If you realize you don’t remember last weekend even though that weird thing happened but you can’t place the day, 

If you wish you had a chair in a garage to sit in during a summer storm, and maybe a father and a beer to watch it with, 

If you almost stepped on a dead squirrel on your walk home and shuddered not at its rotting death but at the memory of some other squirrel in your childhood’s backyard that your brother shot with a BB gun, 

If you sometimes stick your fingernails between your teeth to feel how loosely they’re cast inside your mouth, 

If you’re haunted by corn fields, no matter the season, because of how familiar they are, then you should read Maria Romasco Moore’s Ghostographs. 

I first read Ghostographs in a nearly windowless basement apartment, on a floor mattress, with the whole world around me. A directionless philosophy student with no philosophies in an endless winter. I wanted everything to change about myself, which is still true, but, especially then, I felt particularly moldable and particularly stiff about the idea of ever returning home. Ghostographs captured that sickly ruralness, that gray scratch at the back of my neck of perceiving through the impressionistic, surviving through a schism.  

Ghostographs is a series of profiled flash fiction inspired by the author’s foraged photographs of random people. Each piece of flash takes as long to read as it does to stand for its picture. Moore’s strangers become known as quickly as it’d take to judge them, written out long enough to start understanding them. Until my second read, I hadn’t realized Moore didn’t know the people in the pictures. This slice of magical realism came entirely from the imagined colors of someone’s brain stalk. Fiction, what a cannibalistic thing.  

Photos like women with leathery skin. Men standing in front of a suspicious-looking apple tree. Children in a row looking vintage with faces that make you wonder when children stopped looking so sad; that maybe in the last hundred years, our mouths have evolved to curl up a little more. These images are the dead things rattling under the porches of Moore’s fiction. A fabricated town of metaphysically talented people, each earning their own page which characterizes them in the fittingly absurd light of rurality. 

Ghostographs creates a singular home for an imagined narrator through a splicing of many crannies of rural America. Repeated tropes of the tired people that make and feed this country. There are so many stories, stories to run away from, that every story might as well be true. We’ve all gotten our eyes poked from an unknown direction, seen something quick in the quiet of an empty morning, or something sinister across the river. Right now, I’m just sitting here, waiting out the long thaw. Then I’ll pass it over to you. 

One such character, Tess, is the perfect metaphor for the unseen extraordinary: 

“She was so bright that if you held a book in front of her face, you could see every page at once. You could try to read the book that way, but it would make no sense. If you held your hand over her hand, you could see all of the muscles and bones and the old rose thorn lodged under your left thumbnail. You could read your hand that way.”  

The surreality transfers the fictitious experience so well onto any face. Some people just shine so bright we can’t even look at them, they may all be Tess. 

Every time I move, I move farther and farther from where I came. Every time I go outside, I mistake strangers for people I know, back from somewhere else before their faces frog back into the strangers’. But I know who they were, just following me. We’ve been tripping over the same wheat grass, loops of it like a trap under wet snow. Found ourselves in a different farm town where the ground still buzzes.  

All of Moore’s characters are playing hide and seek like this, popping up in the corn stalks of each other’s profiles and then disappearing in dim exposure and waterlog. Some fade away with height like trees, others plant themselves in the ground to fertilize their dead wives to blossom up towards the sun. It’s a whimsical reading. I especially remember it being so with the desire for backwater summer to tickle my neck. I read it under the moth light of a vitamin D lamp, a puddle of melted snow and mud under my boots by the door. 

In a later flash piece, Tess becomes “Tess Unlit”. She “blinked out like a burnt bulb” and “won every game of hide and seek.” 

*** 

If I were to return home, it would only have to be under the presumption that all of the people were gone. When finding ourselves back at a place so far away and familiar, there’s that uncanny nausea of how normal it feels. I’d be paralyzed to see all of the people still mulling around, trapped in a period of time that is long ago for me. And so further and further I’ll stretch away, and the chronology of it all will be pressed, a benign photograph that stops everyone from moving but me. 

Because it would be easier to keep going and separate each person in time from the next. Living in a place where you lose the light in yourself, where you’re becoming a ghost yourself–it’s hard to look back on when you finally get out. But photography is merely light reflected from a subject, and each of the townspeople in this novella reflect off each other. They make different shapes of one shifting memory, a blending of self into a communal landscape. So the narrator can’t separate, and neither can I. Because “like the flicker of a shutter, light remakes us every instant. Every bird. Every leaf. Every ripple on the surface of the river. You. Me.” 

The characters that shape the narrator’s world paradigms are shadows at best, light beams at worst. Their Aunt Beryl, who “stands backlit, blotting out the sun like a one-woman eclipse”; or a river that healed them of things they couldn’t see, or their father who sold fish ghosts which you, as the reader, don’t quite know what that means but you agree anyway. These characters live in the penumbra of the narrator’s mind because they’re squared-centered in yours. A fill-in-the-blank of your life! Such a wonderful thing to remember you also have a wayward grandfather with a cosmically designed wisdom you’re not designed to touch. 

Everything, according to this fictitious grandfather, is different kinds of light. Some dangerous, some drinkable, but if you’re “unsure what kind of light you are dealing with, check to see if a cat will sit in it, if so, it is simply the light of the sun.” 

And I guess this resonated with me, reading from my lightless apartment. Because outside, there was a frozen Great Lake with tall ice rafters and sand grains that didn’t know themselves from one another in the homogenizing cold. I had a comfortable spirituallessness tucking me between holy sheet and dog-blood-stained mattress that affirmed to me that mine and the world’s time are on different clocks. Somewhere in universe-guck, I am sixteen again, living in a picture frame of a writer’s archival project. Don’t cannibalize me, I don’t want to go home. 

I grew up in a setting much like Moore’s setting; kids with scratched-up calves from the briars, burn barrels, stubborn folk, gravel teeth, a collective not accustomed to much change–or anybody different. I didn’t want any of that. Well, except for the briars, because they’re a mark of pride. They signal I’ve felt something before, that my mom couldn’t stop me from running barefoot and still can’t stop me from cutting off all my hair and dressing like a boy. And I wonder how many of the children in the pictures Moore found were the same way: sad because they weren’t going to find themselves where they were. Like “The Troublemakers” who put sand in salt shakers to “make our mothers sigh” but also to “assert some modicum of control over the vast and inconsiderate universe.” 

Maybe that’s the quality that makes a ghost. They can inhibit any narrative a storyteller can make someone feel. I imagine these people, although dead before I was alive, knew the prick of my briars’ ancestors, in comparable fields, and they, too, felt a passed-on pride in that longing burn they leave. 

Fiction is cannibalistic but more so unifying. Moore’s work, in its surreal images, retextures reality into its dissociated and signified form. She captures the strangeness of childhood imagination through veins like snakes under skin, invisible boys, and girls made of blistering radiance. Through that, I re-perceived the fantastical I was missing from my own infant creativity. My spirituality had, like Moore’s archival musings, been simply cowering under the porch. That is until I equated my present and past; a rotation of crops on inherited self-same land.  

In the first flash, the narrator describes themself: 

 “When I was little I believed that the person I was today and the person I was yesterday and the person I would be tomorrow were three separate people. I believed that I only lived one day. In the morning I was born and in the evening I died and the person that awoke in my bed the following morning was someone new.”  

In the last flash, the town is described:  

“There is a new town where the old one used to be. There are new houses, new roads. They look the same as the old ones, but they are new. There is a river that winds through the town. The path it traces is nearly the same as the path the old river once traced, but it is new.” 

These subtle paradigm differences and leveling of identity with place reaffirm the grandfather’s and my belief: time is light. And I think light is a late death and an early lunch, a nasally thicket to trudge through with the flies and ticks. Sometime after reading Ghostographs, I found my philosophy there; in the tricks my eyes play on me, in the falter of my memory, in the necessity for an alternative. Anywhere I’m headed I’ve already been; light is everywhere, and I want to see how it falls from every direction. 

So I’m here now, across the country from the oak savannah I grew tall in and equally so from the lake and trees and snow I knew when I read this book. Now, I’m finding my reflection burned into the light of my history. My own face is a double exposure with something else. Maybe that weird thing that happened last weekend, or a little green BB gun pellet stuck in the sylph of a sassafras tree. And that’s what kept me reading Ghostographs; I felt like I could almost reach out and touch what made up the shadows knowing that they were equally yours and mine. We’re running from the same thing, that unexplainable fear that we’ll recognize ourselves everywhere we go.