The agency sends Kimmy first. I spend all morning waiting for her to arrive–baking cookies, lighting incense, stowing my bundles of sage–and she just lets herself in. I’m standing by the stove when she taps my shoulder.
“I’m Kimmy,” she says.
I stumble into the counter and take her in. Kimmy is more elegant than her name implies. She has this short, frizzy hair and wears a wrap dress. She’s pinker than I’ve imagined, a pale blush, rosé. In the photos, she was a deep purple.
“You just let yourself in?” I ask.
She shrugs. Maybe this is a stupid conversation to have with a ghost. She starts opening all my cabinets like she has full license to do whatever she pleases. “That’s the deal,” she says. “Where are your snacks?”
I found the flyer outside the grocery store. Feeling lonely? Ghosts for hire! I would’ve thought it was a prank if I hadn’t been seeing ghost children helping the elderly check expiration dates on bagged granola or deceased personal trainers floating alongside runners, cheering them on. I’ve been alone in the house for weeks. My sisters just moved to the west coast together. I ripped a tab off the flyer and scheduled a consultation for the next morning.
The Ghosts-4-Hire office slots above a personal injury lawyer, between two jewelry shops downtown. A ghost checked me in at reception.
“What are you in for?” she asked.
“I’m looking for a ghost,” I said. She rolled her eyes. When people die, their ghosts pop up in random places. If you’re lucky, you speak the same language. All too often, wires get crossed. It has been happening more frequently, something with the climate fires, the Greek alphabet being invoked for hurricane season. Friends and family spend years searching for their departed.
“Aren’t we all?” she said. “Have a seat.”
But I didn’t have to. The matchmaker, Barry, rushed in. “You must be Sean,” he said. He beckoned me down a hallway crammed with dark green filing cabinets. We sat at a circular table in his office and he handed me a plastic cup of water. He pulled out seven file folders and played with the knot on his Jack-o-Lantern tie. I chugged the water and dragged my fingernail over the cup’s ribs.
“What are you looking for?” Barry asked.
My sisters had left our city to surf. They have this idea that sun might heal the wounds. They left me in our parents’ house, said I could have the extra one percent of whatever money remained in exchange for caretaking. “I’d love a sibling.”
“Siblings, huh?” Barry said. He licked his finger and pulled apart the folders. “Everybody comes in here looking for a parent or a child or a real love connection. Siblings are new.”
Barry guided me through a questionnaire, asked about my favorite TV shows, drug and alcohol consumption, any romantic partners. When he got to the end, he totaled a number. He consulted his chart and there was Kimmy.
“Kimmy should be a great sister,” he said. “How does she look?”
In her picture she looked homely, European. She’d maybe died in the English countryside, but she wasn’t sure. “She looks like someone’s sister,” I said.
“Great, her record looks perfect for you,” he said. “Aloof, a bit adversarial, the whole shebang.” Barry dropped the other folders to the floor and handed me a glossy pamphlet. Its images of ghosts and people co-working had faded to pastels in the sun. “All our ghosts are seeking gainful employment,” Barry said. “You pay us and we handle your account. Now let’s talk subscription plans.”
I went whole hog–maybe my one percent was good for that. Barry sent me home with a free bumper sticker, Ghosts-4-Hire.
So Kimmy’s in the kitchen, looking through my cabinets, the fajita spices and pineapple juice cans my mom kept buying pushed to the side in pursuit of the good snacks. She hovers over the floor and fluffs up her hair with her fingertips when she can’t find anything.
“There are cookies in the oven,” I say. When I was in afternoon kindergarten, my mom and I baked while my sisters were in school. We ate spoonfuls of dough before eleven AM and scarfed down cookies with lunch.
“I’m watching my figure,” she says. “God, Sean.” She cracks open the fridge and finds a bag of pale baby carrots and hummus. She washes a handful in the sink and dumps them in a bowl.
“So what do you want to do?” I ask.
Kimmy turns off the faucet. She takes the bowl and the hummus and sticks them in her stomach. They float in the air. “I don’t know,” she says. “Entertain yourself.”
She floats up the stairs and goes straight to my parents’ room. She closes the door and calls out to ask where the TV Guide is. I go upstairs to tell her we don’t have TV Guides anymore really. “Let me show you the remote.”
She mumbles, “No, it’s fine,” through the closed door. I hear Grey’s Anatomy. Heart-to-hearts and heart monitors beep all afternoon.
We carry on like this for weeks. Kimmy asks me for the wifi password, a phone charger, dinner every night. I bring board games from the basement–our 90s editions of Twister and Sorry–and she pushes them away, saying, “I don’t want to play with you.” She’s secretive about a lot of things, where she goes every morning when she runs out for coffee, who the ghostmen are that she invites over on Friday nights. They close my parents’ bedroom door, and when they start having sex, ghostly howls sing like a theremin through the house. There are all kinds of ghostmen she sleeps with. Some are perforated with bullet holes and some spout water from their mouths when they try to speak. Kimmy bears no trace of her death.
“I think it was something internal,” she says. She has a notebook filled with the memories she’s collected. She interviews me, asking me my impressions of her to see what might stick.
Did I die in childbirth?
Did I swallow sleeping pills?
Did I have cancer and people held my hand by my bedside?
My sisters have gotten interested too. One of them says, “Kimmy sounds so un-European.” The other one says, “I’ve been filing public records requests all over the United Kingdom. I spent all day reading Kimberly obits.” She sends them to me. Kimberly Tracey died of internal trauma. Dover woman Kimberly Butterworth contracted typhoid. Kimberly Lewis? She died of sepsis. I screen the obituaries but end up showing all of them to Kimmy anyway. “Your sister’s finding these?” she asks.
I nod.
“None of them are me,” she says. She pops her eyes out of her head. It makes me think of Beetlejuice. “Maybe she’s a bit obsessed. It’s a bit weird.”
And I agree. Maybe surfing isn’t working out so well after all. Maybe they just want a slice of this house, an evening with Kimmy, her ghostmen and their spectral howls.
On Friday, Barry calls. He says my name like Seen, like have you seen a ghost.
“Seen, I’m calling to check on Kimmy,” he says. The photocopier grumbles in the background. The secretary ghost must be light gray, washed out. Maybe she sits at her desk all day looking up info on where she’s from. Maybe she’s from here and this is how she wants her eternity to be. “How’s she working out?”
“We’ve been connecting,” I say. We have. We fight about who gets to use the big TV. We fight about who does the dishes. Some Saturdays, we go to Friendly’s for the caramel brownie sundae. Saturdays are our cheat day.
“The thing is,” Barry says. “We got a tip. From a family outside Belfast. They’ve been looking for Kimmy and found her in some of our promo materials online,” he says. “They’re offering us a big bonus to bring her home.”
“Is that so?” I say.
“You can have a minute to sort your affairs and all that,” he says. “We’ll give her a call Monday morning. I’ll set you up with a replacement then.”
Kimmy’s still at the gym when I hang up. I dig through Ghosts-4-Hire’s page, looking for her face. There are young ghosts and old ghosts at a picnic on their gallery page. They appear in time-stamped photos from Barry’s digital camera. The gray secretary is on the home page. Kimmy appears on CONTACT. A professional photographer captured her, waving with both hands. She’s beaming.
She blows in my ear. I jump. “Dammit, Kimmy,” I say. “I didn’t hear you come in.”
“You’re so easy to scare,” she says. “What are you looking at?” She taps her fingers on my mousepad and zooms in all the way on her nose. Purple pixels blot out my screen.
“I had to update my billing info,” I say.
She nods. We don’t let money be a thing between us. She sometimes treats me to our brownie sundaes. It’s her money after all. “I didn’t know you modeled for them.”
She shrugs. She dashes to the fridge and opens a Gatorade. “I was between gigs. The extra money helped.”
For past clients, Kimmy was a daughter. She could play the fights well but never cared enough to reconcile. “There’s something more apathetic to playing a sister,” she told me once. “I think I’ve found my calling.”
Does she have a sibling spearheading her search? Does her Irish brother feel apathetic about her too? Maybe he’s only searching because he thinks he has to.
“I was texting with Sis today.” Kimmy calls both my sisters Sis. We’re all siblings and none of us are. “She started sending me obituaries. None are me, though.”
“Shame,” I say. “Let’s go out for dinner.”
She shrugs and says I’m buying. She closes herself in my parents’ bathroom to shower. I pack a duffle bag, listening to her singing. When I hang around the kitchen waiting for her, it’s like we were never here. It’s like my parents could come back any minute if I found them on an internet page, too.
“You’ve got to start dating,” Kimmy says. “Don’t you have a girlfriend or a boyfriend?”
I pick meat off the buffalo wing. She flings each bone into a bowl on the table. She wanted wings, something really American, she said. She asked the waiter for seven different dipping sauces. She swabs each wing through different combinations–hickory and buffalo, hot honey and apple, apple and hickory, and so on.
“Where do you find all your ghostmen?” I ask.
“Tinder,” she says.
“Is there some ghost filter?” I ask.
She shakes her head. She flicks a chicken bone and misses but before it has a chance to smack the table, her hand shoots like spider silk and snatches it from the air. “You can just tell,” she says.
“Anyone good?” I ask. Her last ghostman died in a fire. After he left, we had to open all the windows and throw away the sheets. She’s ruined a lot of my parents’ room–stained, singed sheets; exploded light bulbs. There’s new scum in the tub. My sisters say they maintain no affective attachment to the house where we grew up, but maybe this will change that.
She shakes her head again. She rolls her eyes. “God, Sean, it’s just sex. Maybe you should try it sometime.”
A group of men cheer at the bar. A sports team is winning their game. “Kimmy, what if we drove west?” I say. “We could go meet Sis and Sis.”
She shrugs. If I’ve learned one thing about the dead from Kimmy, it’s that eternity makes you noncommittal. She doesn’t worry about logistics, just worries about getting her chicken wing, her ghostmen, her weekly paycheck, her nut.
There are no sappy goodbyes to our town when we get in the car. No heart-to-hearts when we drive and drive. I do all the driving–Kimmy only has a ghost tail, after all, no feet. I don’t tell her anything about the accident, our parents, the sibling retreat I did not join where Californian Rebirth was conceived. We are siblings. She already knows all this. She knows she gets paid to do this.
We sleep in Walmart parking lots. We stop for roadside wonders and she buys snacks at every rest stop. She hangs her ghost tail on the dash and chomps on sour gummy worms. Through Illinois, through Indiana, South Dakota, we go like this. Maybe she starts feeling good. Maybe the hours together finally doing something jolts her awake, so she says, “Sean, this isn’t about apathy.”
I chew the inside of my left cheek. I grab my iced coffee to distract her from my face. “It’s not?”
“I think I’ve learned what being a sibling really means. We didn’t get to choose each other. But now we’re here.”
We choose to drive cross country. We’ll choose to crash on our Sis’ pull-out couch and take surfing lessons by their side.
So chewing the straw, I say it. “Your family found you, through the agency.”
“They did?” She sounds so deflated. She sounds like I’ve offered her cookies not on a Saturday. “Where?”
“They’re in Belfast,” I say. “They found you online.”
I look over to check her face, but she’s already gone, a nest of gummy worms and Coke bottles settled into the seat. I pull over to the side of the road, awaiting the rush of a passing car, awaiting internet service when I open Tinder. Maybe she hasn’t gone too far yet. Maybe she’s a person nearby.
Michael Colbert is an MFA student at UNC Wilmington, where he’s working on a novel about bisexual love, loss, and hauntings. He writes a column on horror films for No Contact, and his writing appears in Catapult, Electric Literature, Gulf Coast, and Atlas Obscura, among others.
Photo by Eva Elijas from Pexels