Clap Clap

Prompt: You move into a new apartment that seems to be haunted. The doors open by themselves, lights flicker, wet footsteps appear in the hallway. You have no time to deal with its bullshit so you ignore everything that's happening. After a while it seems like the ghost(s) is sulking.

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It wasn’t hard to ignore the stereotypical signs of the haunting; I’d grown up with two older sisters and they were always trying to prank me. And if there’s one thing I learned, it’s that ignoring the problem can actually make it go away. (Sometimes.) If there’s a second, it’s that teasing will turn to pouting, which will turn to giving up. (Most of the time.)

So I ignored, and found work-arounds. Ghostly handprints on the fogged-up mirror after I showered? Score, I can do my makeup without having to wipe the mirror off. Lights kept turning on in the middle of the night? I installed The Clapper. Clap on, clap off, bitch. Ghosts can’t fucking clap. Cabinets opening themselves? Yeah, okay, that one was hard to deal with, especially after what felt like the hundredth time I banged my knee in the middle of the night, but at least I’m organized enough that stuff didn’t fall out.

And like I expected, the ghost got pouty. Instead of handprints on the mirror, there were sad faces. The lights didn’t flick on and off anymore. Cabinets still opened, but half-heartedly and not at shin-height.

The morning I woke up to find all the pillows in the apartment arranged into a sort of pillow fort, complete with KEEP OUT sign, I figured it was time for a heart-to-heart.

With a sigh, I settled onto the rug at the foot of the couch.

“All right,” I said. “You’ve had your fun. But I’m not going anywhere, okay? I rented this place, fair and square. And I know you know that, because you’ve made my rental agreement into your little sign there. (That’s a dick move, by the way, I need that.) So like, you can deal with the fact that I’m gonna be here, or you can keep trying to inconvenience me, but it’s not gonna work. So,” I went on, holding up a yellow legal pad, “let’s make a deal.”

The sign shifted a little and I got the feeling that the ghost was looking at me. I drew a line down the middle of the paper and headed one side with ME and one side with GHOSTIE.

“You can have the mirror,” I offered, writing it under GHOSTIE. “That’s fine. But you gotta stop with the cabinets, okay? My boss thinks I’m being abused.” I put “cabinets” in my column and held out the pad and pen. “Your turn. Something fair.”

After a long moment, the pad and pen slipped out of my hands and flew into the pillow fort. They came back with “salt” on the ghost’s side and “lights” on mine. And so it went, this trading back and forth, like terrible roommates dividing up a studio apartment. It barely took twenty minutes to come up with something we could both agree on.

“That’s settled, then,” I said as I tacked the paper to the wall.

The lights flickered, and I got a sense that the ghost was teasing me. I clapped twice, loud and firm, and they came back on full force.

“Clap clap, motherfucker.”