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Flaggstaff Plus One
by Megan Fahey It was bad form, they said at first, to invite, of all things, a ghost to our wedding since he’d wear the same color as the bride. Flaggstaff hated that joke. As a kid, Asim cut his teeth on Ouija Board, but I was too afraid to tempt fate. Asim said it was nothing but a child’s fun, but what’s so fun about disrupting the spirit world, my father would say. In his youth, my father dabbled in Ouija as well, and the next thing he knew, it was the sixties, and Grandma and Grandpa’s house was collapsing with them inside, and what exactly do you think caused that, he’d say? They lived, by the way, my grandparents. At middle school sleepovers, while the rest of the girls cast preteen enchantments with a patchwork of manicured fingers that hovered over rivets of numbers and letters that, for me, only spelled doom, I sat in the corner with the half package of vanilla sandwich cookies thinking of poor old Grandma and Grandpa and their poor old house. I stretched my night-sized t-shirt over my knees in fear of total structural collapse, when, really, the only thing I had to be afraid of was the nerdy Indian boy in the upper class whose presence might leave his body and inhabit a Parker Brothers plastic board just for the night and just so he could embarrass me in front of all those popular girls. Asim proposed to me on the Ouija board, and I wasn’t so afraid after that. He spelled out those words one shaky letter at a time. I’ll never be sure what possessed him to do so, but I’ll admit that I was the one who moved the planchette to “YES.” Then the earth shook. Then the doorbell rang. We hadn’t ever met anyone like Flaggstaff—living or otherwise. Despite his deadness, he was polite in all ways (he even used the doorbell) and transparent both in outward appearance and regarding politics. He was nineteen feet tall. What are you doing here, we said, in our house? He joked about the cathedral ceilings and our being democrats. Flaggstaff had the best sense of humor. As we planned our nuptuals, my father assumed wholeheartedly the father-of-the-bride position, and as such became more staunchfully prideful by the second. But he wouldn’t budge about Flaggstaff. After weeks of careful planning and ceaseless negotiating, my father gave some ground and said that if some dead ol’ fuddy-duddy wanted to come to the wedding, well, what the Hell did he care? But, he refused—to the utmost degree—the suffering of any ghosts, banshees, demons, devils, apparitions, haunts, wraiths, shades, spooks, phantoms, phantasms, or poltergeists at his table. Flaggstaff wasn’t like that, though, we said. And Asim’s parents are traditional Hindu, we said. And he’s got to sit somewhere. At the reception, in place of a calligraphed table number assignment placard, the sign on Flaggstaff’s table read “Spectres ONLY,” which, in fairness, is what we requested from the banquet center, but not, like they thought, as a joke. They stitched over it. Invisible plates with invisible knives, they hoorahed, Someone slaughter the fattened invisible calf! A ghost is coming to dinner, they said. And they said it right in front of Asim’s parents, I swear to God. But then, right there in the banquet hall, after my father and I danced to his favorite liturgical-sounding, contemporary alt-rock ballad concerned with growing old too quickly, but before the ceremonial cutting of the cake, which was simultaneously symbolic and literal, while our friends and esteemed guests busied themselves with the buffet line, Asim and I joined our gilded hands in secret and conjured up Flaggstaff together. Most screamed. A woman on the wait staff rent her apron in twain. Aunt Rue said, “Oh, bother,” and returned briskly to a glass of champagne. At the end of the night, though, the consensus was clear. No one can limbo like a ghost. |
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