The first chair moved while Suki was changing a battery.
Her brother saw it. He made the noise he made when he found money in old trousers.
“Again,” she said.
The chair stayed where it was, halfway out of the saloon doorway.
Dry Gulch consisted of five wooden buildings and a road that had given up at both ends. Suki had borrowed a car to get there. Cal had come because she said they would have a day out together. He was beginning to understand that together might mean holding a microphone.
“Please,” she told the doorway. “I wasn’t ready.”
An old man appeared behind the chair. Sunlight passed through his hat and made an oval on the floor.
“Neither was I,” he said. “That’s how you get dead.”
Cal laughed. The chair slid another foot.
Suki started recording. “Can you tell us your name?”
“Which of you is us?”
“The audience.”
He looked past her toward the empty road. “Bit thin.”
His name was Purl. He had been a barber, a gambler, and, for eleven unhappy days, mayor. Two other ghosts came out to see whether he was telling the story about being mayor. One carried a hat without a head inside it. The other was a woman with the expression of someone waiting to correct a date.
“He wasn’t elected,” she said.
“There wasn’t an opposing candidate.”
“There wasn’t an election.”
Cal laughed again. The empty hat rose above the road. Purl took a long step toward it and missed. His foot passed through the chair.
The hat fell.
Suki had filmed all of that. She checked the screen. Three indistinct figures stood in the sunlight. The hat was sharper. The chair was perfectly sharp.
“Can you move something else?”
“If he laughs,” said the woman.
She was Hett. She explained that the dead could move loose objects that belonged to the town, briefly, while someone living laughed. They couldn’t move a car, a camera, a person’s body, or anything someone was holding. They had plenty of chairs. Living visitors were less plentiful.
“So you do tricks,” Suki said.
“We compete,” Hett said. “There’s a difference.”
The third ghost was Roan. His hat had been stolen from a hatstand in the saloon by Purl, who claimed it as a prize for an earlier joke. Roan wanted it back. Hett wanted both men to stop using her good chair as sporting equipment.
Suki placed her camera on a wall, framed the street, and gave a large, professional laugh.
Nothing moved.
She tried a smaller one, the sort she used in introductions when something had gone wrong but she was going to make a charming thing of it.
“You sound poorly,” Hett said.
Cal leaned against the saloon post. “That’s her laugh for the sponsors.”
“I don’t have sponsors.”
“You’re practising.”
She stopped recording.
There was a long quiet in which a fly inspected the lens.
“Tell him the mayor story,” Suki said.
“He heard it,” Purl said.
“There must be more.”
“There were eleven days. I spent most of them looking for someone else.”
Roan bent and put his hands under the empty hat. His fingers went through the brim. He swore without enthusiasm.
Suki began recording again. She asked Purl to stand inside the chair. She thought a ghost apparently sitting inside a wooden seat might be funny. He obliged, up to his waist in it, and looked at her.
Cal did not laugh.
“Could you smile a bit?” she asked him.
“I’m not in the shot.”
“It would help.”
He pushed off the post. “I wanted a day out. I can get a job in town if I want one.”
He went around the side of the saloon, toward the strip of shade where they had left their lunch bag.
Suki took down the camera. “Fine.”
She tried putting it into its case. The strap had tangled around a buckle. She tugged, caught the case with her knee, and knocked an old tin cup off the saloon’s window ledge. It landed upright in the dust. The fly settled on its rim.
“Lovely,” Purl said. “You’ve brought a customer.”
She laughed before she meant to.
Roan snatched the hat. Hett jerked her chair toward the doorway. Purl grabbed the cup and inverted it on his head, imprisoning the fly against the top of his transparent skull.
Suki laughed harder. The fly passed through his head and came out below his chin. Purl tried to catch it with his mouth. The cup slipped over his eyes.
Roan put on his recovered hat. It was too small. He had bought it that way, Hett said, because the proper size cost more.
Suki was doubled over when Cal came back.
“What happened?”
She told him. Purl stood still with the cup over his eyes, unable to lift it now that she had stopped laughing. It was a very small cup. That made explaining worse.
Cal laughed. Purl pulled it off. Roan’s hat shot upward, stolen again.
“Give me the camera,” Cal said.
For a moment she reached toward him with it. Then she saw that he was holding out its open case.
“You’re missing this,” she said.
“I’m here.”
She put the camera away. There was enough recorded for a short visit, if she still wanted to make one. It ended before the fly.
They ate their sandwiches sitting on Hett’s chair and the saloon step. The ghosts could not eat, but they could all remember better sandwiches, and disputed each other’s examples at length.
When Cal offered Purl a bite, his sandwich passed straight through the mayor’s chest. Purl peered down at it.
“That’s the problem with public office,” he said. “Nothing sticks.”
Hett groaned. Suki laughed anyway. In the street, Roan’s hat began to climb.
Loading comments…