"A Story to Share..."

His Ghost
An adaptation of A.J McKenna’s “Old Ghosts”
By Christopher Flournoy

It's Jason Miller’s birthday. He wakes up on this humid August morning, to the pleasant sound of birds singing outside his window and, for a long time, he stares in confused remembrance towards the window where the swelling orange sun is burning the faded floral wallpaper across from his tumbled bed.

'It's my birthday,' he finally realizes. 'I'm seventy-six today. Where did the time go?'
Climbing painfully from a sore mattress, standing naked by the window shielded only by the sheer curtains that have hung there for more than 30 years, Jason stares down at the yard. There's too much be done. Later. Much later. These days it's all weeding, backache and wishes. Outside in the sunrise, the flowers in the rock garden are already awake, begonias and impatients reach upwards to the sun and all the verbenas and pansies are on fire.
'It's my birthday.'

The neighbor’s dog barks. A cat he sees often, who in his mind he’s named ‘Fred,’ climbs through the fence and drops beside its shadow under the Pear tree, stalking anxious robins with the first sun. Under his neighbor’s broken bird bath a squirrel plays with a pear he stolen from Jason’s yard. Shadows shrink in bright shyness against all the fences and rooflines and the last star melts into the arrival of the dawn. There's already heat in the breathless August day.

Jason Miller, seventy-six, sitting in his kitchen. Silent. The house, holding its breath around him, the roof heavy and oven baked. Jason's thick veined hands brush toast crumbs from the old lace tablecloth and when he moves his faded slippers across the floor, dust dances giddily on the sun patched tiles. He listens to the awakening of the new day: the clock on the wall ticks hurriedly and rudely breaking the tranquil silence, the phone begins to ring.

Jason hurriedly walks to the hall and picks up the receiver of the old phone that’s been in the house since 1936. Lifting the receiver to his ear, he wonders ‘Who’s remembered my birthday?’ Encouraged, his ‘hello’ has far more vim and vigor than on most days. ‘Tim, is that you?’ ‘There’s no Tim here, you’ve got the wrong number.’ Jason hangs up the receiver. No birthday wishes to sigh over - these days who would know?

Returning to the familiar kitchen he cooks his eggs and returns to the table with his morning juice and cup of yogurt. No longer absorbed in his meal Jason looks at the sunlight shining blindly on the green grass of his backyard. He sits and thinks about birthdays back when. Cake and ice cream, songs and celebrations and the family and friends now long dead who cared. Back then.
'Time flies,' he says.

He talks to himself most days - who else will listen? In the still shadowed study a clock chimes the hour and Jason rises tiredly and prepares to face the day. When he turns on the television the news assaults his soul. The world is littered with dead children and pain. Bad news amuses curiously while the advertisements for things never dreamed of prove to be even less entertaining. The world has gone mad with cruelty and nobody seems to have noticed. He changes the channel and foreign voices are being interviewed. Talking violence in tongues, telling of the rapes of children, roadside bombs and a never ending war. The media loves abusing the innocent with their excited updates and urgently breaking stories. It was different back then. It seemed quieter and children could play on the streets. Back then.

Jason smiles and finds a gardening show on PBS and the morning is saved by thoughts of planting fall bulbs. Then he dresses and walks, cane and cloth cap, to the front door and checks the windows and the bolts and all's secure. When the nighttime house creaks with its own age, Jason thinks of burglars and imagined violations and trembles in case they invade him.
What a world!

Jason swings open the front door and sees Leroy Hazal standing there, smiling like sunlight.
'Happy birthday, Jason!'
No longer astonished, Jason smiles back and sighs because Leroy isn't really there.
Leroy Hazal, fourteen last week. He's been seeing Leroy a lot lately. He walked behind him all the way to the hushed library yesterday and when he sat to rest in Russell Woods Park Leroy was standing under a tree, waiting for him in the shade.
'I didn't forget,' Leroy says.
'I know, I know.'
'Will you come with me?'
'I can't Leroy. You're dead.'
The sun slides down the street and settles on Jason's house and Leroy fades like a startled shadow.
'Poor Leroy,' Jason whispers sadly. 'My poor dead friend.'


Jason avoids the supermarkets. It's too complicated. Grim cashiers who aren’t happy in their work. Kids breathing asthma. Babes crying incessantly. Bald headed young men pushing forward, rings in their ears, rape in their shiftless eyes. Never stare back. Girls demanding more. Parking lots cluttered with cars bought with stress earned money. People hurrying, car exhausts, liberated women with little freedom. The exhaustion of super markets and too much choice. Too big, too modern. Too lonely for Jason.

He goes to the smaller neighborhood stores and sometimes the gas station mini marts, chats with familiar people and gets milk and eggs and a loaf of bread. Further along, outside the Salvation Army store, the neighbor from up the street nods an inquisitive greeting.
'How are you doing?' she asks, looking past him at the second-hand bargains in the window.
'Fine. Yourself?'
'I’m good.'
Life is strangled with polite lies.
Jason walks home through the heating streets towards sanctuary at twelve-eight-two-five Broadstreet.

In his armchair in the living room bay window he looks out on the street. Hearing the clock in the study chime eleven times and the long day stretching ahead like a dreadful eternity. The terror of 11 a.m. Nothing to do and outside youngsters move slothfully through the morning, sun on their heads, time on their hands. Timberlands clattering, sagging pants, short skirts, hip hop bass rattling the windows.
I'm glad I'm not young anymore.

Jason despises this time of day. Already too hot for the yard work and nothing to occupy the mind until making something at lunchtime. Light sustenance for the long afternoon lengthening drearily ahead like an empty road going nowhere. Jason tries to read but even in glasses the words are a blur.

'Leroy,' he whispers and his name rings in his head like a tolling bell.
Leroy Hazal, Leroy Hazal, Heroy Lazal.
Jason happily goes off with him. His eyes close. He becomes delirious with dreaming and hears a soft knock at the front door. Jason shuffles down the hall and when he cautiously opens the heavy door, Leroy is there, sixteen and handsome, framed in the sun like a young prince. Leroy Hazal, budding with manhood and youthful happiness.
'Can you come out today, Jason?'

From behind, a different ghost in the dark hallway, Jason's mother, smiling.
'He's got to do some shopping for me, Leroy dear.'
Jason, sixteen, between his mother and his first love, adolescently happy.
'I'll go with you, Jason,' Leroy, was always agreeable. 'We'll go to the store together. If that's all right?'
Mother agrees, she loves Leroy, seeing how happy his friendship makes her son.
'Of course it's all right with me.'

Jason and Leroy walking down the path with mama at the door, waving like a mother, waiting until they are beyond the gate, forever worrying about them traveling through the neighborhood and its dangers. Drug dealers, street gangs, muggers. You name it. Young people often died young back then.

Jason and Leroy, heads tilted, magnetic attraction and heart’s affection drawing them closer, talking, laughing, a pair apart from others. In love. Leroy's calm curling smile framed by manhood’s first downy whiskers shows him quiet and reliable as the moon.
'Will you love me forever?’ Jason asks.
'Forever and ever,' Leroy assures, looking around warily before squeezing his beloved’s hand.

On the way back they short cut thorough the alleys. A long short cut. Still talking, their words tumbling like waters in the rapids of some far off stream. In the old alley they settle in shade next to a dilapidated garage and kiss among the weeds and trash, innocently. They kissed like that for what seemed only a minute but was in fact an eternal moment in time.

Life, a summer holiday until seventeen. Then, Jason goes to New York with his father. A business trip. Magnificent New York and his first trip on a plane weaving its way across the summer sky, tall buildings everywhere, cathedrals of commerce and then the Ambassador West Hotel. Swanky. Dinner and desserts. Black ties, brown cigars. Gin and tonic with a twist of lemon. Now, New York is always dry gin and a twist in Jason's fading memory. Bitter lemon.

Jason with father's friends. A party and the talcum smell of sex. Dad leaves early with a friend. Dad feels only half married. Winking a man's signal. Permission to sin. A bird in the bush.
Jason dancing until dawn has caught the wanton eye of the young waiter. Back at his upstairs flat he says his parents are away and Jason is still not sober.
'Let me help you to bed,' he says, learning the rules of the game and when to cheat.


Sixteen Leroy smelled of love and quiet gardens. This man is twenty and slick with gin. Lust in his eyes, stone in his heart. Bath naked he drips rich. Jason falls into him and is devoured. Leroy, innocent sixteen, gave him everything except that. His tended flesh was reserved for the passing of fear and the proof of love. Jason thought he wanted more. Pearls before swine.
Mea culpa, Leroy -mea maxima culpa!

Then the New Yorker came to Detroit with the snow, all passion and lust pursuing Jason all grown up and knowing. Blood on snow. Seventeen Leroy, discarded, like a toy wound down, broken and useless.
'Don't you want me anymore?'
'No.'
Tears on Leroy’s bitten lips. Eyes red with pain. Soul seared. Leroy goodbye.
'No. I don't want you.'
Jason brave and final, cruel as winter. Abandoned Leroy, quietly waiting for him to mature, to understand love.

Next year he took the New Yorker away. Vacationing. Not even saying goodbye to pale Leroy, eighteen and alone with sickness rising in his young troubled mind, his heart dark with love. Leroy’s innocence like seed heads on dandelions, dancing readily away. Crowns of thorns for Leroy’s virgin manhood. Veils of tears.
Leroy ill, pain unbearable.

On Jason's return his mother greets him with rubbing, folded fingers. Wet cheeks.
'Poor Leroy,' mama whispers, 'I don’t understand why he did it.' Respect for the dead.
Jason matures. Instantly.
Too late.
Leroy’s black blood on his spitting lips. The flowers on his grave stiff in frost. Brown leaves tumbling, flying wildly in the frozen air, reburying him. No more warm kisses and a heart soaring with love. Leroy nineteen, never twenty. Mama behind the coffin, mama in her own maternal grave. And rain for fifty long years and more, after that.
My dearest gone for evermore!

Clock chime. Ding. One. Ding. Two. Et Cetera.
Jason struggles from a dream speaking his beloved’s name into the listening shadows.
'Leroy?'
The pitch dark shadows silent as love words from dead mouths. Marble graveyard lips, cold as stone. Ivy and moss. Memories haunting his present. Jason shivers and steps into the window sun. Rubs his thick veined hands. Prays. Then he makes lunch. Turkey with lettuce and tomato, yet again. He dreams the evening away - half out of life. On the radio a woman sings 'Four Last Songs.' You don't have to know the language.
Such sweet sorrow. Who said that?

Later, a seat in the yard looking towards the singing sunset. There is nothing to see except blackbirds and robins; nothing to hear except the laughter and cursing of those still young.

Even later, the clock in the study chimes twelve heartbeats. Night comes hot and bothered.
Climbing into an empty bed, Jason turns off his lamp and watches the shadows from the street huddling against the floral wallpaper. Stars look in at his graying face. A hot August moon in the open window. Soft as silence, quiet as apple blossoms falling, gentle as Leroy’s dimpled smile. Leroy’s same sad glad smile standing there by his bed. Faithful Leroy, waiting.
'Do you want me now?'
'Yes! Dear sweet God - yes!'

He says 'I can be with you now, Leroy, if you like. I'm finally, properly dead.'
'I'm glad. I've been waiting for such a long time!'
Jason rising from his bed, leaving his seventy-six years between the laundered sheets. Soaring through the moonlight with Leroy in his arms, the pair of them shooting likes comets into Eternity while the clock in the study stops.
Forever and forever.

*****

Dedicated to Stephen Christopher Harris, a man not unlike Jason

"Fear Eats the Soul"