How to Sell a Haunted House

Everyone realizes that at some point, right? It’s part of growing up. You realize you’re not going to be the star of the show. You realize you’re going to be lucky to scrape by and pay the rent. That’s when a lot of people go to med school. Or get married. Or decide that hitting the bong first thing in the morning sounds like a great idea.

. I read about Little Angel’s Wild Night of the Witches, and Handspan Theatre, and Charles Ludlam’s The Ventriloquist’s Wife, and Javanese holy shadow puppet plays, and how puppet shows used t

Mark was cleaner but he looked like exactly the type of guy who’d go to a Waffle House at three in the morning after shooting a haunted puppet.

He had the same little black tongue, the same turned-up nose, the same chalk-white face, but something

else looked out at her through those black-rimmed eyes. Something she couldn’t control, and Louise knew she was all alone in her room with something truly dangerous.

“I’ll come right out and say it,” Mercy told them. “Strange noises, bad vibes, your mom and dad recently passed— Your house is haunted and I’m not selling it until you deal with that.”

You know, Louise, statistically, and there’s a lot of variance in these numbers, but in general, from a strictly scientific point of view, everything turns out okay an improbable number of times.

Louise held Poppy’s feverish, limp body for hours, wishing harder than she’d ever wished before that for just sixty seconds someone would hold her, but no one holds moms.