71/

Something shatters in the kitchen and wakes Chloe at four in the morning. It was a vase – not one of the nice ones, at least — and by the time she’s swept and vacuumed and mopped, it’s four-thirty. The clock face on her nightstand presents this as glaring, glow-in-the-dark fact. Her body won’t go back to sleep, and the pressure from lying on her side is making her ear hurt. If she didn’t have to keep replacing her glassware, she’d go in for a new pillow. A nice one — real down, or maybe latex.

It’s a long wait until eight-thirty, when she can start making calls again. The problem is that no one worth their salt believes her — and the indigence toward her grates more with every passing day.

“Ma’am, is this a crank call?” says the man on the other end of the line. Chloe sighs, hoping it will help convey her exasperation as she states again that it is not.

The man clears his throat. “With due respect, you do know that ghosts aren’t real?”

“You don’t say,” Chloe says, flatly, and hangs up. There’s a thud in the room next door as a hardcover slides off the coffee table onto the floor.

“This is worse than having a cat,” Chloe grumbles, picking up the phone to dial the next number on her list. She found the psychics and mediums impressively mundane, and quickly learned that they didn’t believe Chloe’s story any more than she believed theirs. The night after the psychic first claimed the bad energy had been cleared, Chloe woke up to her nightstand glass of water being poured on her face. The psychics always claimed the ghost banished. It never was. Chloe moved on to priests, who tended to either not believe her or ask her what she’d done to deserve it. Who else was there to call for ghosts? Chloe decided to try archeologists.

It’s hard to find archeologists, and the ones she does manage to get in contact with are confused as to why she would call them. Chloe can’t give them a good reason: no one prepared her for this situation, and the psychics and priests didn’t pan out. She asks them if there’s a better profession, besides the three she’s tried. That’s usually the point when they end the call.

At two in the afternoon, Chloe throws her phone down in defeat. The lights in the room flicker on and off several times. She gets up to go on a walk but the front door won’t open. Her shoes have also disappeared.

It’s not that bad, she tells herself, as she ambles into the kitchen to make herself a cup of tea. The thing has been around for a month and it’s never really tried to hurt her. She’d asked her landlord to let her out of her lease early, and he hadn’t believed her reasoning either.

The kettle lifts itself from the stove and pours itself out in the sink.

“Oh my God, what is your problem? What do you want?” Chloe screams at nothing in particular.

One of the kitchen cabinets slams open, and the bag of sugar splits, spilling granules over the counter. Chloe peers over them as they arrange themselves into letters.

What makes you think I want anything?