Things That Are Ghosts

by Adam McOmber

Ohio. Grandfather clocks. Certain years. 1993. A John Deere combine harvesting a field of wheat at midnight. The way the moon is. The high school made of red bricks. Gray hallways lined with lockers. Fluorescent lights. The opacity of the other. I barely remember him now, you know? Flannel shirts. Brown hair. The smell of Aspen cologne. What else? The way he put his hand over my mouth on New Year’s Eve and pretended to kiss me, but really he was kissing the back of his hand. I liked it though. I wanted him to do it again. The A&W root beer stand. Tractor supply stores. Long gravel drives. Anxiety. That which repeats without ever being present. My mother had a paper castle she’d put on the table at Halloween time. I liked opening the little windows and looking inside. The shadows there. Cracks in the stone. Chains on the walls. A haunting is a disorder of time as well as space. I was a farm boy then. Corn fields. Bean fields. The smell of cattle. I wanted to walk with him at the county fair. Yellow lights. Tilt-a-Whirl. I wanted to wear his sweatshirt. To hold his hand. I wanted him to kiss me in the shadows of the rabbit barn. But that never happened. Of course, it didn’t. Yellow flowers. The path around the reservoir. The dark bathroom at Heistand Woods. When did he stop talking to me? What was the year? The month? When did I stop being someone he wanted to see? We graduated high school. I moved to a city. Went to gay bars. Tried to forget all of this. There was a haunted house at the county fair, you know? It was a double-wide trailer made to look like a ruined mansion. I walked through it by myself once. All those dark hallways. I didn’t know I’d get so lost.

Adam McOmber is the author of four novels—The White Forest (Simon & Schuster), Jesus and John (Lethe), The Ghost Finders (JournalStone), and Hound of the Baskervilles (Lethe)—as well as three collections of short fiction: Fantasy Kit (Black Lawrence), My House Gathers Desires (BOA), and This New & Poisonous Air (BOA). His new novel, a queer vampire story called With Blood Upon His Teeth, is forthcoming from Lethe Press in 2026. He is co-chair of the Writing Program at Vermont College of Fine Arts where he is also Editor in Chief and Fiction Editor of Hunger Mountain.

Hear a reading of this work, and an interview with Adam McOmber on pod-ette Episode 7: Time Keeps on Slippin’.