Ghost
by Dawn McCombs
Dawn McCombs, 77, digital photograph, 2019. Courtesy of the artist.
GHOST
Dawn McCombs | OCT 2025 | Issue 49
I live in the same house where we lived together for sixteen years, although I’ve changed most of the furniture. He didn’t take his things, so I stuffed them into garbage bags and put them on his porch until my daughter told me that he was tossing them straight into the dumpster. I started doing that too, a short cut at least, to rid the house of him. I did wear his socks for a year, until my daughter told me that it was weird to wear my ex-husband’s socks. I threw them all away, but ended up replacing them with the same socks, because nothing in my brain was working quite right yet.
Now I have a German professor who rents out a room. He cooks sausage every night, because he says that’s what Germans do. I hear his footsteps on the stairs. I hear dishes clanking in the sink. I like that he breaks the silence.
He left behind all the photos, his books, coats, shoes, pens, CDs, pocketknives, bottles of melatonin, white socks with the feet cut out of them to wear on his arms when he ran. I got rid of it all, except for the books that sit on the bookshelves, the titles searing themselves into my brain. I want to fill the Little Free Libraries with them, but I can’t bear to hold them in my hands, because once he held them in his.
The house has a new roof that repels water during storms, unlike the old roof that lightning struck a hole in one night, water pouring through the ceiling. The thunder cracked first. I tried to wake him, but he told me to go back to sleep, that I was dreaming. I laid there gaslit until the sheets grew heavy with rain.
I wish that I would have been the one who said one morning after twenty-five years of marriage that I would be moving out before he got home from work. And then I would be laughing with my daughter on the phone, like he did, as I set up my new house that same night.
I saw him running in front of the house today, even though we live in different states. I asked my daughter, who also lives in a different state, if it was him, and she said, “No. He wouldn’t run past that house anyway. He says it’s haunted.” But I swear I saw him today, and a year ago, and the year before that.
I dream of living on a houseboat or a van that never stops anywhere for long. Maybe it’s only the ghost of you I saw, prancing on the balls of your feet, white-socked arms, too small hat perched on your enormous head that our daughter inherited, that I had to force out of my body.
I loved you and then I didn’t and then you turned into a ghost. Running, always running.
Away.
Dawn McCombs lives in Columbus, Ohio. When her father died, at the same time that her mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, she found herself unexpectedly writing a memoir. When she isn't writing about loss she sings karaoke, fantasizes about living on a live-a-board on the West Coast and finds heaps of joy doting on her big-eared rescue pup. She has been published in The Audacity and started a writing community called The Word Weavers.