We are ready to wrap up our 119th Lite Reads selection, There Are Ghosts Here by Dominique Dickey. There were questions as food for thought on social media as people had the chance to read it and think about it. I will be sharing my own thoughts here. Spoilers ahead for those who have not read the story yet. Content warning for discussions of accidental child death, missing children, and animal death.
There Are Ghosts Here by Dominique Dickey is a 2018 dark short story published by Anathema Magazine. The story begins with Leo, older brother to Louisa and Lucas, going missing. Their cousin Maisie visits with her parents, and while the adults are talking she goes to play outside with Lucas. While Maisie shows that she is an unusual child with a fascination with the stars, her parents reveal to Lucas, Louisa, and Leo’s parents that it is too late to do anything for Leo, and the audience learns a baby is being born in the house next door as Leo breathes his last breaths. Shortly after this, Maisie’s parents die and she comes to live with her cousins permanently, and Lucas learns how unusual she is. Maisie has the ability to heal, save lives, and take lives away, and she uses these abilities on the local animals, looking after the ones she can and taking the bones from the ones she can’t. The children also help look after the next-door neighbour’s young child Bodhi. The extent of Maisie’s abilities isn’t truly revealed until Bodhi is five years old and is struck down in the street by an ice cream truck. Rather than saving him, Maisie reveals she eased his death so it wouldn’t be painful, but let the death happen so that they could return Leo to his family. With the help of Louisa at the wheel, Lucas and Maisie go to find the spot where Leo died, a spot that had never been recovered, and recreated the moment they shared talking about the stars when Leo had breathed his last breaths five years earlier. The story ends when Leo’s body recovers from the decay of time and breathes new life. It’s a haunting and sad tale that also manages to produce a sort of magic and hope that feels at home in the darkness.
The magic that Maisie harnesses in the world of There Are Ghosts Here is a fascinating thing to just sit with. The way the stars and the bones play into this magic, along with the ways the magic focuses on life and death and healing, feels like folk magic at full effect. It gives an almost magical realism feel to the story, especially with the fairly unquestioning nature of the child characters. I like the taste we get at the beginning of this story that this is family magic, with Maisie’s parents advising Leo’s parents that he is already dead, and new life has already come of that death. This taste of the idea that Maisie has learned this folk magic from her parents, and grown to be an expert in her own right is kind of beautiful. Traditions like these are the exact kind that are passed down in families, so it makes it feel even more like magical realism. Even though the story is dark, with almost a suburban folk horror feel to it, the magical realism feel of it helps to soften the blow, but still giving us the feeling that anything is possible but everything has a cost.
The way There Are Ghosts Here explores death is really interesting. Death is permanent, and it’s also impermanent and rather fluid, but is also ultimately a ledger where the columns need to balance out. Maisie has completely accepted this ledger and works with it to create the magic in her life. Her work with this magic leaves her apparently detached from human death, because even though she’s sad, the death of her parents or Bodhi doesn’t leave her outwardly reacting to the situation the way animal deaths do. That said, there’s still a certain level of detachment, as she is still completely capable of stripping the animals down to the bone when she fails to save them. Death is treated as a sort of fickle thing here, which manages to increase the overall creepiness of the story, as it can be jarring to see children treat something as serious as death in an almost callous manner.
At its core, I feel like There Are Ghosts Here is primarily a story about childhood. Even though death isn’t a standard fixture of childhood, especially the death or disappearance of other children which is obviously a complete tragedy, it’s still an unfortunate part of the lives of many children. Magic is a much more standard fixture of the wonders of childhood, and it’s honestly beautiful that this infused a story about death with magic and preserved the strange innocence of childhood by doing so. It was beautiful to see the ways childhood perseveres through the worst traumas, like losing a parent or a sibling, and still manages to find magic in the stars and in the remains left behind. I feel like these are concepts I need to ponder over more because it’s touching that children are so resilient and devastating that they need to be.
Overall, There Are Ghosts Here by Dominique Dickey was a fascinating and creepy short story that I definitely enjoyed. It was enjoyable as a spooky story on a surface level, but I also enjoyed spending time thinking about the themes that I took from it. It’s my first experience with the author, but I’ll be keeping an eye out for their work in the future.
I hope everyone who participated by reading the story and following along on social media has enjoyed themselves. If you have more thoughts to add, you can leave a comment here, or join the conversation on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, or Instagram. You can also join in on the discussion at Litsy by following @elizabethlk and the #litereads hashtag. Our new selection will be available tomorrow, Sunday, September 19.
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