Read the beginning of "Ghost Hallway" from The Least Cricket of Evening by Robert Vivian:

"I live in a ghost hallway. They come and go whenever they want, like the transparent, blow-away wings of bees. Their spirits hover inside this house on Mechanic Street like a twilight hue filling a wine glass. I live more or less inside their moods, which they carry behind them in traces of light that flood the panes one window at a time and in the creaky flutes of rusty hinges. The ghosts don’t say “boo” and they don’t swing chains. They’re good ghosts as far as I can tell, calm as a cup of tea, considerate and watchful and able to pay attention to the least thing for hours.

I like how they watch me read without telling me what to think; I like how they touch my mind with ghost memories, laughing and smoking on the porch with their neighbors. I like how they stared out these same windows, serious and alone in their own thoughts, unable to share with each other the deepest parts of themselves because the inner commotion was too great to put into words. I see how after a fight or a death in the family they sat by themselves in the living room, wanting things to be good again, wanting to be healed but not being able to do anything but wait.

What they have left behind is shorn of all eventfulness as if what happened here long ago in this quasi-dilapidated shotgun house still lingers on as after- tone, slowly turning into something else, the echo of their memories which I navigate now with a cup of coffee and a three-day beard. I’m doing a soft-shoe in my slippers through their long recollections, the fog that hangs in the trees between dreams. They heard the same front door whine and clatter and the soft thudding of footfalls on the sidewalk: they heard the wind in the trees and the wash of rain tearing through them on its way to another season carrying a hundred small deaths in its wake. Their senses are alive in mine, just as mine are remade in the memory of theirs. It’s a mysterious transference that I do not understand. I don’t necessarily like to feel the pangs of sorrow the woman felt, beetling up and down her spine like a slug of mercury, finding her defenseless in her own house at different times in her life, like a painful sickness that keeps coming back. I don’t know why she was sad, but her sadness cleaned out the closets and touched the cobwebs lifting themselves out of the corners.

I think her sadness gave way to something else, something precious and loving whose slender and tender roots are planted in the long-lived acceptance of a silent struggle. Now I think this acceptance is her legacy to me and anyone else who happens to live here, a gift she blows like a kiss from the other side. She is here and not here, a mid-Michigan wife who did her duty and loved her children, though they left her anyway, and her difficult husband, who died before her. It’s her house or no one’s, though she never worked outside the home. Her husband is a different story, downstairs in the basement with his tools and the dark anger that never left him, his lust seething into the glue between two-by-fours, into the hammer and the clay pipe that he sucked on obsessively. His hard gray beard was peppered with roots of black hair and he liked off-color jokes. But he loved his wife, he did, and he made sure there was food on the table, and every two or three years or so they rented a cabin on a lake in northern Michigan, and then he was wise and gentle, at least for a few days. And what more could you ask for, then or now? What more could you expect without education or much money? That was their life together, he downstairs working his frustration into wood and she upstairs, mending and cooking and walking lightly though he couldn’t hear her anyway with all that hammering, sawing, and moving about. He never really knew her, that much is clear; he never knew her. And how do I know this?"