to move past her in the tight aisles. Erin hated asking to be excused over and over again past some asshole who was deaf to the world in their headphones or airpods, eventually being forced to tap their sweaty shoulder before they’d deign to make room for her to move into the train or reach the discounted can of beans on the bottom shelf. The ghost podcast, which Erin had found by searching up “midwestern call in haunted show paranormal spook you next time” based on her spotty recall of the host’s outro catchphrase, released daily. It seemed to Erin an absurd frequency, given the approximately 90 minute run time of each episode. That seemingly good natured radio voice must be an audio-engineer slave driver. The newest episode’s description appeared to allude to Naomi’s story, recorded just yesterday evening.
Through the tinny right channel, Naomi’s voice, despite sounding so artificial and put-on from her room yesterday evening, was familiar enough to catch Erin’s attention back from where she was dabbing liquid foundation onto a cotton round.
The host introduced Naomi as an actress living in New York, which was true in the way that sort of anything can be true. Naomi acted, she’d had a small role recently in an off-off Broadway one-act dramedy that got recast before going to Edinburgh and had been appearing more and more frequently as a guest in a friend’s vertical dating game show, but Erin usually described her as a waitress when explaining her living situation to co-workers or tertiary family members.
Erin put her blush on before concealer, always had for some reason. She was approximately a year and a half too old to have learned how to do her makeup on YouTube and privately believed it showed. The puffy cotton round sucked up more product than it deposited on Erin’s cheek, but she refrained from double dipping the applicator back into the pot of orange-y rouge out of respect for her fellow free-sample-user. Someone had to uphold the social contract here.
A few months ago, Erin and Naomi had been parallel getting ready in the soo small bathroom, taking turns alternating between the mirror over the sink and the mirror in the kitchen right outside the bathroom that had an easily accessible outlet for the flat iron. Naomi commented on Erin’s blush thing, asked why she did it that way, and Erin hadn’t had an answer. Erin, in turn, asked Naomi why she kept licking her eyemakeup brush. Naomi was ready with an explanation.
She introduced a concept as “watercolor makeup”, a way to capture Makeup today, she argued, is all applied as powder or ink. She found this dogged adherence to the opposite sides of the blended out suggestions of color to hyper-difined lines spectrum limiting, especially since she wanted to look more like a Singer Sargent than a Lichtenstein. So Naomi would use a small paint brush instead of a makeup brush and she’d mix up a watercolor-like liquid in the pool of her cupped tongue with spit and eyeshadow pigment, then paint translucent brushstrokes of color across her eyes.
The result was as undeniably chic as the vintage beaded reticule Naomi used for a makeup bag, which always spilled her little sample sized vials of perfume into the porcelain sink when she half-sat on the basin to lean close to the mirror. Erin did it herself a few times until she was scrolling Reels and came across a front-facing video from Naomi pitching the technique. The process, in her head, was suddenly a proper noun, capitalized Watercolor Makeup.
There were more beats in the ghost story told to the podcast host that were new to Erin than she’d expected. It seemed that the sound of cooking dinner last night had drowned out some of the juicier details about what exactly Naomi and her college roommates had experienced before they got all Nancy Drew about the ghosts. Naomi described, in a manner Erin could admit was incredibly charming and engaging, how all the housemates had been watching a scary movie in the living room one night when they heard footsteps clomping up and down their hallway upstairs, walking at first before breaking into a sprint from one side of the house to the other.
Naomi could tell the hell out of an anecdote, slipping into narration like a character she could inhabit. Erin had worried, when she’d invited Naomi to the office-wide holiday party six months back, that Naomi might embarrass her by saying something crass or insulting the station manager. She’d done nothing of the sort, charming all of Erin’s coworkers with her half self-deprecating stories about failing to strike up a friendship with a girl who looked like her twin that got called to all the same auditions as her and a co-star who recovered a scene brilliantly when Naomi had her first and only brush with black box stage freight. Jane in HR remarked to Erin, days later, how nice it must be to live with a best friend. Erin wasn’t sure if she had a best friend and Naomi’s best friend lived in Minneapolis.
Little fuzzy wisps of cotton stuck to Erin’s skin where she tried to press liquid foundation over a smattering of pimples on her chin. She plucked with her fingernails the saturated little wads of cotton and makeup from where they trailed across her jaw, then tapped her fingerprints across the uneven surface until her skin appeared marginally smoother, less red and angry. A faint blush was rising on her neck along with her heart rate, but Erin didn’t have the patience to repeat this process across her neck and decolletage.
Certainly the footsteps were a coincidence. Hearing footsteps in a home when all residents were sitting together in the den is far different, far scarier, than hearing footsteps in a multi-unit apartment when your own roommate isn’t even home yet. Even if what Erin heard last night was inside their unit, the most logical explanation, Naomi drunkenly stumbling home with a slightly different gate than normal, was still believable and benign.
Two stories later, only about two thirds of the way through the podcast, another guest mentioned hearing steps. Between this comforting repetition of ghostly habits morphing last night’s haunting into a defanged cliche and the cooler air that settled over the street as the sun set, Erin was pretty sure the blotchy flush down her neck had dissipated by the time she reached the wine bar. Vanessa was already seated at an outdoor cafe table. She waved Erin over with practiced animation, squealing like a sea gull.
Vanessa’s gratingness was incredibly contextually dependent. When she and Erin had been interns together at iHeart, she was the lone cool girl Erin sidled up with against a churning sea of Aritzia hybrid slacks and dating reality show small talk. That summer, they watched vintage horror movies Vanessa insisted Erin would be able to handle due to the outdated special effects and saw a band Vanessa knew from college play Mercury Lounge and ate brown bagged sandwiches together at lunch. Outside of their brief alliance of convenience, Erin felt that their companionship made less sense.
Vanessa had that rare quality of possessing both intimidatingly good taste and the sort of easy charm that appealed to productive members of society who didn’t really give a shit about her good taste. She somehow had access to both /mu/ and Emily Post spider senses that told you how to diffuse awkward silences and what sort of gift to buy your internship manager at the end of summer. Her hair was infuriatingly perfect in a way Erin initially resented as a genetic stroke of luck before eventually realizing she was getting blow-outs somewhat frequently. The length of time Erin spent imagining Vanessa’s round brush shaped waves as gifts from an unfair god made her feel like one of those boys girlfriends poke fun at for not being able to identify eyelash curlers from kitchen utensils.
When the waiter popped by their table, he acted surprised to see the second chair occupied and Erin realized she probably should have stopped by the host stand before being seated, or at least entered the restaurant instead of hopping over the low barrier of potted shrubs delineating the sidewalk from the patio. Vanessa had already ordered some hummus and a bottle of wine with two glasses, so Erin didn’t understand why the waiter felt the need to wordlessly harp on such a point with his judgy little eyes.
Vanessa was still at iHeart, her job sounded like it mainly involved convincing dog subscription box companies that they shouldn’t mind whether or not podcast hosts believed in the efficacy of pasteurization or the metaphysical runic impact of emoji symbols on cortisol production. She was spinning it well, expressing gratitude for her so very supportive team and making vague intimations at a high salary, but Erin could hear the twinges of self-consciousness and disappointment in her words as they passed through the sheen of her glossed lips. Vanessa seemed unacquainted with playing her cards close. Back during their summer as coworkers, she had detailed her five year plan to break into A&R to Erin in unabashed detail. Unfettered access to one’s dream journal is a difficult thing to walk back.
“What about you?” Vanessa prodded with the confidence of someone with less to conceal. It occurred to Erin that she might be serving the purpose of a pick-me-up encounter right now, remembering how incredible it felt to spot an ex with a shopping basket full of frozen burritos and single-serve diet dinners at a grocery store a few months back. “You’re also doing podcast stuff now, right?”
“Radio, actually.”
“Oh yeah, WNYC? They have such great programming. It’s just a shame it takes forever for them to let anyone produce something.”
“Yeah. I’m working with some great producers, though, so I get a lot of opportunities to pitch ideas for shows, you know, casually.”
“You should look into doing I9 stuff on the side, you know. There’s always a new true crime podcast that needs a cheap editor. We use this, like, Indeed that’s specifically for AV professionals sometimes, but there are always freelance gigs up on there too. I’ll send you a link. The paranormal true crime ones are just exploding right now.”
“Do you ever actually listen to any, or is that like bringing work home?”
“Yeah, not really. I see these clips from a paranormal call in show with this goth chick on Reels sometimes though. She has this great, like, Arkansas accent. And I love ghost stories.”
“I lived in a haunted house in college. Did I ever tell you about that?”
“No, really? How did you know it was haunted?”
“We’d, it was me and three other girls, we’d always hear footsteps running up and down the hallway upstairs when we were home alone or, a few times, when we were all together in the living room even. And then, at night mostly, we’d hear steps up to our bedroom doors or the bathroom, if we were middle of the night peeing, and then three loud knocks. Like: bang, bang bang! But when we’d open the door, there would never be anyone there!”
“You’d hear banging knocks in the middle of the night and then you’d open the door?”
At home, Erin sat in the kitchen. She could turn the kitchen light with the front door still open and the always-on hallway light streaming into the apartment, but the overhead in her bedroom was burnt out so to turn a light on in there she’d have to walk through her dark room and fiddle with the lamp on her bedside table. She didn’t feel willing or even capable of standing in the dark in her room like that when no one else was home, so she pretended to keep busy putting away the dishes from the drying rack as slowly as she could and hoped that Naomi planned on returning that evening.
It took an hour and change but, sure enough, Naomi came barging into the kitchen a little after midnight. She wore her shoes all the way to the table and kicked them off underneath.
“Hey, you were kind of loud coming in last night,” Erin complained, hoping the expression of annoyance would mask the relief in her voice at finally gaining companionship in the still mostly-dark apartment.
“Oh please. I was a church mouse. No way you were even up still.”
In her room, Erin pulled the podcast episode back up, this time on her laptop: research style. She scrubbed to her approximation of when Naomi’s call would come. She had to revisit the details, to cross check her experiences against Naomi’s descriptions. She could go out into the kitchen and ask, but Naomi could lie to her, could fabricate commonalities or disregard evidence of the ghost’s sudden apparition so far from home in their dirty apartment, depending on her mood. As she listened, Erin scanned the Spotify comment section for any remarks on Naomi’s story. The fourth top voted comment had a bunch of replies, mostly in agreement. It read:
Chris needs to vet his guests way more. The one about the college roommates was word for word an urban legend I heard like five years ago from a coworker. Pretty sure I heard it again on another podcast last year. Do better, your audience deserves it.
Ella Gray Hickman is a writer in Brooklyn. She has published work in Cleveland Review of Books, the Eidolon Journal, Angel Food Mag, Burial Mag, BRUISER Mag, and Expat Press.