smiling kyla Grin beats smile. 010729 ... PeeT what is a grin? 121017 ... ovenbird These particular ghosts were last alive in 1954. The wife wears a floral house dress. The husband wears a button up shirt that has one too many buttons undone. I notice chest hair spilling from the gap. We sit at the dining room table, sipping tea from melamine mugs, a plate of Digestive biscuits untouched before us. I complain about the apartment, the noisy hauntings. “At night ghosts rattle the cast iron radiators,” I complain. “It keeps me up all night.” “Oh, that’s not ghosts,” the wife says. “It’s just bad plumbing. Ghosts are always being blamed for things they have nothing to do with. We are rarely the cause of disturbances. Most people don’t know that.” It turns out there are a lot of misconceptions about ghosts. For instance, they are far more substantial than we’re led to believe. The ghosts having tea with me are solid, not a hint of translucence. They can’t pass through walls. They sit upon the chairs, just as corporeal as me, but if you look closely you find that their chests don’t rise and fall and their edges look ever so slightly blurred. I sip my tea. I decide I would rather take my chances with these ghosts than the hungry grizzly bears in the hall. I can hear them out there, snarling and grunting, climbing the bannisters. I take a cookie. The ghosts smile spectral smiles. My own is no more real. 261004 what's it to you? who go blather from