Perhaps you can help me settle something: did I write a ghost story? The farmhouse begins when Kendra, a newly single college student, moves to the edge of town in hopes of escaping the local dyke drama.
Let me know what you think.
“But there’s nothing here about the roommate,” Noah said. He handed her the phone and returned his attention the joint he was rolling. When he leaned forward, his thermal flared where the backrest met the seat of the chair, exposing his fatless lumbar spine to the morning chill.
Kendra sighed. She scrolled through the ad again. private bed & bath in shared farmhouse. There was a name—Sam—but no other personal details except for two short sentences: no pets. i have a dog.
“Not not a red flag,” she admitted, enlarging her favorite photo. “But it’s perfect. And I like dogs.” She hadn’t intended to move in with some random man, but she’d pledge a frat for this big, beautiful bedroom at nearly half her budget.
Noah licked the translucent paper. “Well,” he said, “you’re the one who wants to get away from it all.”
By the time she passed the lightning-split oak that marked the city’s southern limit, Kendra was lost. Her destination refused to populate and the directions from her terse email exchange with Sam didn’t account for the access roads that disappeared into the trees, by now stripped of their fruit by the harvesters and their leaves by the season. She was almost twenty minutes late before she found the right turnoff, almost thirty when she noticed the mailbox staked beside a narrow driveway.
The chassis of an older car would have bounced as it descended to the one-lane gravel road, but her mom’s hand-me-down hybrid managed the transition with stiff alacrity. Gingerly accelerating beneath a canopy of bare black branches, Kendra followed the driveway’s long curve against the interstate, then its right turn into a clearing that, from the road, was hidden from view. In the clearing was the farmhouse, the squat blue center of three concentric rings: first gravel, then grass, then the trees, all dripping like a million broken shower heads.
Kendra zipped up her jacket and opened the door. Darkened by the morning’s rainfall, the gravel bore her weight without a sound. Somewhere overhead, a crow coughed. She had been expecting a busy open house—the rental market in her private college town had only gotten more competitive since she moved here for undergrad—but other than a green pickup parked under a rundown carport, hers was the only vehicle. Beneath the pickup, a big sandy mutt reclined in a patch of dust. At Kendra’s whistle its ears moved, but its snout remained between its forepaws, pointing at the trees to the east of the farmhouse.
Like the carport, the farmhouse had seen better days. The porch peeled like a skin disease, the black-and-white latticework around its base as gap-toothed as a mid-game go board. Next to it was a rust-stained woodshed, its doors hanging drunkenly on their hinges. Nearby, some empty tomato trellises straddled sterile mounds of earth. “Farmhouse” was clearly aspirational. The place was more like a forgotten hillbilly cemetery.
Sighing, Kendra leaned back into the car for the manila binder with her rental paperwork. Clipped to the top was her photo from Walnut Park last summer. She had always thought that Caroline’s artsy photography made her look washed out, but Noah didn’t agree. “You look pretty in this one. Prettier than you actually are, no shade.” Kneeling on the driver’s seat, she opened her phone, sweeping past a text from him (how did it go?) and a few yellow Cyte notifications.
A door slammed like a gunshot. When Kendra turned her head, Sam was already halfway across the clearing. “You made it!” she exclaimed, teeth emerging. “I was worried you weren’t going to show.”
Allowing her fingers to be folded into the cold, square handshake, Kendra smiled, too. Not only was Sam a woman, but she was a woman with a crew cut and work boots. Too manly for her taste—but wasn’t she here to get away from the town’s tiny lesbian scene, where every breakup seemed to involve at least a dozen people while somehow lasting longer than the relationship it ended? Out in the boonies was the farthest she could go without dropping out altogether, but she was scared to do it alone, and Noah refused to give up his one-bedroom to join her. If she had to share a home with somebody, the only dyke in town who wasn’t involved in the drama (or her drama, anyway) was as good as it was going to get.
Before she could reply, something hard and wet slid across the back of her thigh. Kendra’s first thought, as she bashed her elbow against the hybrid, her foot dragging a runnel of grit across her clean white sock, was that she was pissing herself.
Laughing, Sam seized the dog’s collar. “Misty loves making friends,” she said, digging her fingers into the short, sandy fur.
Kendra’s elbow hurt, but she laughed, too. “Misty,” she repeated, her eyes watering. Embarrassed, she straightened her skirt, the one with the stain you could see if the light was right. Could Sam tell she was living out of her suitcase? No, she decided, regaining herself, the butch wouldn’t notice something like that.
Quicksilver suddenly boiled across Kendra’s pink cheeks, ruining the photo. It was raining. “Oh,” she said, “my application—”
“I’m sure it’s all there,” Sam said, waving the folder away. “Let’s get inside.” Misty was already under the pickup again, staring at the trees.
To Kendra’s relief, the farmhouse was more welcoming inside. Though there was dog hair on the couch, the rustically handsome furniture—a coffee table, a stunning sideboard by the fireplace—was polished to a shine. The walls were strangely bare, but there was a framed photo of Misty on the coffee table and, on the sideboard, another of a jumpsuited baby in the arms of a headless woman. Like Sam, it smelled pleasantly of leather and tobacco, with an undercurrent of some unidentifiable flower.
Running her fingers through her damp hair, or what there was of it, Sam repeated the terms of the ad. With her high forehead, heavy jaw, and naturally straight teeth (orthodontia always had a look, didn’t it, thought Kendra), she reminded her of Hilary Swank in that lesbian movie. Kendra followed her to the kitchen, watching as she opened the golf ball-textured refrigerator, gestured to the range, and pointed out the camera nestled near the ceiling.
“It doesn’t work,” Sam said. “Hope that’s okay. It was here when we moved in, but we’re so far out I never saw the point in replacing it. And I’m sort of a Luddite. I don’t even have a cell phone.”
She glanced at the one in Kendra’s hand, which she didn’t remember taking out. She shoved it back in her purse, feeling a thrill of unease. “No problem,” Kendra said. She couldn’t remember life without cameras in the house, though her older brother, Tim, probably could. Sam’s age was hard to determine. Plaid flannel, analog wristwatch, hips disguised in men’s denim—was she a relic, or just retro? Kendra would have believed that Sam was twenty years older than she, or just a few solar rotations past her Saturn return.
“Great.” Sam was smiling again. “Your room’s back here.”
There it was, beyond the sparkling sink and the butcher block island. Kendra followed Sam through a doorway, stepping down a few inches from the kitchen tile to beaming parquet wood. Except for a power drill by her foot, the freshly painted bedroom was empty. The windows, each broader than her wingspan, framed the gravel, the grass, and a corner of the woodshed, beyond which the orchard crested like a frozen tsunami. On a cloudless spring day, it would shimmer with pink-hearted blossoms. Kendra already knew where she wanted to put her desk.
“It’s nice,” she said, trying to sound unimpressed. “Did someone just move out?” There had to be something wrong with it—a toilet that never stopped running or a pernicious case of black mold. But the door that led to the private bathroom was open, revealing a tranquil eggshell cove, complete with a tub mounted on enameled basilisk’s claws.
Sam had stopped smiling. “My ex.”
Kendra pictured a prairie femme with messy braids and muddy clogs. Sam and her homespun companion would have Uhauled to the farmhouse years ago with dreams of IVF and hers-and-hers tombstones. What had the irreconcilable difference been? The femme’s Etsy addiction? The butch’s wandering eye? She wanted to tell Sam about Caroline, both to out herself and to let her know she wasn’t the only one to have gone through a breakup recently.
But there it was again: in a single rapid movement, the slick yet rigid muscle had ascended from her Achilles’ tendon to the ticklish square inch directly behind her knee. Kendra caught herself against the doorframe, realizing as she did that it was impossible to push the dog’s muzzle away without just a hint of violence.
When they returned to the front porch, the rain had stopped. A crow landed on a tomato trellis and cocked its head. Her tail erect, Misty leapt down the steps and sprinted across the gravel.
They signed the paperwork on a small table beside a half-full ashtray and a few mini lighters. After Kendra’s final initial, Sam offered her a cigarette. She declined, a little too politely, before pointing at the camera above the door. “There’s another one.”
“God, is that thing still there?” Sam looked up over her shoulder, her hands cupped around her mouth. “One of these days I’ll get around to taking them down.”
“I’m moving in this weekend!” Kendra announced. She snatched a carrot and poked his shoulder with it. “Now you’ll never have to cook me your gross Ayurvedic food ever again.”
“Finally!” Noah exclaimed. As little as he ate, the kitchenette was his favorite place to be. Water simmered on the stove, Kylie whispered from the bluetooth speaker, and a Christmas cactus budded, a month early, on the windowsill above the sink. “I was starting to think you dumped her so you could force me to be your maid.”
Kendra stuck out her tongue. “And guess what?”
“What?” Noah was focused on the cutting board, his slender knife strokes onbeat with the music.
“I got the dyke discount,” said Kendra. She nibbled the carrot. “She’s charging me even less than what she put in the ad. I’m going to save so much money.” She wanted to go to Mexico City in the summer, for a month at least this time.
“Seriously? Why would she do that?”
Kendra shrugged. “Maybe everyone else who applied was straight.”
“Oh, for sure.” Now Noah leered at her, his cuts slowing.
“Shut up.”
“Just you two girls out there all alone—”
“Noah!” she cried, poking him with the carrot again.
Grimacing like a scream queen, he was archly raising the knife above his head when the water boiled over behind him, blanketing the window with steam.
Thank you for joining me as I try a little something different. If you’d like to support my work—most of which is free—you can subscribe, buy my books, or find me on Twitter, Instagram, and Bluesky.
digging this so far!!! gps not working? crows? hmmmm 🤔 definitely giving spooky-ooky vibes!
i don't know if i see ghost story yet, but that doesn't matter, and i don't know much about ghost stories! extremely gay, tho. a balm to see this in the inbox and have the time to read it. looking forward to 2/3/4! (and casanova etc etc)