This is the tenth story in this summer’s online Flash Fiction series. You can read the entire series, and our Flash Fiction stories from 2017 and 2018, here.

I answered that I’d been visited by three ghosts.

Was it three?

The first ghost showed up in the form of a Bernese mountain dog. It was like this. I was staying at a cabin with my husband’s family over the Christmas break. This large dog, maybe two hundred and fifty pounds, came to the back door. He didn’t bark—he looked in through the glass pane and waited patiently. My father-in-law, who, as a child, had shared a home with a deer and a flying squirrel, opened the door.

That giant mountain dog came up the steps, crossed the room, and greeted me with a gentle head push. He put his nose down between his front paws, to make himself lower than me. He wagged his tail, gently. He had chosen me. He visited every day that week, for an hour or two in the morning, an hour or two in the afternoon, following me all around the house and out into the yard, too. I get along with dogs fine, generally, but this was something else. We loved each other. His nametag read “Kush.” To the rest of the family, he was merely polite. I don’t know how to explain it, but my father’s spirit was in that dog. Yes, my father had also been giant, and gentle, but it was more than that. My father was paying me a visit. It was strange, but also obvious. This was some fifteen years ago. In the year or so after the encounter, it seemed like I was meeting Bernese mountain dogs in elevators and on sidewalks all the time, but, when I met Kush, who was also my father, he was the first Bernese mountain dog I’d ever seen.

Where were all those dogs now? The breed had surged in popularity, then, it seemed, vanished.

I met the next ghost at a book-club meeting at the Boulder Public Library. I didn’t live in Boulder, I was passing through, but there was a notice in the newspaper about the book club, and my husband and I thought it sounded fun. I was a better person when I was young, and more open. The book club was reading “The Overcoat,” by Nikolai Gogol. Poor Akaky Akakievich spends all his savings on a new overcoat; the coat is stolen; after a series of further humiliations, trying to reclaim the coat, he dies of a fever; there are reports of his ghost haunting St. Petersburg, stealing coats from others.

It was a mixed crowd at the book club. Was the story about bureaucracy? About human vanity? About folklore? Was it a satire, or a tragedy, etc. It was the usual discussion. But then a small, thin man sitting in the corner scolded us all for missing the point. “Ghosts are real,” he said. The story was about a real ghost and “none of you understand that.” The thin man said that he knew that ghosts were real because for years he had worked at a slaughterhouse in Broomfield.

The man’s comments were received politely, but he left the meeting frustrated. Upon reflection, it was clear, to me and my husband, that the man from Broomfield was himself a ghost. That was what he was trying to say.

The last ghost was a mom I knew only a little bit, from my youth. Her husband was a professional trumpeter. I babysat for her two boys a few times. The last time I did so, they were so out of control when their parents came home that I was never asked back again—which I thought was reasonable. Later, two very sad things happened in that family: one of the boys died in a car accident, and the mom had a seizure in the night and was found to have a brain tumor. By that time, I lived in a city thousands of miles away and hadn’t seen the family in years. But one night, more than a year after I learned of the tumor, I had a very vivid dream with Leona in it—Leona was the mom’s name—and we said hello and were very happy to see each other. Really happy. The next day my own mom called me to tell me that Leona had died. I’d never had a dream with Leona in it before, and I never had another one after.

I told my daughter about the ghosts, because I wanted to be honest with her. Ghosts aren’t real, but also they are? Or something like that. I don’t know what I wanted to communicate to her. Probably I was showing off. I said three ghosts. But wasn’t that misleading? I had spent so many years interested in ghosts, the dead, ancestors I’d never met, anything sad and gone—that world felt real to me. But I haven’t seen a single ghost in more than ten years. Wait, no, I fixed the math. I hadn’t seen one in . . . the number of years was the age of my daughter. Now I spend my time more fully among the living. Either that, or the ghost these days is me.