Wayne H. W. Wolfson

Ghost in the Window

It had been good for both of us, effortless too. A voyeur would have seen a form of fighting combined with a type of horizontal street ballet.
Now would come the cooing, baby talk which I could not stand. I wish I had not agreed to spend the night.
Me, lost in thought, she had already started. Lost in thought, she saw the faraway look on my face and stopped.
“What?”
I felt the hairs on the back of my neck prick up. She invented a lot of her own superstitions, one of which was that she always had to live on a third floor. I squinted out the window, something was watching us, a black shape. My heart pounded.
“Listen to me . . .”
Her face pinched tight. She thought she knew what U was going to say. She decided to attack first.
“Ten years we have been together, if those years had been a baby, it would practically be a teenager now, double digit birthdays. You can’t even stay one night with-out having to be worn out first by arguments? Ten years, you owe me for an abstracted life we never even talked about creating because it upset you.”
I just sat there. As she raised her voice the shape ducked out of sight, hovering on the periphery.
“Listen to me . . .”
At this point I would sound absurd. She calmed down a little, put a kettle on and went into the shower. I quickly let myself out, silently. I could not wait for the elevator. The stairwell door swung open as I reached for the knob.
Her neighbor, he had the same moustache as me, but trimmed to finer points. He smiled, cheeks creasing and swallowing up his eyes.
“Let me get that for you brother.”
I nodded and squeezed by him. The door shut with a dull thud. Looking down the squared spiral of the stair-well, I saw a girl descending. I watched her. I was uneasy and decided to call to her to wait, we would go down together.
As I was about to open my mouth I again spotted the blackened shape. It was at the very bottom, waiting.
Should I yell out a warning? No, maybe if it had her, fed, it would leave me alone, go away. She was almost to it. I closed my eyes, standing perfectly still, silence.
I waited, for who knows how long? I crept down the stairs making as little noise as possible.
Outside, I did not feel any better. I tried to look up to her window, but the angle was wrong. I had to get home, I could not wait for a taxi. I ran to the train station.
The train was mostly empty, a drunk softly singing to himself as two young lovers locked in an embrace.
Two stops into the ride my eyes wander out the window, toward the tracks.
The shape.
If it had been hovering, it would not have seemed as bad, sort of dream-like. Instead, it kept up with the train in a series of leaps and bounds. Sweat stung my eyes.
I got off at my stop and ran up the stairs. The phone had just stopped ringing as I closed the door. I checked the lock and got myself a glass of water.
I felt exhausted. I lay down on the couch, too tired to make it to bed.
I am not sure how long I slept. I felt someone watching me. With a start, I jumped up, grabbing the heavy ashtray off the coffee table.
No, no one.
Outside the window, the shape. I stared.
It looked like a dog sitting up, it cocked its head to the side.
He moved slowly, stopping several times to look back at me as I followed him down a tunnel.

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Wayne H. W. Wolfson is has published widely, including in Word Riot, The Kit-Kat Review, Poetry Motel, Hobart, and Winamop (UK). He lives in Northern California.