Ghosts in the Rain by Julia Strayer
Julia Strayer’s “Ghosts in the Rain” is one of three winners for the CRAFT 2025 Flash Prose Prize, guest judged by Grant Faulkner.
Sometimes it’s trying that matters most in life, not succeeding. This is a story about a father who is trying hard to be a good father. It’s a story about a child trying to figure out a new, confusing world that is inhabited by an absent mother. Inhabited. You can feel the mother’s presence. You can feel her haunting everything. The irony? Those who are haunted turn into a different kind of ghost. It’s hard to mix both hope and despair in a single short story, but they are intertwined in this one. It is, in the end, a story of survival. —Grant Faulkner
“A day of fun,” my father had said, but that Sunday only involved walking from one place downtown that was closed to another. He bought white sheets for my bed at the only store open. This wasn’t long after I turned six and Mama had packed two suitcases of clothes, along with most of her vintage salt and pepper shaker collection, and vanished. I asked if she was a ghost now, but he said no.
We waited for a bus that refused to come while the sky smeared gray as office buildings and the rain slicked streets and sidewalks. My father had only one rusted umbrella, too small and mangled to cover us both, and since he wore a raincoat and cap, he threw a new sheet over me, cut out two eyeholes with his Swiss Army knife, and held the skeletal disgrace over most of me.
We probably looked ridiculous because now I was a ghost. He said the sheet was magic and no one could see me but him. I was unsure of that.
He bought me a drink and we walked out of the city to where there were more houses than dry cleaners and 7-Elevens. He kept talking about grown-up things, mostly to himself, but all I could think was he never cut me a mouth hole and there was no bench for a ghost to sit on to slurp a cherry Icee.
I paused at a playground. I wanted to swing, but he said he couldn’t hold the umbrella over me if I did. I said we could swing together, but he said I’d have to hold tight to wet metal chains, and ghosts don’t like that.
I liked the idea of feeling wind under the sheet as I imagined flying up and down and up on a swing—rain clouds trying to hold me at the top but unable, and back down where he’d push me again, the brief hesitation of him not wanting to let me go but eventually doing so because he had no other option. I remember Mama doing that every day when she dropped me off at school. Hugging me so tight but still letting me go only when there was no other choice.
“Do I embarrass you?”
“No, I’m trying to protect you.”
“Why did Mama leave?”
“Some questions have no answers.”
We passed a pond, my father as awkward and sad as the umbrella, staring into the fog as if waiting for an apology.
“Are we walking to Mama?”
“I don’t know where she is.”
Rain and mud crawled up the bottom of my sheet, the whole of it heavier and heavier as we walked. We probably looked even more ridiculous because now I was a wet ghost. But that’s how broken people can look sometimes.
“When is she coming home?
“Maybe she’ll come back for the rest of her salt and pepper shakers.”
I knew she wouldn’t. She’d left only the ones without mates.
“Doesn’t she love us?”
“She loves you, but I’m not sure about me.”
“Then why didn’t she take me with her?”
He stopped walking, the wind whirled, and his hair flew up for a moment. He dropped the umbrella and picked me up, holding me tighter than Mama ever did. I knew deep down she didn’t take me with her because she knew he needed me more. That he couldn’t exist without me.
That’s when another father and girl about my age approached from the other direction. His hair funneled rain to his face; his shoes squished as he stepped closer. His daughter wore a white woolen dress and held a large plastic salad bowl over her head and shoulders.
The man gave us the onceover—my father, the withered umbrella looking like a dead bird on the pavement, and ghost me. He asked if we were lost. My father said no, but I knew we were. I also knew the other man and his daughter were equally lost and couldn’t help us anymore than they could help themselves. The four of us, two pairs of mismatched salt and pepper shakers. The fathers nodded to one another and each set of us headed in the direction the other was coming from.
JULIA STRAYER’s stories are living their best lives in Glimmer Train, Kenyon Review Online, The Cincinnati Review, New Ohio Review, Jellyfish Review, HAD, Flash Frog, Atticus Review, and others. Her work has won contests and awards and is included in The Wigleaf Top 50 and The Best Small Fictions. She’s a Submissions Editor at SmokeLong Quarterly and teaches creative writing at New York University. She can be found on Facebook @juliastrayer.9 and Instagram @juliastrayer.
Featured image by Qi B, courtesy of Unsplash.
