New Flash Fiction: "Ghosts"

[But first -- this is my last posting before I leave for France tomorrow. Hope to be signing on again soon in a couple of days from a village in the Alps!]

Ghosts

The ghosts hang on the washing line, freshly laundered, drying in the night air, so they’ll smell like the moon. Clean again, like the three little kittens who lost their mittens. They ate pie, got blackberry jam on themselves, but their mother made them warm and dry again.

Later, ladies — weird, witchy sisters — will iron the ghosts, irons set on cool so the delicate fibers won’t melt, fold them up, put them in a drawer, away from your sight. The ladies hide them from you, the gossamer bits of ghost. So you peek over the fence into their yard, trying to catch the flutter from the clothespins with your eyes.

If they would just let you see them, when they take them newly awake again from the line, just one, irrefutably, for sure, really absolutely, so you know you saw one.

And then you would know that it is all real, that it all really happened, the Chronicles and Caspians of your childhood, the Tarans and the wanderers and the lions, the Harrys —

Go ahead and say it, why not? Magic.

Why won’t they show you? Why do they leave you twisting in the wind like a sheet, like Macbeth on the Heath?

Did you turn your head away? Don’t look now. They heard you. One of them is looking at you, her crooked finger beckoning. Go on. Make it real.