Crossroads
What most amazed the ghosts was how their perfectly good stuff was going for nothing or just being thrown away. They stood watching the estate sale’s progress, dazed. “Can you believe they let a first edition go for that?” one ghost kept repeating.
When the sale ended, some ghosts stayed in the empty house like walls that had been torn out. Others followed favorite items to new homes and seemed scarcely aware that anything had changed.
But one ghost became influential among mice, and with its subtle touch coaxed them to fashion crude replicas of the former home’s furnished rooms, in voids between walls. And there it remained, among them, vaguely content for many years.
Daryl Scroggins lives in Marfa, Texas. He is the author of This Is Not the Way We Came In, a collection of flash fiction and a flash novel (Ravenna Press), and The Light I Want to Keep, a mixed genre collection (MacQ). His poems and fictions have appeared in Blink-Ink, MacQueen’s Quinterly, and Quarterly West, among others. One of his fictions was included in Best Microfiction 2020.
You can see more of Daryl's work in 13.1 and 12.3 and 11.3 and 10.2 and 10.2 and 10.2 and 10.2 and 8.3 and 8.3 and 8.3 and 7.2 and 7.2 again and 6.2 and 6.2 and 6.2 again and in Special Flash issue 50/50 here and here