Moonday Mag #12: Moonday Madness (III)
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Dear reader,
Maybe it’s fitting that this is the year that I can’t seem to stop thinking about ghosts. There is so much to haunt us these days. In a time that feels at once both so cruel and unmoored, it makes sense that the unsettled past would start to seep through the cracks, drawn towards the vulnerable.
In the fall of 2022, I met my first ghost.
The baby was sick. On his first cross-country trip, surrounded by my family for the first time in his little life, he came down with the double-blow of RSV and Covid. The blend had left him fussy and wheezing, so before I went to bed, my conjured family nestled in the bosom of the one I’d been born with, I leaned down into the travel crib he slept in, rested a hand on his tiny chest.
The hand I felt was warm. That’s what I remember most. It was warm and solid and steady when it laid itself upon my lower back. A firm, comforting touch, that soothed while I watched the stuttering rise and fall of my baby’s breath. I assumed it was my partner, woken from a deep sleep in the bed behind me, trying to ease my fears. So I stood and I turned, and found him snoring still beneath the sheets. The air behind me—empty.
“It seemed friendly, at least,” I told my family when I recounted this story.
I’d told myself the same thing the night before. As I dragged my son’s crib to my bedside. As I climbed into bed. As I stared into the darkness, sleepless.
It was true, though, it had felt nonthreatening. Though I think nothing really prepares you for an incident like that. My nervous system reacted as though my body, my child, were in peril, and I can’t blame it. How often has it been touched by an invisible hand?
When I think about what has changed since that night, I see: the years of devolution in this country and in various parts of the world, the real fear of what tomorrow might bring, the exposure of the worst of humanity. But I also look back and see that night differently. We have a guess as to who my ghost was, and with time I have decided that the gesture was a loving one. The gentle hand of a matriarch on the distressed new mother I was back then. As I listened to my child breathe through struggling lungs, she eased the storm. Or, at least, gave me something else to lay my fears on.
As the season for spirits arrives, I think of my ghost, and the reaching out across the veil, and the wonder and mystery of it all. And my hope for us is that through all of our hauntings, as we live through waking nightmares, we find the space to share with one another the burden of our fears.
— Brie Ward
Contributing Editor
Featuring fiction by Arden Boshier, Melissa Perri Smith, Emma Dhanda, Natasha Grodzinski, Joe Greco, Harrison Lee, and Athena Kane; poetry by David Elia Egon Seger, Kevin Lonano, Joseph Harms, and Devony Hof; and art by Donald Patten, Rob Maushund, Jacki Oh, Rowan Tate, Mikolai Mio, Gorbi, and Kristi Sanders.
