Status Updates From A Festival of Ghosts

Carved pumpkins decorated roughly half of the doorsteps he passed by. Candles burned inside those pumpkins, even though it was morning on a sunny day. The other half of the houses he passed had curtains drawn and windows shuttered like eyes squeezed tight, or like ears with fingers stuck in. Lalalalalala. I don't see any ghosts, I don't hear any ghosts, and ghosts are most definitely not welcome here, nope.

"I think maybe there's a time when you come into your own. When you're most fully yourself. Sometimes you hold onto that through every other age, even when the rest of you changes."

"Mom tried to soothe a novel badly haunted by early unpublished versions of itself by reading the first page aloud. She savored the words as they were, and tried to quiet the haunting drafts of the words as they weren't."

"Lunch is important, you know. Most alliances are made and broken at lunchtime."

"No, I didn't know that," Rosa said. "I don't know anything about how the living draw circles around each other."