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Back Lurkers Save as PDF
Chapters (20)
  1. I.
  2. – 1 –
  3. – 2 –
  4. – 3 –
  5. II.
  6. – 4 –
  7. – 5 –
  8. – 6 –
  9. III.
  10. – 7 –
  11. – 8 –
  12. – 9 –
  13. – 10 –
  14. – 11 –
  15. – 12 –
  16. IV.
  17. – 13 –
  18. – 14 –
  19. – 15 –
  20. Acknowledgments

“That’s exactly my point.” Rosemary gripped her chopsticks till her knuckles were white. “Fuck this shit.”

She picked at a limp mung bean sprout. Their mother chewed on a slice of pickle in silence, no doubt thinking a million negative things. Mira found herself in the unlikely position of family peacemaker. With no choice but to be a good sport, she swallowed one of the dumplings.

“This is pretty tasty.” She looked at her mother—who was still expressionless, still locked deep within herself.

“Ma, say something. Say: fo’ shizzle my nizzle.”

“What? Why?”

“Just say it.”

Mrs. Park cast her eyes away but Mira kept at it.

“Ma, say it. Ma, say: fo’ shizzle my nizzle. Come on! Fo’ shizzle my nizzle, Ma.”

Mrs. Park put down her chopsticks. “Fosheezer ma neezer.”

“Yaaaay!” Mira hollered enthusiastically and gave her a standing ovation.

Mrs. Park found herself smiling in spite of herself. “What is meaning, Mira?”

“It means,” Mira beamed, “I agree with you, my delightful friend.”

– 11 –

– 11 –

THE SILVER BULLET

The haunting, if it even was a haunting, continued all summer—doors left open here, ectoplasm there, the dial on his radio tuned to Mexican stations and the volume set at Earth-Shattering. More than twice, mariachi trumpets had him leaping out of his skin. And those yowling disk jockeys—who or what the hell was La Raza? Could his ghost be some Latina who salsa’d around his house to this kind of thing?

As the weeks passed, Raymond started looking forward to the visitations. He liked the radio tampering. He liked the mounds of cookie crumbs neatly piled like anthills on his staircase. He liked especially the sexy puddles of ectoplasm. He started talking to her. This had all the makings of a buddy movie: aging horror writer and his dead Latina confidante, an I Dream of Jeannie for the twenty-first century.

“The blue Hugo Boss shirt or the green Thomas Pink shirt?”

When these disturbances stopped in the last week of September, he felt bereft.

He had started a log. The visits only occurred when the security system hadn’t been on. When he had it activated, with its beep-beep-beep “On” sound, the ghost seemed to respect his wish not to be disturbed. Some nights, he left the entire system off just so the ghost wouldn’t feel unwelcome. But recently, even when he had it off for a week straight, his friend didn’t show up.