Foresight

Pink-cheeked Charles was pinned to her hip like a moving box, sheltering his pucker from the sun with his hand in the shape of a trowel, as Sam listened to her new neighbors condemn the previous inhabitant for his notorious lack of foresight. The atheist had planted the first living thing on the property a month ago after spending 30 years in the two-bedroom rancher.

One asked her through prune-lips, "You don't have any qualms about living in a house where a man just expired?" Sam would’ve laughed, like a juice carton? A red plane passed in the blue overhead. The lawn was lush, save a yellow circle of worn grass around the living thing in question.

"I love marigolds," she said.

Over the yellow weeks of summer, Sam received a carpentry magazine, AARP flyer, and promotional materials for the Baltimore Orioles. She flipped through them with interest, understanding a network of objects and ideas that composed the old man’s personality. The bills, toll violations, and heartfelt, regretful letters from Charles’ father were post-marked to her. She’d bury these in the trash and look out the window to see those bright orbs, each its own vibrant planet in a verdant green atmosphere.

One night, when Sam was showering, the waning light flickered behind its frosted mid-century glass. Then blinked. She opened the curtain and it blinked again. She rinsed off and threw a towel around herself. A soft buzz alighted her shoulder. If there’s another consciousness in this room, she thought, then I’ll know who won the World Series in 1983. I’ll guess that it was the Orioles. She dried her hands and looked it up on her phone. It was the Orioles. An electric sensation washed over her.

Ever since, the light signaled whenever she walked by or washed her hands—until Charles spent the night with his grandparents and Sam had someone over. It was this handyman whose hair was as deeply black as the tattoos adorning his body. The most prominent, on his neck, was the Virgin Mary. They had pizza delivered, a glass of wine, and sex by the fan. He wiped her stomach off like a mechanic and asked her how she got on without a man in the house.

“Oh, I have one,” she said and told him about the ghost.

He made sure to pull on his boxers before walking past the bathroom door. The light blinked as usual. He finished dressing, took a long look at her in bed, and went out to his car. In the cicadas’ nightly chorus, she speculated that he was going to drive off. Instead, he came back with a bouquet of roses and a steel toolbox.

“These were for you.”

He was in the bathroom for less than five minutes before the spirit was disposed of. When he left, Sam walked back and forth in front of the bathroom. Nothing. She read a book in the bath. She wrapped herself in a robe and skimmed through the old mail she’d received. Inside one magazine she didn’t remember reading, there was a page on the 1983 champions. She gathered his letters in her arms and dropped them into the garbage. Under the streetlights, the shadows of the marigolds’ winding petals stood out to her, their finite grooves like a circular switchboard.

“How can a man just disappear?” That was the sensational headline on the Mystery book magazine, laying face up in the trashcan.

In the orange light of the next evening, Charles crawled across the wood, empty as a map and Sam spit seeds out the window toward the marigolds, in appreciation of the deceased’s faith until night fell, not black, but dark, dark blue and cool.