Reading by Ghost Light
by Robert Scotellaro
It’s astonishing how luminous, how sinewy, in recollection, their light can be. An ex looms up through the floorboards, brings a horror movie script for me to reread. She scrapes two butter knives together by my ear: an eerie sound effect perhaps. The words blur.
An old army buddy glows his way out of a heating duct, a scroll in hand. It’s disconcerting because of his low candlepower and the way the scroll keeps curling back into itself, its muscle memory beyond my capacity to tame it.
My mother’s ghost memory slips out from behind the drapes shimmering with a menu in hand. There is the scent of cigarettes and oven grease. The text is in hieroglyphic profusion. I recognize a few of the animals. The blue plate special looks a little sketchy.
My father, incandescent in a wrinkled blue suit, brings a Book of Facts that aren’t. Held out in the leather vise of a baseball glove from my youth. The book tells something about the social habits of fast flying insects he’s highlighted, or the primary punctuation marks of some arcane dead language of affection. It’s hard to tell them apart. I turn the page. The small wind it creates, blows out all the lightbulbs.
Robert Scotellaro’s work has been included in W.W. Norton’s Flash Fiction International, Maryland Literary Review, Gargoyle, Matter Press, New World Writing, Best Small Fictions 2016, 2017, and 2021, Best Microfiction 2020, and elsewhere. He is the author of seven chapbooks, several books for children, and five flash fiction collections. He was the winner of Zone 3’s Rainmaker Award in Poetry and the Blue Light Book Award for his fiction. His flash collection, What Are the Chances? (Press 53) was a finalist for the 2020 Big Other Book Award for fiction. A new book of flash triptychs, Ways to Read the World (Scantic Press) and a chapbook of flash and micro stories, God in a Can (Bamboo Dart Press) are scheduled for release in 2022. He has, along with James Thomas, co-edited New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction, published by W.W. Norton & Co. Robert is one of the founding donors to The Ransom Flash Fiction Collection at the University of Texas, Austin. He lives in San Francisco. Visit him at www.robertscotellaro.com.
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What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Reading by Ghost Light”? This story started as a title. I was thinking how significant “recollections,” often filtered and reframed, come to us unexpectedly in a certain light. I wrote down: Reading by Ghost Light in a notebook. Many months later I used that title as a launching point for this piece, thinking how these memories, in a way, are ghost-like visitations.
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