“I don’t get it.” Your friend should have been born a Parisian. She is fine-boned and neurotically exacting with her attire, a chain smoker who balances a predilection for nicotine with a reverence for salads, too ephemeral, you think, to ever be touched by grief. You can’t imagine her crying over anything. “You’ve not spoken to your dad for six years.”

Your throat clenches. “It’s—it’s hard to explain.”

“I guess it could be disassociation.” She continues, relentless, smoke pluming from between professionally whitened teeth. “From all the years of not seeing him, and from being physically removed from your home. You’ll be fine. It’s just shock.”

Shock? You close your mouth around the word. Shock. It didn’t taste like shock. In your mind, shock is astringent, sharp. Like lime, like stomach bile, a flavor that wrenched and appalled. What you feel is softer, a carbon monoxide haze, subtly lethal, seeping into your lungs and your blood. It dulls you, whatever it is, flattens your world into mono-dimensionality, into perfect greys.

Not shock, you think.

“No.” Your friend pinches together immaculately painted brows. “It’s definitely shock.”

You spasm, lurch in your seat, realizing at last that you had spoken, not subvocalized. In your embarrassment, you assemble a laugh, unevenly syncopated, a quavering ha-ha that you use then to segue into flightier topics, rearranging the conversation about your friend instead of the grief that sits waiting like your father’s apparition six tables down.

“Go away.”

Your father only stares as you crumple against the steam-slick wall, as you contract into a ball on floor, hands in your hair. Somewhere in the last five days, he lost his fear of proximity, replaced it with an intensity that both frightens and depresses you. Now, he squats an inch from your face. As you look between the kelp-tangle of your hair, you see him reach out, long fingers stretched to brush your cheeks.

“Go away!”

Your scream erodes his silhouette, reduces him to ashes on an ocean wind, to a shimmer in the cold fluorescent light, and then, like he never existed in the first place, a delusion given substance by an ill-attended grief, he is suddenly and irrefutably gone.

You pointedly ignore his reflection in the laptop screen: his skin is missing, his torso gapes like a mouth, the ribs gleaming teeth-like against the wet mass of his innards. Intestine drool from the base of his breastbone, a spiral of nesting pinks.

Preta. Er Gui. Hungry ghost.

You type in fresh search terms, hoping to triangulate a solution, or at least an explanation for the haunting, an origin story from which you can exorcise some form of reprieve. But Wikipedia only has riddles.

Hungry ghosts were driven by intense emotional needs in an animalistic way. Hungry ghosts were lessons. Hungry ghosts were victims.