Oblivious to these thoughts of mine, the ghost grabbed the box of chocolate kisses and tossed it into a cart, the hint of a smile on his pale face. His eyes were sunken, and the skin beneath his nose was much too dry and wrinkly for one so young. Gripping the side of the shopping cart, he gawked around. His arms were so thin they didn’t seem to be attached to his shoulders, and under his caved-in chest, his stomach stuck out. Definitely not a child of this age. He desperately searched the shelves for sweets he knew. He probably couldn’t have cared less about the hundreds of rich new candies lining the shelves. Ghosts, it seemed, did not devote themselves to devouring the future. All this child wanted was to recover another thread that had slipped from his grasp during his very slender life.

Such a lot of candy in a health food store. I’d assumed that this health-conscious generation wouldn’t even consider buying cheap sweets, but clearly I was wrong. Apparently there were plenty of people who, rather than give up sweets, enthusiastically looked for ways to make them healthy. I saw gummy bears, but they were all brown. They had animal crackers too. “Buy me some sweets,” the ghost said. “Buy me frozen dogs.” I looked for the sweets called “frozen dogs,” layers of biscuit and cream covered with chocolate, and there they were. Of course they bore the inevitable “organic” and “free trade” labels. His brow furrowed, the boy was desperately trying to remember more kinds of sweets. I was about to say, “If you eat too much you’ll get sick,” but didn’t. This child was a ghost. He was already dead. There was no use worrying about a dead child getting sick. Apparently not realizing he was dead, he said, “If I get sick I can go to the doctor. Dr. Kollwitz will see me even if I don’t have any money.” Kathe Kollwitz’s husband was a doctor, and the waiting room at his clinic was always full of poor people. She sometimes drew sketches of them. Which meant that this ghost must have lived in Berlin a century before and had perhaps emerged from one of her sketches.

“Have you been to see Dr. Kollwitz?”

“Sure, lots of times.”

“And what did he say?”

“He told me to eat more good things. Let’s buy fried sausages!”

“I don’t think they sell them here. How about fish sticks—do you like them?” Fish sticks are rectangles of fried white fish. Even now kids like them, but since they only went on sale after the war maybe this boy has never seen them. They don’t look like fish and hardly taste like it either, which might explain their popularity. A sort of junk food, you might say, but with good enough ingredients they wouldn’t be so different from fried fish. Probably much better for him than fried sausages, I thought, like a mother worrying about her child’s health, which seemed strange even to me. Would anyone adopt a ghost? I was about to buy some when I saw how much they cost and discovered that they were way out of my price range.