Hauntings
by Liliana Lule
The argument stretches across weeks, gnawing at them day and night. She thinks they should name the baby after her mother. He thinks they should name her after no one at all. Before long, her sleep starts to suffer, and she wakes up to phantoms moving at her periphery. When she asks her husband to double-check locks, he tells her it’s in her head. Soon, doors begin to slam by themselves. The walls’ paint jobs warp, the windows fog at noon. She demands to know why he won’t listen to her, and off they go in circles again. Eventually she calls her mother, who reminds her all walls have ears. Her husband insists they’re both being ridiculous, but he doesn’t complain when she sends him to sleep on the couch. In her dreams that night, she sees him with no face, and the unnatural silence in their bedroom wakes her. At the witching hour she stands over him in the living room, his sleeping body vulnerable in the dead of night.
“I think we should stop arguing,” she whispers, and he stirs. Inside her, their daughter shifts. “The house can hear us.”
Liliana Lule is a recent graduate of Emerson College, where she completed an MFA in Creative Writing with a focus in fiction. Her writing interests include questions of identity and culture, particularly of Latines in the U.S., as well as issues of representation and diversity in literature. Her work focuses on issues of belonging, both in terms of interpersonal connections and of the supernatural. She can be reached by email at lilule@rocketmail.com.