You, Who Make Us Holy

The past is never dead. It’s not even past — William Faulkner

Editor’s Note: Enjoy Sarah Blake’s haunting short story about a ghost in a bomb shelter —David Michael Slater

We’ve been keeping a ghost in the bomb shelter, which is misleading to say like that, to put it that way, because she can leave, if she wants to. But she is not merely staying in our bomb shelter. We bring her things, anything she asks for. So we are keeping her, we are tending to her, how we might keep a garden and meet its needs. But she won’t grow and blossom into some larger version of herself, full of color and aromas that attract others to her heavy head.

Though she might. Honestly, we don’t know much about ghosts, even now, after she has been with us for weeks.

Once she asked for lace, draped it over her figure, walked slowly around the bomb shelter, and asked, Am I scary? Am I scaring you? Before we could answer, she laughed.

The image has stayed with us. We talk about it often. We even tried placing lace over our own heads, walking around the bedrooms of our house, wondering if that was all it took. We felt—well, we felt scarier. We admitted that to each other quickly.

We expected she would ask for revenge on her killer, but she said the world didn’t want revenge on her killer. She said that some of the world justified her death and some denied it entirely. We asked her if she was raped, and she said she was. She held up her dress and nothing was there. She told us she chose that. She chose all of her appearance. We looked more closely at the dress she chose, the long braid of hair brought over her shoulder, the short nails on her fingertips.

We told her we didn’t care if others didn’t want revenge on her killer because we did, but she shook her head. She said one day soon her killer would die and she would get her revenge. And what unnerved us about this, of course, was that she seemed to know when her killer would die.

When we told her we were unnerved by this, she told us that our lives were long, very long ahead of us. This meant two things for us: one, it made us happy, we were happy that we would live long enough that the basic upkeep of our own bodies would become difficult; and two, it meant that we would survive the war.

There was a time when she showed us how she could pass her hand through the wall, into it, and leave it there, resting, her fingers slippery and vaporous. And then she leaned forward, until her head went in, some of it, and she tilted her face towards us and smiled. It wasn’t an evil smile, mind you. She didn’t want to scare us—though she had, more so this time than with the lace, more strikingly, and in the moment. We felt the fear in our chests and our forearms were prickled with goosebumps.

But, no, the smile was one of amusement and delight, as if she were, perhaps, enamored with her own body and its properties, how her body could become one with another thing. Because that’s what it was truly about, much less about her body passing through an object, and more about her body temporarily becoming a part of something else. Which meant (we came to this conclusion much later, after talking about it alone and away from her) that her body was not a complete thing, and neither was anything else, complete. If it were, there’d be no room for her, vaporous or not.

By having her touch something, it became closer to complete, and her, too, together, all these partial pieces. So we imagined her touching us—our bodies feeling more whole, more filled up, and, also, the sudden understanding of the less-whole that we once were and would be again. So we tried to focus on the more-whole feeling that it would give us, and we tried to associate that with good feelings. Wasn’t it how sex was described to us when sex was marked by love and vulnerability? That resulting whole, made by two bodies, even when only opening one’s mouth to another’s.

But that conversation led to another. How many ghosts would it take to reach this new whole that must be available to us? How many could reach their fingers into a body, into every square inch of skin? Thousands, surely, we decided.

And we found we weren’t done discussing it. One night, we whispered to each other in bed that it was merely semantics, how one defined what it is to be complete, and we were, in fact, complete, just as we were, because it wasn’t about physical space and the room left by the ridiculously airy structure of atoms. We ventured that our being and our sense of completeness could and must be measured by other things. One example we came up with was to consider how crowded and uncomfortable one might feel when not left to their own body, with, say, the fingers of ghosts laid into their backs and shoulders.

When we were content with this line of inquiry being fully explored, we pretended to be tired, to drift off to sleep, while actually we lay there for hours wondering if we could reach any real conclusions when they relied on the feelings that resulted from a ghost touching us, when we were unsure if a ghost ever had touched us, and if we had been touched, when we ever had indeed felt crowded or uncomfortable (or, on the other side of that, more complete). And while we knew, quickly enough, that we couldn’t reach any conclusions soundly, we also knew that we had all the means and opportunity before us, if we wanted to discover how it felt to be touched by a ghost.

These discussions are why we resent the ghost, and adore her. Though we imagine, we will, at some point, purely resent her, or purely adore her. It depends on her, and on what she asks of us.

With the war raging, the sirens went off nearly every day. We would rush to the bomb shelter, and there she would be, standing, or sitting on the ground, or leaning against the wall.

There were more things we expected of her. We expected that she might ask us to die, or to at least consider it, perhaps to join her. But she never once suggested that. She wasn’t lonely, not for our company.

We were only useful, and at times, she seemed to stretch the limits of what we could do for her, as if to test us. What would we do? What could we manage? We imagined her posing these questions to herself and deciding that she needed to know more, so she could draw out the boundaries of our abilities and our devotion.

And we were able. And we were devoted. Though God only knows why. The only way we can explain it is that when you meet a ghost, it feels more like a blessing than a curse. We are taught that we will feel haunted. We are taught that there will be a sense of doom. In truth, there is an overwhelming sense of magic and possibility.

Once she asked us to bring her a porcelain bowl, translucent and white. Our own dishes were thick and sturdy, and we were not the kind of people who had a China cabinet to display our finer pieces. Our house was small and practical, and we had no heirlooms. We were descended from a people who, when they had to leave, had to leave everything behind.

We wondered if she knew any of this about us, if she ever left the bomb shelter without our knowing, and if she ever used this time to peer into our windows, to think of us at all.

There was an older woman who lived down the street from us who liked to collect art. From the street, we could see, through one window, a glass sculpture, and we hardly passed her house without remembering to turn our heads to look at it. If anyone had the porcelain bowl the ghost desired, it was her. So we went to her door.

Why do you want such a bowl? she asked.

We told her we would return it to her. We told her we wouldn’t put food in it or stain it or damage it.

But why then?

We couldn’t explain. We could only beg for the bowl.

She brought the bowl to the door and looked at it in her hands. Do you want me to wrap it? Or put it in a box?

We didn’t need anything, we told her.

She held out the bowl and it went from one set of hands to another.

As we walked back to the bomb shelter, we talked about how we weren’t sure of the ghost’s intentions. We talked about what we might do if it seemed the ghost might harm the bowl, and we realized we had no idea how to stop the ghost from doing anything. We feigned anger at the ghost, there in the street, dropped our voices to be firm and cold, how we might speak to a child. And then we laughed. We laughed so hard we cried.

In the bomb shelter, we placed the bowl in front of the ghost, hoping we wouldn’t have to protect it in some way, hoping for—we did not know what. Before we could move again, the ghost’s foot slipped out from underneath her dress and she placed it into the bowl, delicately, more delicately than we imagined a foot could be placed, and then, as she stepped the other foot in, her body, it seemed, slipped, it fell, it shrunk, it puddled, and there it was in the bowl, as if the bowl held a kind of fog, shimmering and still.

We tried to speak to the ghost, but after a few minutes of silence, we left.

A few more sirens brought us to the bomb shelter with the ghost still quiet in the bowl. When the door was open and sunlight filled the room, the bowl appeared empty. When we closed the door behind us, she appeared again, almost silver.

At first, we were transfixed by her new form. We were jealous. She looked more beautiful than she had any right to be, barely there, barely there in the bowl, and yet, impossible not to look at. We discussed how might place a blanket over her, and in less kind moments, we considered placing something heavier on top of her. Not that, as a ghost, it would harm her, but we could feel our own unkindness in the impulse.

We, at one point, discussed the ethics of our desire to hide her, and we weren’t sure if anything could be considered right or wrong, given the unprecedented circumstances.

Though we were coming to accept that many ghost stories we’d heard must be true. Other people had met a ghost, as we had, and dealt with a ghost, as they saw fit, as best they could. So, if the event of encountering a ghost was not entirely unprecedented, the ethics could be considered.

Then we fell down a rabbit hole of how the ethics of a situation could always be considered, regardless of precedence, as most situations were unique in their own way, given the strangeness of the individual parties involved. The ethics were near enough and transferrable, based on the parallels that did exist between one situation and another.

And yet another rabbit hole opened beneath us as we considered the moments where ethics failed us. When war was never ethical and yet so often necessary. As this war was. So why have ethics at all? This conversation made us feel very uneasy, as some answers were so obvious, and other answers felt like doorways that you grasp for in the night, in a house you know, but it’s dark and you’re tired.

We wanted answers from the ghost. We wanted her to know secrets of the universe which we did not know. We wanted her to see things more clearly than we could, from her new position. But she stayed quiet in the bowl, and, admittedly, we grew bored of her. So we tucked the ghost, in her bowl, in a corner of the shelter.

We forgot about her. It took only two days, full of work and people and light, arguments and emails, so much time spent eating, and shitting, too, days full of phone calls and doom-scrolling. The whole world interested in our war but knowing very little about it, and we could see how it was not always their fault, their ignorance.

One ceasefire was turned down, but hundreds of articles came out, and they placed the blame on different parties. How would you know which source was to be trusted?

In real time, we watched the history being written by those who were willing to write it, and those willing to make it available to millions. Even when corrections were made, it was too late. They were so eager, so earnest, but so very, very far away. It doesn’t matter what they want, and everything they don’t understand. How little they know about war, we almost envy it.

This is why it was easy to forget about the ghost, even though she changed how we thought about the permeability of flesh, and states of matter, and death.

And after two days of her in the corner, we found ourselves in the bomb shelter again, sirens sounding, and the ghost stepped out from the bowl. She stood across from us, but she said nothing, so we said nothing. When the sirens stopped, we took the bowl in our hands, ran our fingers along the inside, and felt nothing. We took the bowl back to the woman’s house, where she was grateful, and we thanked her over and over, even though we were hardly grateful, because we were not the ghost, and the bowl had never been for us.

Back home, we went to the bomb shelter again, even though the sirens were not sounding, and we were, supposedly, safe, at that moment, a kind of safe. We looked at the ghost and she looked at us.

We could tell what we were feeling—we felt that she had abandoned us, in those few days, silent and lovely, in the bowl, which was a feeling we had no right to, as she was not ours, and she did not love us nor did she owe us her love. But as starved as we were for love, that general love that might come from the world around you, the ghost was just as starved. How could we have ever helped each other?

It was like sleeping for me. She looked at each of us. Being in the bowl was like sleeping. I needed to rest.

This we understood. We asked her if she still dreamt of anything.

Oh yes, she said.

Sarah Blake's debut novel, NAAMAH, is a retelling of The Great Flood from the perspective of Noah’s wife, published by Riverhead Books in 2019 and winner of the National Jewish Book Award for Debut Fiction. Her most recent novel, CLEAN AIR, was published by Algonquin Books in 2022. It was selected as an Apple Books Best Book of the Month, an Editors' Pick at Amazon, and Oprah Daily called it "a cli-fi novel for our times." Blake is also the author of three collections of poetry, IN SPRINGTIME, LET'S NOT LIVE ON EARTH, and MR. WEST, all published by Wesleyan University Press. She is the recipient of a Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and holds her MFA from The Pennsylvania State University. She currently lives in the U.K. You can learn more at blakesarah.com

What five tiny delights lift your spirits and make you happy?

• Having honey in my tea and on my toast

• Picking apart the matted bits in my puppy's hair

• The lemongrass smell of my husband's mustache wax

• Coloring my gray hair pink

• Having socks with stripes

What five tiny JEWISH delights lift your spirits and make you happy?

• Seeing my menorah on my bookshelf

• Eating matzo ball soup

• When someone touches the Torah with a corner of their tallit and then brings that corner to their lips

• Saying the word kugel

• Thinking of my favorite Jewish deli (I'll be back one day!)